Ok, so, the updates haven't been so regular, I know...

So, life has gotten super crazy, and I've been way internet deprived for a while now. Nothing that I won't push through, I'm actually really happy, but really busy and without a stable internet connection. And blogger has been kinda fucky about letting me update pictures, which is oh so frustrating because I have some cool, cool updates in the works.

You can look forward to...

A new "illustrated" story from the illustrious BearTrainer
Several detailed pictorial evolutions of some really big top gainers that if you read this blog regularly I'm sure you wouldn't be tossing out of your bed
Some postings of some of the stories that were on GainerWeb which is currently on hiatus -I was smart enough to save them to my hardrive before the site went on vacation.

In that vein, despite the fact that I can't upload pictures, I can embed youtube vids, so here is a hot little vid from a non-gainer and a great story from the GainerWeb archives. I think of this story as a sort of gainer version of Y Tu Mama Tambien. Hot guy, realizing he's gay, on a trip, lots of vivid detail, I imagine it would have a good soundtrack if it were a movie, they speak Spanish, etc... It has that whole bisexual en route to gay thing that totally got me off in high school. I dunno, it's a story you have to invest in, but some really hot imagery. Read it, slowly, while snacking on something.. The whole thing after the jump.


Los Playeros (The Beach Bums)

By Joey188@aol.com

When I got off the plane, the tropical air of the island hit me in sultry waves, making me sweat. I wished I'd left my jacket back home in Corona.

Announcements echoed through the terminal in Spanish, making me feel like I was in a foreign land and I began to wonder whether returning to Puerto Rico that year was such a good idea. It was 1982, I'd just turned eighteen, and it was a strange time in my life. I was horny all the time. Horny and confused.

Home for the summer between high school and city college, I was jerking off like five times a day while my parents were at work, and I was dying to fuck something - hell, anything ! Judging by the pictures in my mind, it didn't matter who wound up in bed with me. So long as they were hot and friendly, I'd take 'em. Anyway, there I was in San Juan, my jerking off and fucking days clearly over, at least for the next six weeks. My God, I was going to go crazy!

On top of all that, at the last minute my father had been called away on a construction job in Mayaguez, on the far side of the island, and couldn't see me till sometime late in July. He'd arranged for his half-brother Raul to come pick me up and take me to some boondock shanty pueblo called Vega Baja.

There for some endless stretch of time I'd have to sit on the mocassina, eat shaved ice, and watch the sugar cane grow. Major drag.

It's funny about Puerto Ricans and airports. You could fly back and forth between the island and the States a hundred times, but if you've got relatives, they'll dress up in their Sunday best, pack the whole family into the car and show up at the gate as if you were the Second Coming. I spotted the red lipstick on my Aunt Nilda and smelled the aftershave on Tio Raul from fifty paces. He was wearing one of those embroidered gentleman's shirts the older men on the island wore at formal events. She wore slacks and her three-inch fingernails were painted fire engine red to match those fiery lips. The two of them grabbed and smothered me, immediately starting to jabber in hundred mile an hour Spanish.

"Mas despacio," I grinned, and they burst out laughing as they usually did when I took a stab at the language. My Dad had taught me a lot before he split on Ma when I was six, but I'd forgotten most of it.

Predictably, hot on the heels of this greeting came the Dreaded Inspection.

I'd prepared myself for this, and thought this time I'd get by fairly unscathed. I'd grown about a foot since my last visit, and had been working out on and off for the past year. My black hair was short and fashionably cut, and a pair of contacts brought my dark eyes out from behind my old clunky pair of eyeglasses. I'd looked into the mirror in the can on the plane, checked out my tight muscles and sizable crotch bulge, and thought I was finally coming into my own. I should have known better. Raul and Nilda's turned me around between them, poking and prodding me, running their hands over me as if I were a workhorse up for market. Though I scored points on height, I was way too skinny, like a skeleton, if I got my translation right.

Also I was pale, como un fantasma .

"Does the sun no longer shine on Manhattan?" asked Raul in broken English, forgetting I'd moved out of the Lower East Side about ten years earlier.

I grinned and bore it, suggesting we get to the suitcase pick-up. To tell you the truth, my heart was sinking. I'd been in Puerto Rico all of five minutes and I hated it already. I wanted to go home and jack off. I was so depressed and horny, even old Aunt Nilda's persistent squeezings were getting me hard, and that was gross. There had to be something in the air on that island, I tell you....

