Fat Girl Walking: Sex, Food, Love, and Being Comfortable in Your Skin…Every Inch of It

by Brittany Gibbons

  “Oh look, the electricity company cashed our check and I still haven’t called about that blood in my stool, I’m on it!”

  The very first blog I created was called Barefoot Foodie, reflecting my then status as a stay-at-home mom with grand visions of becoming a famous food critic or television chef. There were a few problems with this plan. The first as that the only restaurants close to my house were a McDonald’s, a drive-through Subway and a seafood restaurant, and it’s really hard to critique shellfish in a landlocked state. Second, none of my recipes were healthy, and 2007 was the beginning of world domination for the vegan-gluten-paleo folk. And third, it was just a really sucky blog. I mean, there are only so many adjectives at my disposal to describe a bite of food, and eventually everything was just nutty and earthy and acidic.

  “I can’t put my finger on it, but this cut of steak almost has a nutty quality to it. Very earthy, and yet borderline acidic.”

  It was just gibberish. I didn’t like to write about food, I liked to eat food, and that’s not entertaining unless I’m doing it naked on a webcam and you’re paying $9.99 a minute to view it. Which I would do, by the way, as long as it wasn’t soup. I don’t eat soup in front of other people, and I especially don’t eat it naked.

  After the demise of Barefoot Foodie, I began a two-year-long adventure of simply playing on the Internet. My sweet spot was always humor, so I would update the defunct food blog every few days with humorous anecdotes about marriage and babies, the two things I happened to be elbow-deep in at the time. And suddenly, people started reading it; real people, not just my mom and my therapist, Tom, who frequented my writing to look for cries for help. The posts were read and shared and shared again between women and work friends over coffee and in emails between sisters.

  My readership grew larger and larger simply because other women were relating to what I was saying. It wasn’t anything particularly poignant, but it was honest. Marriage was hard. Motherhood was hard. Remembering to be a woman through all of it was hard. There were so many examples of women online and on television flawlessly pulling off their lives—great clothes, clean living rooms, trendy children—that women began looking for someone to admit how messy and mistake-ridden it all really was.

  I was crude and sloppy, entwining four-letter words with detailed exploits of my sex life and my periods. By the end of 2009 I had a monthly readership of over 100,000 as I wrote from the couch in the one-room garage apartment of my parents’ home, and it kept climbing. I had outgrown the confines of the mom demographic and was being devoured by girls in college, empty-nesters, and husbands desperate to relate to their wives. Companies that had previously shunned me for my language and explicit content began buying ad space, attaching my name to campaigns and advertisements. I was making more money through my blog than I’d earned at any of my previous non-Internet jobs, and I didn’t even have to put pants on to do it. I’d saved up enough for a substantial down payment on a house, and we moved out of my parents’ garage into a large home in the country, and two years post-bankruptcy, I began to out-earn Andy, and it’s been that way ever since.

  For the very first time in my life, I had a career and I had a purpose and I was popular. I had built a huge community of readers, and they were emailing me, sharing their experiences and relating to my posts, even though in truth, I was functioning at a pretty anonymous level. Sure, they knew my first name, and saw me through carefully crafted and cropped photos on the Internet, but they were accepting my cockiness and confidence at face value. I wasn’t either of those things in real life, and I couldn’t talk about what was really happening, because it wasn’t always hilarious and it wasn’t always fun to read. I wanted to talk about the way my stomach made a slapping sound when I ran, the horrible things I said to myself when I put my jeans on, how disappointed I was in my size, and how some days I barely left the house because I hated what I looked like so much.

  Just like high school, I lived in constant fear of outing myself as a fat girl, until one day, someone else did. It was a comment on a photo on Facebook from the baby shower of a fellow social media personality. I had carefully posed myself behind the mom-to-be and some of her friends, but despite the creative concealment of my body, someone left a comment declaring that I was too heavy for the outfit I’d worn. It was the first time I’d experienced shaming on the Internet because up until that point, I had controlled the discussion and characterization of my story. It was my safe place, and losing that terrified me. Side note: is anyone else grateful social media wasn’t a thing when they were a teenager? It’s like Draco Malfoy and all three Heathers smooshed into one invisible organism that thrives on Internet memes and passive aggression.

  After some mean-spirited banter in the comments, the author must have had a run-in with her conscience and tried to remove her post, but it was too late. I’d read it and my heart dropped and my face burned and suddenly I was that girl in high school again trying to pretend I didn’t hear it when someone called me a name in front of all my friends. The difference was that this time the feelings of shame and fear were overshadowed with absolute anger. I had already paid my dues as that girl. I was done being that girl.

  I was tired of living in fear of someone telling the community I had worked so hard to build who I really was, and I was tired of hiding behind turtlenecks or conveniently blurry or cropped photos. That kind of fear is a full-time job, and I didn’t have time for another one of those. I was going to own my body and the words about it from that point forward. I relaunched my website in my name as BrittanyHerself.com (all right not my actual name, but BrittanyGibbons.com was actually owned by a teenage country singer, and she refused to sell it to me, so I had to improvise) and used it as a platform to write not just about being married and raising kids, but about my struggles as a curvy woman, because after all, that is what every part of my life boiled down to. It affected the way I parented, the way I interacted with my spouse, the way people saw me, and the way I saw myself. I wasn’t always a sarcastic and crude girl making dick jokes. I was 250 pounds and an insecure mess.

