Los Angeles, May 6 : Supermodel Tyra Banks, who was insecure as a teenager, wants to encourage women to love themselves for who they are.

Banks started her own charity, the TZONE Foundation, to empower young women to discover their own strength and realise their ambitions, as she hated being teased for being too thin when she was younger.

"Part of my desire to help these girls is because of my own insecurities at that age. The summer I was 11 years old, I lost 30 lbs in three months. It was the 1980s, during the Ethiopian famine, and I got a lot of comments," people. com quoted her as saying.

"My school thought I was ill. It was a very painful time," she added. (IANS)