Then I saw my cousin, Carlos. He was leaning over the baggage carousel, a smiling macho god. He didn't even flinch when the loud buzzer sounded and the luggage started spinning around. A year or two older than me, he'd grown up, filled out, and then some! He was a native island boy with some boricua blood stretching way back into his family history. You could see it in the smooth darkness of his skin, the jet blackness of his curly hair, and the exotic, almond shape of his ebony eyes. He wore a yellow T-shirt tucked in (this was a special occasion, after all), and the short sleeves were tight around his big biceps. The word "Playero" in a sunburst was emblazoned over his left pec. It meant "beach bum". And last, but certainly not least, I noticed he'd managed to pour himself into a pair of white buttonfly jeans that had to be at least a couple of sizes too small for him. Even from across the room I could see his cock plainly through the denim, drawn to the right in that semi-hard state that sexy Puerto Ricans always seemed to be in.

I greeted him by shaking his hand instead of hugging him, like I should have done. Funny how men hold back when they find they really like a guy, even when there'd be nothing wrong with a good tight clinch at an airport. Well, I was drawn to Carlos immediately. In a place loaded with foxy Latin chicks with big tits and tight skirts, I found I couldn't let my long lost "cousin" out of my peripheral sight. Of course I couldn't let him know that. I guess I had nothing to worry about. Carlos barely spoke any English. He just smiled and set to work getting my suitcases together.

On the way home, Carlos and I sat in the back seat of Raul's car. The "meet and greet" now officially over, my aunt and uncle promptly ignored us, opting to complain incessantly about the rush hour traffic on the autopista . My cousin's arm was draped casually over the seat behind my head. I could feel the heat of it on the nape of my neck and at my ears. Somehow that calmed me down, made me feel safer.

"Tienes una novia?" They always asked that. I couldn't be on the island half an hour before being nailed with that one. My cousin was the culprit this time. But with that smile and those dark eyes, I couldn't hate him.

"No, no girlfriend," I admitted. "The girl I was seeing? She went off to college in another state as soon as we graduated. I broke up with her."

Carlos seemed satisfied with that web of lies I just wove. I hadn't had a girl since tenth grade, and we were drunk at a party. The B-boys in school were beginning to wonder about me, and I was having second thoughts about myself. Anyway, I was glad high school was over.

"You are picking up weights?" He leaned over, slid his fingers under below the cut of my chest and squeezed each of my firm pectorals through my shirt.

I felt his warm breath in my face. The lump in those tight white jeans of his got bigger, clearly forming an eight inch impression through the denim. "I have a bench in my house. Feel this-"

Carlos pulled his T-shirt out of his jeans and tucked the hem under his chin.

Then he took my hand and put it on his sunken, washboard belly. It felt like molten lead. I suddenly felt like passing out! He was doing this, making me touch his hot body, in the back seat of his parent's car, as if it was nothing!

"Wow! That's hard!" I had to lift my left leg to hide the massive boner I'd gotten. "You've been working out a long time."

"Yes," he smiled proudly. "Now we can do it together."

To get to Vega Baja, Puerto Rico, you've got to head west from the Carlos Munoz Rivera International Airport in Santurce, cruise past the sunny hotel district on Isla Verde, with its oiled and bronzed men cooking to succulence on clean sandy beaches, and get on the Numero Dos for thirty or forty minutes. You have to pass through Bayamon, where neighborhood paisanos work on old 1970s muscle cars in nothing but ripped up gym shorts and soaking bandanas around their sweaty brows. And you drive by Dorado Beach, where they put up fences to keep the homeboys out and the hotsy-totsy golfers tucked safely within. Surrounded by rocky hills and miles of sugar cane and pineapple, Vega Baja is a pueblo in the old sense of the word, a place where the poor people lived. Well, my father's half-brother's family may have been poor, but (gracias a Dios) having little money didn't mean squat when it came to looks, and my primo Carlos was about as handsome as they come.

No offense intended, but Vega Baja was a real shithole. My aunt and uncle's home was set precariously on a steep hill of earth and stone. It was supported by forty foot stilts, the kind you hear about on the news collapsing in a storm or mudslide in Bangladesh. Half-starved dogs, riddled with mange, sauntered up and down the road, and massive iguanas sunned themselves on rocks nearby. Every so often at night, a roach the size of a sparrow flew through one of the open windows and buzzed us as we watched TV.

