chapter 13

Joanna rolled out of bed. She didn't have much choice. Rolling was about the only way she COULD get out of bed these days. It had been a year since her mother and sister visited. A year of decadent, pleasure-filled eating, eating everything she'd ever loved to her heart's content.

It had been a memorable year indeed. Almost from the moment she saw Clara and Titania off at the airport she started working in a computer app. It was an idea inspired by her recent feeding binge and subsequent weight gain. The fact is that Joanna now spent an inordinate amount of time in front of her computer. She had become addicted to fat acceptance and weight gain websites. One of the things she noticed was that there was an entire segment of women out there, very THIN women, who desperately wanted to gain weight but couldn't because they had a super-charged metabolism.

Well, Titania had been thin as a rail her entire life, and yet somehow found a way to pack on the pounds, reaching a glorious state of curvy, jiggling, pendulous obesity. So it was reasonable to assume that if Titania could do it, so could even the most stubbornly svelte women. It was then that Joanna immersed herself in the find and fabulous art of making oneself flabulously FAT!! That was how P.I.G.G.Y. was born, PIGGY standing for Pounds Indisputably Get Girls Yummy!

She started her own website and marketed the app on her favorite "fat sites", figuring that, if nothing else, the proceeds would bring in enough to pay for six months of groceries. Little did she know! The first day she sold a thousand PIGGY's at $5.50 each. The next day that number rose to over fifteen hundred. Before she knew it, Joanna had become a VERY wealthy woman. Her corporate motto became, "Living Off The Fat of the Land!". She became so rich that she hired her own personal chef to cook up all sorts of fattening goodies to increase her by now stupendous girth. She also hired a personal assistant to do most of the "heavy lifting" that life required. This allowed Joanna to do as little as possible, thus burning very few calories and speeding up her weight gain immeasurably!

Life was good. Within a year she gained 247 pounds, putting her weight at nearly five hundred pounds, which as it turns out, made her fatter than her mother but still somewhat smaller than her immensely fat older sister. Her net worth was approaching nine figures and she became a media celebrity, dispensing advice to women who wanted to be fat, or who HAD become fat and couldn't adjust to their new physiques.

And it was all due to her losing her job as part of a greedy corporate merger. What made the whole story delightfully ironic is that Engulf & Devour spun off Brilliant Investments for $100 million, selling it to Fat of the Land, LLC, wholly owned by one Joanna Kirshner. She had come full circle. She was back with Brilliant Investments, but not as some flunky churning out financial algorithms, but as its CEO.

Brilliant Investments turned out to be a VERY fortuitous acquisition. Joanna reworked the corporate mission, going from a financial advising firm to a hedge fund. She also positioned Brilliant Investments into a unique place within the marketplace. She tapped into two previously under-utilized resources. First, from a human resources perspective, she essentially hired women of substance, overweight women who had been shunted aside in the corporate world because they didn't conform to some male's perception of what a top-notch executive looked like. Then she set out to corner as much of the plus-sized fashion industry as she possibly could, hiring young, fat fashion designers to bring an exciting and innovative approach to dressing the obese woman. It was a strategy that worked wonders. Brilliant Investments became one of the major players in the fashion industry and later expanded its scope to advertising and entertainment. Joanna made the cover of Time Magazine as Woman of the Year for starting a revolution in society and breaking the stereotype of fat women as dowdy, dull, and uninspiring!!