Having been really skinny until I had my son, Iīd like to comment on this, too.

Being skinny does not automatically mean you are confident and happy with your figure.
Being skinny does not automatically mean you are a member of the "I only had half a leaf of salad for lunch and want to be praised for it" club.
Being skinny does not automatically mean you are drug-addicted.
Being skinny does not automatically mean you look down on people who weigh half a pound more than yourself.
Being skinny does not automatically mean you have a bad personality or no character. For the ones who canīt refrain from making such utterances: I have been attacked by fat women more times I can count. Women I did not know and who had literally no way to know if I was a diet freak, suffered from Mega-Ego, or spent two thirds of my day in the gym.
To these women: Start working on your attitude, stop screaming you donīt want to be judged by your looks, start NOT TO jugde other people by THEIR looks, and maybe most important: Realize that youīll get what you give. Be that positive or negative.
If you are not happy with your body, and can do something about that, stop the fucking whining, and do it, rather than bitching at thinner women, because that will NOT help your self-esteem. It will not make thinner women treat you friendly, and with respect, either - do you have a clue why that might be so? Yes? Good.

So, end of rant for that fraction of fat women I met.
I also met bigger ladies who were loved by literally everyone, who could get every man they wanted into bed (even if he claimed to be a skinny-girls-fan), and were great company and lots of fun.
They were confident. They knew they were not skinny, but they did not give a fuck. They felt comfortable within themselves. If they wished to be skinnier, they did not show it. Certainly they did not let it spoil their life or self-esteem.

I also met NORMAL sized girls (by normal I mean what a woman should look like in my opinion, with curves, and by curves I do not mean to euphemize too much fat. I mean a woman that looks like a woman without being overweight, period) who for some reason thought they were too fat, which was in the overwhelming majority of cases not the case.
Shockingly, these girls are the average, the absolute majority of the women I know.
I donīt see why women do this to themselves - look into magazines and feel bad because they are not the super-perfect models they can see there.
I know of not a single man who is that stupid. Neither do the men I know fret all fucking day about not looking like underwear models. NEITHER do the men I know expect the women they are with, or see on the street everyday, to look like the models in magazines.
Ladies - this troubling ourselves with not-looking-like-the-chicks-in-the-magazines is really, and truly, a habit we should get rid of. It spoils all the fun.

As for my own experiences: I hated being thin and had huge complexes until I was 19. Being skinny as a kid also means you have no big tits, and get your fair share of ugly treatment from your classmates or other teenagers for it. (Again, I cannot emphasize enough, not only the fat girls get to be the object of jokes.) In such a state, you do not take a compliment as a compliment - you only think people still wish to make fun of you, or they just say it to be nice.
For the greatest part of my puberty I also had glasses, and brackets on my teeth - do you get the picture? *lol*

I had my only serious relationship before the one I have now with a guy I greatly loved and who was smitten with my looks and figure (I had gotten rid of the glasses and brackets by that time, mind. *lol*). He would not stop telling me how good I looked. I did not believe it. I thought he just thought so because he loved me, so he was blind to the stick-like reality...
I later learned the greater part of my male friends during that time thought me hot... I never knew at the time.

If you wish to know what changed my self-perception overnight: I slept with my tattooist. A guy I was totally smitten with, and who had LOTS of beautiful women (models among them). I knew him well, I knew his tastes, and I knew he would not sleep with me unless he truly found me delicious, because he could have had simply anyone.
After that night, I thought "ok, I CANNOT be that crappy if he wanted me!".
No, I do not recommend sleeping with a tattooist if you have self-esteem troubles :-)
What I would like to point out is that this is the reason why all the reassurance an insecure woman gets from her loved one might not be helping - she will believe he only says it to be nice, or because heīs blind to reality.

All my life until my pregnancy, I wanted big tits. When I was pregnant, I got big tits, and after loving it for maybe 2 months, I came to hate them, and was glad when they were gone again. Men STARE at them before looking at your face (an experience totally new for me, and I hated it). Moreover, they are uncomfortable when sleeping on the belly, and they bounce painfully when you act as if you still had no tits worth speaking of, and jump down the stairs with no bra (I had not known this, either).

For now, since childbirth I have hips (before my pregnancy, I had no recognizable waist..) and a breast size I am very comfortable with.

As for the optical things that attract me:

I have always been optically enticed by women who look like women, meaning not like me, not sticky/skinny/bony/whatever you want to call it.
I tend to think women, no matter what they look like, think what they donīt have is whatīs beautiful. (After all, same goes with hair. Curly women want straight hair, straight-haired women want curly hair, you get my point.)
I am not properly bi, though, I only like womenīs upper halves... and of 100 people I look after, 98 are women, because I simply think women are more beautiful than men (to me).

As for men: My "type", as I used to have, was very tall and very skinny, preferably dark-haired and dark-eyed.
My hubby, on the other hand, is a tall, broad-shouldered giant who is described by one of my gay friends as "her hubby who looks like a bloody Viking".
Yes, I like long hair in men. Very much so.
I never fancied the hard-bellied, over-trained, slim, muscle-packaged sort of man which is used in fashion photos for men. To me, they always seemed artificial - like Ken, like Barbie, nothing Iīd feel the urge to touch.

Valid for both sexes: I totally go for the eyes. If I donīt like these, I wonīt fancy the rest, either, no matter how "perfect".

These were the optical things only.
But what triggers me truly is the radiance of a person. I cannot put a name to it otherwise, and I find it hard to describe. Itīs not sex-appeal. Itīs not simple confidence. I cannot name it, but I can say very few people have it. So I am not overly prone to cheating on hubby *lol*.
Apart from this, itīs voices that get me. Deep, raspy voices. The sort that usually belongs to tiny, ANCIENT men. *G* I would never do anything with them, but I go for these voices.

This was way more than what I had intended to write, but maybe one or the other among you finds something helpful.