The only things that kept me from going completely nuts were the magical songs the Puerto Rican tree-frogs sang from dusk till dawn -ko-kee, ko-kee - and the hypnotic sight of my gorgeous cousin Carlos, as he stretched languidly around the house in nothing but a pair of ripped cut-offs and that ever-present, sexy smile. We slept in the same bed, him in his underwear, me in my pajama bottoms. Feeling him asleep so close gave me the wildest of hardons, but I dared not touch myself for fear of being caught and ridiculed.

"Cojelo suave, popi," he'd tell me whenever I strained to keep up with him lifting weights or taking our afternoon walks up forty-five degree hills.

"Take it easy, my man."

His body seemed naturally muscular and powerful, and he moved with a lazy grace that made me want to snare him and devour him. One day, when we were playing touch football, I noticed the snap of his super tight shorts kept popping open whenever he had to reach up and catch a high pass. A thick, black swatch of pubic hair could be glimpsed there at the base of his belly.

He may have put on a couple of pounds since I got there, and he seemed healthy, happy and proud of the weight. I found myself tossing plenty of high passes. When Carlos finally noticed me staring, I almost died of embarrassment. But he just laughed and pushed his stomach at me till his shorts popped open again.

A smooth, deep suntan and bigger muscles had been my first priority, and fairly soon my body was adorned with both. Carlos loved working me out. He and his friend Nestor would spot each other out on the mocasina, where the lizards would look on as they climbed along the fences, and the tropical breezes sometimes got strong enough to make the house sway on its stilts.

Every few minutes they'd switch and pump away on the weight bench, working at the barbell until a buttery sheen glossed their dark skin from brow to belly.

Nestor was about six foot-two, long and lean, quiet and cool. He had thick eyebrows and a mustache that made him look tough, almost sinister. Carlos was shorter by a couple of inches. His body was more beautifully proportioned. We had both put on weight since I'd come down from New York that year, and he wore his well. As they lifted, I could swear I could actually see their biceps and triceps swelling across their arms and shoulders, full sets of solid, sculpted muscle seemed to expand and harden before my eyes.

When they spoke in Spanish with each other, they touched one another in a way I'd never seen back home. Carlos would make a point about firming up a pectoral by casually pushing aside Nestor's tank-top strap and squeezing the area around his buddy's nipple between his fingers.

Carlos and Nestor got erections all the time! Bulges appeared and grew larger whenever they touched, whenever a girl passed by on the road below, hell, even if the wind kicked up! I've got to admit, it put a little less stress on me hiding my own throbbing cock sometimes. These guys were driving me crazy!

Nestor would wear this ancient pair of gym shorts that tended to hike up around his thighs every time he did military presses, leaving his huge, uncut dick to slide down out of them.

Now I'd seen Carlos's fantastic cock, on account of the fact that he didn't seem to give a shit about being naked in front of me whenever he changed out of those shrinking short of his. But Nestor's huge piece was every bit as gorgeous! It was thick and wrapped so tightly in its skin, it looked like it was about to burst! His foreskin wrapped the plumb-shaped head of his cock in what looked like a luscious grape leaf of wrinkly flesh. The sight of it only gave me more to think about laying next to my snoring, sexy "cousin" in the dark of every night after that!

We trained seriously those first couple of weeks. There was little else to do, really. I'd marvel at Carlos as he scarfed down four or five peanut butter sandwiches and a quart of milk at a sitting, but then again he'd force me to chug-a-lug gallons of those crash weight-gain drinks on top of Nilda's daily Latin banquets of rice and beans, morsilla, chuletas, bistec criollos and two bottles of Malta India per meal. In a matter of days, we put on several more pounds, and I thought we were looking pretty good.

Nestor had his own thoughts on the subject of my new, bigger appetite, though. He would grin while lifting my T-shirt and patting the extra flesh gathering on my sides with the palm of his hand. "You got to work harder and don't eat too much, my man!" he'd coach in his sweet, broken English. "The ladies of Puerto Rico will get turn off if they see you get a fat stomach."

One night when Carlos and I were hanging out with a crowd of village teens at the bottom of the hill, I noticed some of the older girls kept glancing over at us and smiling while they spoke Spanish at a rapid clip. They were all dressed in tight jeans and frayed old button-down work shirts, thready shirt-tails hanging over plump, pouty asses, sleeves rolled to their forearms against the cool evening breeze. Carlos, his favorite Playero T-shirt draped over the antenna of the old Ford we were leaning against, folded his thick arms over his big bare chest, grinned, and started joking back at them. They laughed as he turned to me and pulled me away from the car, lifting my arms slightly, as if to show me off as he spoke.

