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A courageous plus-size model who spent 20 years battling cancer has hit back at body shamers - saying it's taken her two decades to learn to love her curves.

Inspirational Angelica Fenney posed in a revealing shoot in a celebration of her curves.

The stunning 37-year-old was diagnosed with breast cancer aged just 17 and, throughout various treatments, gained six stone.

But Angelica, from St Helens, Merseyside, is now in remission following breast, cervical and skin cancer, and has celebrated the strength and beauty of her body with a 'natural' shoot in the woods.

Other images show her covering her skin with every insult she says she's heard during her lifetime.

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Sharing the images online, Angelica wrote: "This one is for all the haters, that keep body shaming me and the rest of us curvy women out there.

(Image: Angelica Fenney / Ed Igroover)

"For all the sexy curvy ladies that have body issues I'm making a stand for us," she added on her Facebook page.

"It's taken me over 21 years to finally accept my body and really start to love it with all my scares too."

She explains that she has "tried everything in the book to lose weight even crash diets for Channel Four" she explains "... because of being body shamed most of my life, and you know what, it hurt deep down inside that I ended up putting that fake smile on my face.

(Image: Angelica Fenney / Ed Igroover)

Now, she says, she will not pretend to be OK with it: "No more will my smile be fake. I have been through the mill and now I've come out the other end and I say that we women what every shape/size should embrace our curves and show the haters that we are all beautiful in our own way."

Angelica posted her thanks to her friend Angel Sinclair "for encouraging me to do this shoot and helping me get me back," and also to photographer Ed Igroover.

(Image: Angelica Fenney / Ed Igroover)

Following her remission news, Angelica said online: "I feel liberated in such a way the day after the news. I travel down to London for my first official non-cancer shoot in over 20 year."

She also bravely blogged about the experience, saying looking at the images "I feel overwhelmed, because I really didn’t know my own emotional fortitude".

Last year Angelica posed for a raunchy glamour shoot to show that she had accepted her scars from cancer.

Angelica was first diagnosed with breast cancer when she was just a teenager and was placed on a trial of a drug called Tamoxifen, which she believes may have led to her developing secondary cancer.