  Through hiccups, tears, and one very large Frosty from Wendy’s, I finally typed out the words I’d been too afraid to admit: that I was fat, and that I hated myself for it. Here is a glimpse at what I wrote:

  I spend most of my day loathing my body, and sharing that with Andy is hard enough, let alone admitting to him that others see me the same way. Obese.

  I feel like I am just that much further from liking myself.

  I’ll still look for excuses to change in my bathroom with the door locked, or hide my Spanx at the bottom of my underwear drawer, or act busy and hurry away when he tries to put his arms around my waist.

  I want to not spend so much time hating myself. But, it’d be a whole lot easier if people would stop reminding me about all the reasons why I should.

  YOU’RE NOT AS THIN AS YOU THINK YOU ARE

  It turns out that once you admit to a community of readers that you are plus size and miserable they either say, “Ew, gross” or “Me too!” For every person who stopped reading my blog, I gained ten more. Plus the occasional chubby-chaser who inquired how happy and satisfied I was in my marriage and if I’d send them a picture of me slowly eating a box of doughnuts.

  Job number one while being fat on the Internet is figuring out just how fat on the Internet you actually are. Yes, sure, I had a scale, I could read numbers, I knew how BMI charts worked, but I also had a mean case of body dysmorphia . . . in opposite-land. Meaning, I thought I was thinner and prettier in the mirror than I was in real life. It happens to us big girls at some point. You leave the house thinking you’re having a good hair day and your jeans fit great, and then you catch your reflection walking past a store window and you decide none of those things is true and your brain is a liar. It’s defeating and a million times worse when you have that realization in front of millions of readers on the Internet.

  My very first press tour was a multicity campaign with L
ands’ End in 2010 for their swimsuit line. Lands’ End was one of the first fashion companies interested in appealing to the “real woman” demographic, and they approached me about collaborating on their swimsuit confidence campaign. Without even considering the depth or ramifications of the project, I pitched a great idea that had me standing in my bathing suit in Times Square outside Good Morning America; they loved it, arraigned a bunch of interviews with various other media outlets, and flew me out that May. I was still very much a starry-eyed girl from Ohio at the time, so I showed up at my fancy hotel suite in New York City, with a king-size bed with clean sheets and freedom to crank the air conditioner as high as I liked, feeling very important and untouchable. Every day I crawled out of bed at 3 A.M. to dress myself decently enough to hail a cab and make it to a 4 A.M. call time for hair, makeup, and wardrobe at whatever morning show I was making my rounds to that day, and I never once worried about my stretch marks or back fat, because someone else was there buttoning my pants and shifting stuff around to make me look pretty. I smiled in the mirror and made my way onto the set confident and perky with blown-out hair and perfectly lined eyes.

  Between satellite interviews about the confidence and empowerment that wearing a swimsuit evoked, I would waltz back to the greenroom to grab some food, and when one of the production assistants showed me a photo they had snapped of me on set, being all famous, I spit the bagel out of my mouth, locked myself in the bathroom, and commenced bawling my fake eyelashes off. That girl in the picture was not how I saw myself in the mirror. That girl in the picture looked like Shrek.

  I pulled the poor confused production assistant into the bathroom and laid out the laundry list of flaws I’d seen in the grainy, poorly lit cell phone picture: the arm fat, the double chins, the hunchback. She swore that she saw none of those things, and promised me that the person I saw in the mirror was exactly the person everyone else saw, and even though she probably had way more important things to do, she spent the next ten minutes taking pictures of me so I could practice sitting until I found a position I felt I looked okay in. The irony is that prior to that moment, I had stood in my hotel room in my bathing suit in front of a full-length mirror and concluded that every step I’d taken to love my body after having my daughter was working. If I never lost another pound, I’d be totally okay because jeans looked cute, and shirts looked cute, and my hair was finally out of that super-awkward stage where it was annoyingly hovering around my shoulders to the point that I’d made all my friends promise not to let me cut it because doing so would only end in regret, much like when I get attached to shows that ABC eventually cancels without warning (I will avenge your death, What About Brian).

  That media tour was a wake-up call to how I viewed myself. Naturally, I’m going to be harder on myself than others might be, but it was painful coming to terms with how I really looked on camera alongside the anchors of Good Morning America, Connecticut Style, and The Daily Buzz.

  However, it inspired me to take the time to get to know my body. When I stood in front of the full-length mirror in my bedroom each morning, I was no longer just telling myself I was sexy and strong: I was moving and posing my body, not out of narcissism, but in a quest to find poses that made me feel beautiful and confident. Hating yourself in pictures or in video is the worst. And may God smite anyone who posts a photo of you eating, because absolutely nobody looks attractive while eating. I practiced those poses every day so that the muscles in my body would remember them, and when a camera was pointed my way, my body naturally found those movements and I walked away from the experience confident that I knew how I looked. And with that confidence, the more I put myself out there, on television, on my blog, or Internet fetish sites, the more I could objectively handle the criticism and snark that were lobbed my way and be able to step back and say, “You know what, that’s fair,” or “No way, troll, you’re full of shit, my body is made out of stardust.”

