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

For all women. Especially the ones who don’t know they’re beautiful yet.

“OKAY, BRITTANY, NOW
if you could just walk out in your bikini and pretend you’re just a normal woman wearing a bathing suit?”

“I
am
a normal woman wearing a bathing suit,” I said.

“Right, right. So we’re going to pan the camera up, guys if you could go slower when we get to her stretch marks and chest, and Brittany, if you could just smile and act happy during all of this, that’d be great.”

“Smile and act happy while you pan the camera across my stretch marks. Got it.”

I stood on the cement patio of our rented vacation house in Orlando, while three men from
Good Morning America
adjusted lighting and discussed the best way to showcase the anomaly that was a chubby girl in a bikini. I glanced up at my publicist, Jackie, who sat behind the camera. She smiled and gave me the thumbs-up, and suddenly Monty Python’s “Galaxy Song” played in my head and I smiled as it hit me.

So remember, when you’re feeling very small and insecure . . .

I am the Internet’s token fat girl. If the Internet is still a thing when I am old and die, all this might be included in my obituary.

Brittany Gibbons: the jolly face of plus-size women. Known for taking her clothes off to make political statements and making skinny people everywhere uncomfortable.

Growing up, I had reoccurring daydreams about one day being famous, marrying Dr. Peter Venkman from
Ghostbusters,
and writing lots of books. I never planned to be Internet famous, which is a totally different kind of famous, by the way.

You see, there are lots of ways to be Internet famous, like being adorable British girls in tutus who rap, eating cups of feces with your best friend, or being absolutely any kind of cat. But for me, the keys to my success are just being not slim, making vagina jokes on social media, and having Nigerian men tell me I look pretty and then ask me to accept wire transfers of large sums of money.

One could also correctly assume that I never quite expected to be writing a book about being fat, either.

Nobody really spends their childhood thinking about how awesome it would be to chronicle a lifetime of people watching you not fitting into things, asking if you are really going to eat that, and giving you tips on how not to be a hideous boil on the ass of society.

If anything, I figured I’d follow in the footsteps of Jane Austen, or at the very least come up with a “literary masterpiece” based on a peyote-induced dream I had once about angry teenage girls who fall in love with broody vampires.

But here we are. I am the writer I always wanted to be. And the subject is me and my life as a fat girl.

Overall, I’d like this book to help readers realize that being chubby your whole entire life doesn’t mean you’ll end up alone, unhappy, or the subject of some TLC medical show. And if you
happen to be turned on by sociology, obesity isn’t without its interesting aspects. For instance, being a fat kid afforded me the unique experience of witnessing the evolution of pejorative name-calling.

In elementary school, I was often called
cow, chubs,
or
tubby.
The latter two are adorable societal stigmas that might also double as the name of your pet hamster or determined cartoon tugboat.

High school labeled me as fat-ass or fat whore. Honestly, I think teen boys just like to mix together all the vulgar insults they know because they’re insecure about things like ball hair or their legitimacy as white rappers. Classic projection.

In college, I was what was often considered a buffer or cockblocker, which is the technical term for the large physical barrier I often provided between my super-cute friends and the sleazy douchebags at the bar. It was primarily hurled around 3
A.M
. as I escorted my barefoot roommates back to our dorm.

And then finally, I reached adulthood. The period of maturity when I assumed most forms of teasing and bullying had been outgrown, until I discovered the comments section of absolutely any news site or social network. “
What’s that chubby adult woman? You feel pretty today? Really, that’s weird because you look like Type 2 diabetes and rising healthcare costs.”
Which is just a fancy adult way of saying I’m fat.

I feel like every fat-girl book on the shelf talks about how horrible being chubby is, then somewhere along the line, the author breaks up with gluten, buries her demons, and becomes one with the happy skinny girl who’d been inside her all along. I’ve actually long suspected there was a skinny girl inside me, but not in a metaphysical way. More like I probably had a twin, but I ate her.

This is not a diet book, guys. In fact, if I do this right, our cycles will align and we’ll be eating our feelings together by the third chapter.

Instead, this book is full of hilarious and painfully true stories
about my life as an overweight girl with an unconventional career path. I feel odd prematurely qualifying my own stories as hilarious, because you’re an adult and you can make your own decisions, but my therapist says it’s totally healthy, and I read, like, four chapters of this out loud to him and his eyes didn’t glaze over once.

I think it’s important to talk about things that make people feel awkward and uncomfortable, because that’s how I navigate a good portion of my life, and misery loves company. Unless you’re only coming over to talk about Jesus or sell me magazines from your kid’s school, in which case, I’m good.

I’m going to talk about what it’s like being the only chubby girl in a rural town in Ohio. I mean, there was this one other kid, but he had a legitimate thyroid issue, allegedly. And I am also going to talk about how I struggled with dating and relationships (fat girls suck at this as much as the skinny girls do, and we have more back fat), gave the middle finger to dieting, embraced an adorable case of anxiety disorder that led to me dropping out of college and trying to teach a pug to flush the toilet, learned about womanhood by failing at lesbianism, accidentally had three kids, figured out the secret to loving my curves, and became a nationally recognized body advocate.

Oh, and I’m also going to write a lot about sex and what my body
really
looks like, and I’ll even show it to you. Hopefully you’ll be entertained, and maybe inspired to show off your skin, too.

You just flipped through the book looking for pictures, didn’t you? Reading ahead is like not forwarding a chain letter. You just killed four people in Arkansas and none of your wishes will ever come true. Unless your wish was to see me with some of my clothes off, pervert.