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Supermodel Veronica Webb still remembers the moment she knew she made it. "My mother called me from the grocery store, and she said 'I'm looking at this cover of Elle magazine here. Is that you?'" Veronica says. "It made me feel real. It made me feel legitimate. I'm one of those girls like Iman or Lauren Hutton or Beverly Johnson that I always dreamed about being."

Veronica broke new ground in the industry when she became the first African-American model to land a multimillion dollar contract with a major cosmetics company, but she says her rise to the top wasn't easy.

"Weight was always an issue," she says. "I grew up eating everything deep fried. Everything was baptized in deep fat. We can't eat that way and be slender. You can't eat that way and have great looking skin—you just can't. Your weight is very much tied to your self-esteem if you allow it. I really had to get that under control."

Over time, Veronica says she realized that who she was and what she did for a living were two different things. "Who you are is how you live your life and the way you treat people," she says. "It's not being defined by your job."

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