FAT GIRL WALKING:
Sex, Food, Love, and Being Comfortable in Your Skin…Every Inch of It
In FAT GIRL WALKING, Brittany Gibbons discusses the often funny and often painful true stories of her life as an overweight girl growing up in the Midwest. From coping with mental illness and obesity in her family, to her struggles with dating (it’s hard—no matter your size!), dealing with anxiety issues that forced her to drop out of college, falling in love, getting married, having three children, battling with bulimia, launching a successful writing career, and to finally getting the confidence to say goodbye to diets and body hating for good, Brittany’s new memoir is a soul-baring account of her quest to learn to love her shape.
Told through a series of larger-than-life snapshots, a hilarious memoir in essays about love, sex, marriage, motherhood, bikinis, and loving your body, no matter what size you are from the acclaimed blogger and body image advocate.
Brittany Gibbons has been a plus size her whole life. But instead of hiding herself in the shadows of thinner women, Brittany became a wildly popular blogger and national spokesmodel—known for stripping on stage at TedX and standing in Times Square in a bikini on national television, and making skinny people everywhere uncomfortable.
Talking honestly about size and body image on her popular blog, brittanyherself.com, she has ignited a national conversation. Now in her first book, she shares hilarious and painfully true stories about her life as a weird overweight girl growing up in rural Ohio, struggling with dating and relationships, giving the middle finger to dieting, finding love with a man smaller than her, accidentally having three kids, and figuring out the secret to loving her curves and becoming a nationally recognized body image advocate. And there’s sex, lots of it!
Fat Girl Walking isn’t a diet book. It isn’t one of those former fat people memoirs about how someone battled, and won, in the fight against fat. Brittany doesn’t lose all the weight and reveal the happy, skinny girl that’s been hiding inside her. Instead, she reminds us that being chubby doesn’t mean you’ll end up alone, unhappy, or the subject of a cable medical show. What’s important is learning to love your shape. With her infectious humor and soul-baring honesty, Fat Girl Walking reveals a life full of the same heartbreak, joy, oddity, awkwardness, and wonder as anyone else’s. Just with better snacks!
My thoughts: I am in love with this book! Fat Girl Walking is the best book I think I have ever read. I think Brittany Gibbons and I would be best friends very quickly! I love how she is able to make fun of herself and to tell it as it is. I was entertained from the moment I picked up this book until I finally put it down. It took me only two evenings to read it.
I love the message Brittany’s story conveys. I have always been a body hater. It started out when I was way too skinny as a teenager and simply never grew boobs like all of my peers. I had ribs where other girls had breast tissue. I in fact had to stuff my bra with quilt batting. (My, that got to be sweaty and itchy after awhile.) It only got discovered when it fell out when I jumped into a lake in my bathing suit and was neatly floating away, leaving me suddenly flat chested. I was called ‘bird legs,’ told I had less curves than a five year-old (by a boy) and was accused of being anorexic by many a school nurse. (I was just plain skinny. I simply couldn’t gain weight in my teen years.)
It wasn’t until I had children that I began too see the opposite end of the scale, and then I was fat! The way I look now actually makes me wish for my teenage body back. I usually always hate the way I look. I am definitely not skinny anymore. I am not plus-sized, but I am truly not thin.
After reading Brittany’s book, I am really tying to love my body the way it is now. It isn’t easy, but I am a work in progress when it comes to accepting my body’s flaws. Reading this book is helping to give me courage to show a little more skin and to feel more comfortable in my body the way it looks now.
You can purchase Fat Girl Walking: Sex, Food, Love, and Being Comfortable in Your Skin…Every Inch of It
Disclaimer: I received a copy of this book to review and to keep. All opinions are my own.