Woman Shares Clear Message for 'Fat Girls' After Marrying Hot Guy — and Her Words Go Viral (Exclusive)

• Sierra Hufham went viral on TikTok after she posted a video asking, “Can fat girls date hot guys?”

• Hufham, 32, tells PEOPLE that she met and married her “ripped” husband only after she worked on her self-esteem and owning her body

• Hufham explains why she thinks the video resonates and how she hopes to help other people battling weight stigma

Sierra Hufham, who posts on TikTok under the handle @the_fatgirldiaries, tells PEOPLE she first started sharing on the social media site because she wanted to see more people talk openly about "being fat."

“I've been looking for podcasts, looking for good content, of fat people sharing their stories,” the 32-year-old says. But then she realized she had “a whole journal filled with fat girl diary entries of things I've gone through in my life that revolved around being fat.” So she decided to start posting about her life on TikTok.

But still, she didn’t expect to go viral when, on Nov. 26, she posted a TikTok talking about her own dating experience. “Can fat girls date hot guys?” she asks in the beginning of the video. “The answer is 100% unequivocally yes because I landed one.” She continues, “I don't want you to feel like if you are fat that you are a fetish, because you're just a person. You're a person just like a skinny girl.”

“You have personality, you have beauty, you have style, you have finesse just like a skinny girl does,” she says in the clip. “So don't feel like anybody's out of your reach because they're not.”

Hufham tells PEOPLE that she’s been married to her husband Brandon for five years, and in the video, she calls him “model-looking.” She explains in the clip that “everybody” — including her mother — would tell her she couldn’t end up with someone “hot.” Her mother used to say, “If you just lost like 100 pounds ... you know you're pretty now, but if you lost 100 pounds you'd be a knockout and then you could get a really good-looking guy.”

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“That ruined my self-esteem for a really long time, thinking I'd never be able to get anybody,” she says in the TikTok. “And she was 100% wrong cause I got literally like the hottest guy in the world ... Weight is not the issue here. It's people's mindsets and their hearts and that's what matters.”

She tells PEOPLE that when she filmed the video, “I wanted to just set the record straight and show my husband and I how we met, and the fact that he is a ripped hot guy, and I, a big fat girl, was able to land him. It was just important for me to tell people nobody is out of your league. It is all dependent on how you view yourself. If you know your value, nobody's off limits.”

Hufham met her husband on vacation in the Dominican Republic. “It was my last day on vacation, and I actually met his parents first in the pool,” she remembers. “I fell in love with this middle-aged couple. I was so comfortable with them.”

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So she took her shot: “I was like, ‘If you have any kids, I'm daughter-in-law material.’ ” They told her they had a son and quickly introduced them. “And it was like, love at first sight. It was magical. I was shocked because he was this hot, ripped guy. And here I am, this big girl.”

But Hufham says she was only able to seize the moment on that fateful vacation because she had been working on her self-esteem and self-image.

She took “a whole year off” to focus on herself. “I started to find things that I loved about myself,” she says. “[I learned to] own my body, because these stretch marks are never going to go away. I'm always going to have loose, saggy skin. I'm always going to have remnants of the fact that I'm a bigger person, and I needed to own that and be confident in it.”

The video has racked up more than 700,000 views, and many commenters have shared their own experiences with weight stigma in their dating lives. “I think that a lot of people have dealt with rejection,” she says. “I think that's a normal part of the whole human and dating experience, but I think people don't know how to take that rejection, and they internalize it, to make it all about their weight, because of things that people have told them.”

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Some comments have been “pretty rough,” she admits, but she’s glad she took the chance to spread her message about living in a world where weight stigma is rampant.

“I just want to preach the fact that regardless of if you ever choose to lose weight — and some of us may never lose weight — that's okay. We're still worth something,” she says. “We're still beautiful. We can still land the hot guys, but we need to own our bodies, and that's the most important thing ... [We have to own] the fact that our body might get bigger for now, or it might never change. And that's okay when you love yourself. That's what's attractive.”

“I just want to shake everybody and tell them how beautiful they are," she adds, "because beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”

Read the original article on People