Chicago resident Gabi Gregg is fat. She'd be the first to admit it. She is also, she would stress, fabulous.
Hence the 23-year-old's increasingly popular blog, youngfatandfabulous.com.
According to Gregg, the youngest of four girls and a Detroit native, the fashion-centric site catering to plus-size women gets about 150,000 visits per month -- roughly 80,000 of them unique.
Thanks to her handiness with social media, including blogging, Facebooking and Tweeting, Gregg was chosen to compete in New York to be the first-ever Twitter Jockey for MTV. The position pays $100,000 a year, and the winner will be announced live on MTV at 9 p.m. Sunday.
"It's kind of been my dream to eventually move to New York," she says. "I love the Midwest. I don't know how long I would actually stay in New York. I don't think it would be a lifelong place for me, but I've always wanted to at least live there for a few years in my 20s."
With college loans to pay off and little money being generated by her blog, the jobless Gregg says a hundred grand would go a long way toward easing her financial burden. If so inclined, she could even buy a bed and lose the floor-level mattress pad she's sleeping on in her Pilsen apartment.
Gregg began blogging in October 2008. Since then, she says, reader response has been "overwhelming."
"I get e-mails pretty much on a daily basis from women all over the world. A lot of times they'll be from Asian countries. Literally everywhere. Saudi Arabian women just saying how mind-blowing and life-changing my blog has been for them. And I think that's so amazing, because when I first started blogging, I didn't really realize the impact it would have. So to hear from these women that my blog literally changed their lives is really humbling and amazing. It's still kind of surreal to me."
Some of Gregg's disciples gathered for the first YFF conference in New York last month. Several plus-size retailers, part of a burgeoning niche, sponsored various events.
But while Gregg receives free merchandise (recently, a stylish pair of jeans from Torrid), she claims she won't post glowing reviews in return for payment.
As for the haters, those who think that spreading the fat-is-fab gospel is delusional and unhealthy, Gregg is unfazed.
"I get some of that feedback once in a while," she says, "but my whole thing is I don't focus on health on my blog. My health is my priority and my business and my doctor's and my family's. In terms of my blog, it's all about fashion."
She thinks people who perpetuate the notion that fat and fashion are mutually exclusive do so "for no other reason than discrimination."
When it comes to fat itself being fashionable, however, even experts have doubts. "Obesity is probably the only risk factor that has such a global negative impact on so many risk factors for the heart," Barry Franklin, director of the Cardiac Rehab Program and Exercise Laboratories at William Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak, Mich., told Health.com early this year.
Gregg, though, has no plans to drop the f-word from her vocabulary.
"First of all, I wasn't the first person [to use it], so there was definitely a fat acceptance movement before I came along," she says. Way before. The National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance was founded in 1969. There's also, among other groups, the far newer Association for Size Diversity and Health, established in 2003.
"But using ['fat'] is just a way of taking the word back and showing people that it can be a descriptive word and it can be used in the neutral sense," Gregg says. "It doesn't have to have the stigma that's attached to it. And so we're trying to help fight that stigma by showing people that, 'Yes, I'm fat. I'm not saying I'm not fat.' Because so many women try to say they're not when they are.
"I'm saying I'm fat and fabulous."
Photo: 'LIFE-CHANGING': Chicago blogger Gabi Gregg of youngfatandfabulous.com says women from around the world tell her how her blog has changed their lives.
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