Emma Watson urges young girls to love curves

Emma Watson has spent years struggling to accept her body shape and is now urging other young girls not to feel pressured into staying skinny.

The Harry Potter star admits it took her a long time to learn to love her curves and she hopes other women won't fall into the same trap of trying to lose weight.

She tells Britain's Glamour magazine, "I've accepted my body shape more as I've got older. I went through a stage of wanting to have that straight-up-and-down model look, but I have curves and hips, and in the end you have to accept yourself as you are.

"My weight has fluctuated between a (U.K.) size 6 and a 10... I keep telling myself that I'm a human being, an imperfect human being who's not made to look like a doll, and that who I am as a person is more important than whether at that moment I have a nice figure."

Watson goes on to conclude most of the pressure on women to stay slender actually comes from other females, rather than men.

She adds, "It makes me sad to hear girls constantly putting themselves down. We have these unbelievably high expectations of ourselves... We say that the pressure is coming from men but actually it's from each other.

"I think women feel so much pressure these days and it can turn us against each other. But we really damage our own confidence when we put ourselves down, so I try not to."