  TAKING CHARGE

  The second rule of being fat on the Internet is taking charge of your fat on the Internet. There’s a weird belief floating around that just because you are confident in your body, you don’t care what it looks like in photographs or on-screen. And that by speaking up about how you want your body portrayed, you are somehow defeating the very platform you are promoting. That is bullshit, and I learned that the hard way.

  In the early years of my blog, any media attention or promotion was a big deal; I took whatever I could get. So when I was contacted one week after giving birth to my daughter by a local paper that wanted to feature my site in a story about mommy bloggers, I naturally jumped at the chance. The male reporter asked me various eye-roll-inducing questions about how moms were turning to blogs for therapy, and why I thought the Internet was, you know, a cure for our lady hysteria. When he tried to arrange for a photo shoot in my home, I kindly offered to email him a head shot. Just like Jewish people sit shiva for seven days follow the burial of a loved one, there is an unspoken period of time after giving birth when women are allowed hide in their house in mesh hospital underwear, accepting casseroles at the door and not having to appear in photos. It is for this reason that the conversation with the reporter should have ended, but he pushed for the shoot and I was afraid saying no would cost me the story, so it was scheduled.

  An old man with a camera came to my home eight days after I’d given birth to my third child and took a series of photos of me in my dark living room, as I tried to smile between corralling two small toddlers, quieting a newborn, and adjusting my breast-milk-soaked nursing bra. Frazzled, I had collapsed on the couch to adjust my maternity jeans when he snapped a picture.

  “Just testing the light,” he assured me.

  That was the photo the reporter used for the story.

  It’s events like this that fuel me to put aside my fear and complicity, but as a woman, it’s hard to be that vocal. It was hard to speak up and set the terms when I had absolutely no experience doing either of those things. I wasn’t “leaning in” just yet.

  A few years later, I would again find myself on the set of a daytime talk show, again in a bathing suit, and again talking about a piece I’d written about body confidence. The cameraman had positioned the camera at a very low angle, almost resulting in an upshot, which I think we can all agree should be illegal and punishable by nail gun to the throat.

  “Excuse me,” I said sweetly to the cameraman. “Is there any way you can aim the cameras down at me a bit more? This upward angle is really unflattering. It’s a woman thing.” I shrugged, trying to keep things friendly.

  “Sorry, these cameras are set for the host, not you,” he answered matter-of-factly.

  And that’s when I knew. I wasn’t going to be the woman just lucky to be on the screen anymore. I was going to be the woman they set the cameras for.

  CHANGE THE MOTHERFUCKING CONVERSATION

  Body talk was becoming a huge topic across almost all forms of media, but unfortunately, the majority of it surrounded the effects of unrealistic beauty standards and bullying on teen girls. Having a daughter myself, I could see why these conversations were important, but what about the rest of us? What about the women who were being fat-shamed in the media, discriminated against in the workplace, mocked on television, and ignored by the fashion companies? Where was the guide on how to be thirty and plus size and love yourself? Where were all those conversations?

  They weren’t happening yet, leaving an entire population of women completely disenfranchised, and I saw this as a chance to become a point of reference and authority for plus-size women online. I was already speaking out about my weight and my struggles with body image, and was making huge strides not only in personally loving my size, but in helping others do the same, so that Band-Aid had already been ripped off. Now it was just a matter of turning the societal conversation from fat discrimination to body acceptance. Plus-size people were often portrayed in society as villains. We affected your health-care costs with our diabetes and our heart attacks. We
all wanted gastric bypass and lap-band surgery as an easy way out. We were eating all the fast food from the dollar menu. We were lazy, lacked self-control, and were unpleasant to look at. We were an epidemic.

  Plus-size people didn’t want to hear that anymore, and more important, whatever anyone hoped to change with that kind of negative dialogue wasn’t changing. Women especially wanted someone to stand up and say all the things they weren’t brave enough to say yet. They wanted to talk about having sex and shopping and friendships and dating, not as a plus-size person, but as a person. We aren’t fetishes or last resorts, but we were being treated that way in the media. Curvy women wanted to be reassured that they were allowed to both love and hate parts of their body and at the end of the day, still have worth.

  So those are the conversations I started having. I denounced body shaming. I promoted loving your body, just as you were. I challenged fashion companies to step up to the plate and provide us with stylish options and realistic models. I grabbed my bathing suits and skinny jeans and talked about fashion that worked for my body. And I started taking my clothes off every chance I got; hell, I gave every sex worker in America a run for her money. The more people saw me, the more normal my body became to them. People see a naked thin woman and think, Oh isn’t she beautiful. Then they see a naked plus-size woman and think, Oh bless her heart, she feels good about herself, that’s adorable. I was going to keep showing the world my body until the reaction stopped being how nice for her and started being look at that beautiful woman.