The Human Hourglass: Model with Impossibly Small Waist

You wouldn't know it by looking at her, but Ioana Spangenberg, a model from Romania with an impossibly thin waistline, eats 3 meals a day and doesn't even shun junk food or sweets.

The 30-year-old girl, whose tiny frame you can better appreciate by checking out the video below, embedded at the end of the article, insists she's healthy.

In fact, this is the only reason she's making headlines in the first place: because her waist is so abnormally small, she's talking to The Sun to set the record straight on how healthy she actually is.

Voices in the blogosphere point out that Ioana is probably not even a model, except for the modeling she did for the YouTube video.

The Gloss even jokes that, now that she's made international headlines, she'll probably land a very lucrative deal with some brand or another, one known for favoring models with out of the ordinary looks.

“No one seems to believe it, but every day I eat three big meals and I snack on chocolate and crisps all the time. I just have a small stomach. It's a bit like having a natural gastric band – if I eat too much, I feel sick,” Ioana tells The Sun.

It's always been like that, she goes on to explain: when she was younger, she would actually refuse to go out because people would make fun of her, opting instead to stay at home and gorge herself on chocolate.

“When I was 13 my waist was around 15 inches. Someone could put their hands around it, their fingers would touch and they would still have extra room,” she says.

Things got even worse when she turned 20.

“In Romania it is better to be overweight, because that means you are from a wealthy family. So while my friends were going out and dating, I was sitting at home with Mars bars wishing I could fatten up,” Ioana explains.

Eventually, she met, fell in love and married a man who taught her to appreciate and love herself. Ioana now lives in Germany.

“Jan was the first person who saw me as beautiful and encouraged me to celebrate my body. He asked me to pose in some photos for him. […] But I'm finally comfortable in my own skin,” she says.

Useless to note, many people who have seen the video below and photos of Ioana still hope they're fake.