Brittany Gibbons: How I Became Professionally Fat on the Internet
When a mean commenter targeted her weight, blogger Brittany Gibbons decided to openly talk about how she really felt about her curves.
After the demise of my first blog Barefoot Foodie, I began a two-year-long adventure of simply playing on the Internet. My sweet spot was always humor, and 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 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 a baby shower. 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, 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. 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 began 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.
The cover of Brittany Gibbons hilarious and candid new book.
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 sat- isfied 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.
My very first press tour was a multicity campaign with Lands’ 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 and flew me out.
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.
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.
With that confidence, the more I put myself out there, on television, on my blog, 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 it—my body is made out of stardust.”
Brittany Gibbons is the author of the new book “Fat Girl Walking.”
Related:
I Thought Losing 85 Pounds Would Make Me Feel Beautiful — It Didn’t
“No I’m not fat, I’m pregnant”
Curves: The New Book That Celebrates Every Type of Body
#ProjectWomanKIND: 5 Plus-Sized Models on How They Learned to Love Their Bodies
