(RNN) - After reaching the pinnacle of her career, a Victoria's Secret model says she recently quit the runway because she wants to be a more positive role model for young girls and because baring so much skin conflicted with her Christian beliefs.
Kylie Bisutti won the Victoria's Secret Model Search in 2009 at the age of 19 but recently felt torn over how that lifestyle fits into her faith.
So why the change of heart?
She says an encounter with a young cousin changed her way of thinking.
"I was doing my makeup in the mirror one day and she was just watching me. I was like 'What's going on?' and she just looked at me and [said] 'I think I want to stop eating so I can look like you,'" Bisutti said Thursday during an interview on "Good Morning America."
"It just broke my heart, you know, because she looks up to me and I didn't want to be the type of person that she thought she had to do that to be beautiful."
[See Kylie Bisutti's "Good Morning America" interview here]
Bisutti got married a few months before winning the competition, but said she felt uncomfortable posing for men's magazines and showing her body for people other than her husband.
"Victoria's Secret was my absolutely biggest goal in life, and it was all I ever wanted career-wise. I actually loved it while I was there, it was so much fun and I had a blast. But the more I was modeling lingerie, and lingerie isn't clothing, I just started becoming more uncomfortable with it because of my faith," she said in an interview with FOX411 Pop Tarts column. "I'm Christian and reading the Bible more, I was becoming more convicted about it."
Although Bisutti says her days as a Victoria's Secret angel are history, she hasn't hung up her modeling shoes yet.
She appears in a Kohl's commercial alongside Jennifer Lopez, and in September she'll be working on a new show on the CW.
"I'm definitely going to pursue modeling, but I want to be more wholesome about it and the jobs that I choose will be honoring to the Lord," she told GMA.
Bisutti says at the end of the day, her decision was for the best.
"It is a very hard industry to be in without falling into things you don't want to do," she told FOX. "I've fallen into many things that I wouldn't have wanted to do, it's a very tempting industry."
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Three years after winning the Victoria Secret Model Search, Kylie Bisutti is quitting lingerie modeling because she says it conflicts with her faith. (Source: YouTube)
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