By Alan Duke, CNN
LOS ANGELES (CNN) — Lady Gaga struck back at tabloid attacks on her weight, posting photos of herself wearing only a bra and panties on her fan website Tuesday.
The singer’s blog, titled “A Body Revolution 2013,” invites fans to “be brave and celebrate with us your ‘perceived flaws,’ as society tells us,” by posting their own photos.
“May we make our flaws famous, and thus redefine the heinous,” Gaga wrote.
Online publications have speculated about Gaga’s weight gain in recent months, which she has acknowledged to be about 25 pounds.
Four photographs posted on her LittleMonsters.com site Tuesday leave no questions about her size and shape, showing her nearly naked from the front, side and rear.
The captions above each photo read: “Bulimia and anorexia since I was 15… But today I join the BODY REVOLUTION…. To Inspire Bravery…. and BREED some … COMPASSION.”
Gaga wrote that her “weight/loss/gain since I was child has tormented me.”
“No amount of help has ever healed my pain about it,” she wrote. “But YOU have. My boyfriend prefers me curvier, when i eat and am healthy and not so worried about my looks, I’m happy. Happier than I’ve ever been. i am not going to go on a psycho-spree because of scrutiny. This is who I am. And I am proud at any size. And I love you, and want you to be proud in any form you may take as well.”
Fans began posting their own stories and images including a woman who wrote about weight gain from lupus, saying she was “very self conscious about my body but today I am inspired to be brave.”
“I’ve had a hard year, I’ve been torturing myself with being perfect and I felt I couldn’t trust anyone around me,” another fan wrote. “I cried so much because I felt like I wasn’t enough, and I only felt loved by YOU, monster family. I still feel like this a lot of times. People think I’m happy because I always smile, but they have no idea of how much I cry in my room at nights and I feel so lonely.”
Gaga warns her fans, whom she calls her “little monsters,” not to “look for kindness in critics, go where you know the gold is. Here, in our hearts.”
