420 Pound Model With World’s Widest Hips, 8 Feet In Circumference [Video]

Mikel Ruffinelli is a model and married mother of four. She is also 420 pounds, with hips that measure an astounding eight feet in circumference.

Yet Ruffinelli says she loved her body, her “hourglass figure,” and her modeling career. The 39-year-old maintains that she is healthy and has no desire the diet or lose weight.

At just five-foot-four, Ruffinelli is substantially wider than she is tall. The Los Angeles resident admits that she eats her fair share but also insists that she is healthy.

“I love my shape and I see no reason to diet because I don’t have health problems,” explains Mikel, who has a proportionally small 40-inch waist. “Men don’t fancy skinny girls, they like an hourglass figure.”

While “full-figured” celebrities such as Jennifer Lopez, Kim Kardashian, and Beyonce might agree, they don’t have to face the world the same way that Mikel does.

Mikel has to turn sideways to fit through most doors. She drives a truck because she can’t fit inside a car, and she sleeps on a seven-feet-wide bed. The woman with the world’s biggest hips even has to sit in steel-supported chairs.

Reggie Brooks, Mikel’s husband and biggest fan, finds her shape “sexy.” The couple has been married for 10years.

While Mikel hasn’t always been plus-sized, she maintains that she’s always had big hips. As a teenager, she was athletic and weighed 140 pounds. At 22, she had her first child, and Mikel notes that the weight piled on with each consecutive baby. By the time her fourth child, seven-year-old Justyce, was born, Mikel’s hips had ballooned and her weight reached 420 pounds.

“I put it down to my pregnancies. I don’t see why else the weight would go to my hips, although, I do eat lots,” she reported to Closer.

The mother of four is studying for a psychology degree and eats about 3,000 calories a day.

“It sounds like a lot to have 3,000 calories, but for someone my size, it’s not really.”

She describes her food for the day may begin with a breakfast of two eggs with sausage and bacon and a handful of potatoes. Lunch is fried fish and french fries. Dinner, she confesses, is her “big meal” and generally consists of BBQ chicken with rice. “I have a big portion – but I’m not greedy. I snack on peanuts, granola bars and crisps.”

While Mikel notes that she was sensitive about her size in the past — and even tried liquid dieting — she is comfortable in her body now and hopes to encourage other women to be comfortable with their size as well. Now she models for Big Beautiful Women, a website that earns her up to $1,000 for each photo shoot.

She says, “I mostly wear lingerie. I have two seamstresses who make my outfits, although I can easily find clothes for my top half, it’s the bottoms that are a problem.”

The model notes that she tries to be healthy by participating in water aerobics.

“I don’t want to get bigger, but I don’t want to lose my curves. I look great. I hope I inspire women to think, ‘She’s happy with her body and I can be too!’ ”

Do you think that Mikel is healthy?

[Featured image from Shutterstock]