"What's goin' on?" I said, enjoying all the sudden attention as the rest of the crowd looked our way.

"They say you are-" Carlos dropped his gaze to my middle, his smile widening with mischief. Then he looked to one of the girls, a sexy green-eyed brunette named Iris, and said, "Como se dice 'gordo' en ingles?"

The crowd of girls shrieked with delight at Carlos's efforts to explain. They clapped their hands and came over to us. Iris spoke to me, her red lips smiling broadly and she teased me in broken English:

"Carlos is telling you that the girls here are notice that you are in Puerto Rico only two week," eyes sparkling, she bit her lip and made a gesture indicating roundness just above the waistband of her jeans, "and we see you are getting a fat belly already!"

She squealed and lay her hands delicately on the over-nourished source of everyone's amusement. I must have blushed a deep shade of red, 'cause about six girls nearly burst their blouses with laughter. Nestor had been right on the money about these neighborhood girls. They watch you like starving hawks!

The pretty Puerto Rican girls gathered close around me, their hands sliding around my soft waist, their fingers poking into my belly through my ribbed T-shirt, pinching me as if I had been chosen to be the main course in tomorrow night's dinner. They were taking enormous glee in my mortified embarrassment.

I'd never been so much as pleasingly plump in all my life! But there I was, pounds of voluptuous flesh hiding my tight belly muscles, forming a soft smile that was pushing out over the button of my low-slung jeans. I'd been a handsome missionary, lulled into an erotic stupor by the friendly locals, only to realize I'd been tricked into being fattened for the kill and suddenly dropped like a tasty dumpling into a boiling pot of vegetables by what was turning out to be a hungry tribe of man-eating jungle girls. Well, I was determined to pull my dear cousin, my giggling training buddy Carlos, into the stew right along with me:

"And what about mi primo ?" my fingers easily found the roll of flesh that I'd noticed starting to bulge over the side of my cousin's jeans sometime last week. It was nice and plushy now, a sign that just like me, he'd started to enjoy lazing around slurping on mangoes more than working his body with weights and sit-ups. "Carlos is getting fat too, huh? Puttin' on the love handles?"

"Ah, no, no, no, mi amor," laughed Iris, wagging one of her wildly painted fingernails in my face. "It's okay for Carlos to grow fat por que he already has a girlfriend. It is not okay for you to become a fat boy here because the girls will be not liking it, and you won't get a girlfriend."

This was the first I'd heard about Carlos's girlfriend, but I was too flustered to let it sink in. I had to make a great comeback:

"And would you be my girlfriend?" I put on my most devilish grin.

"Ayyy, que chulo!" she cried, and everybody got hysterical. She slipped her hands around me and followed a kiss to my cheek with a playful bite. "Te come todo todito."

I guess I'd won them over, because the girls hung out with us the rest of the night, flirting with me and Carlos, playing with his big biceps and his St.

Christopher medallion, kissing us and inspecting our muscles with their fingertips, forcing us to compare our bodies and teasing us nonstop about how fat we were letting ourselves get.

Sometimes Carlos would draw me near him and put his arm around my waist, like he was proud of me. Like he was proud of his handiwork. He'd lean into me as he spoke in that strong soft Spanish voice of his, taking the meaty pad of flesh at my side from under my T-shirt and absently, tenderly squeezing it between his powerful fingers. I wanted to grab that perfect Latin face and kiss his lips right there. I wondered whether the girls noticed how hard my cock was through my jeans...

It hadn't rained at all for the first fifteen days of my stay, and one day Tio Raul told me and Carlos that we couldn't use up any more water. We'd have to pee out back, and take showers together. Carlos took this in stride, but I almost had a heart attack. Anyway, that afternoon, after a tremendous workout, we sat on the mocassina sunning ourselves, sucking on sweet canepas and watching the neighborhood girls walk up and down the hill below us. I'd been resisting the canepas, because I knew how fattening they were. But Carlos insisted we have as many of them as we could eat. Canepas would make us gain weight, he explained, and we needed the pounds for our work-outs.

Those were his orders. And the strange little pulpy things did taste good...

Nilda and Raul had gone shopping and we'd decided to waste some time teaching each other dirty words in our native tongues. Carlos slouched in his chair, holding the small round fruit in his fingers, beaming his radiant smile at me whenever I got one of his bad words right. He sucked on the pulp and smiled, sucked and smiled. His muscles seemed to be throbbing in the hot sun. A vein beat warmly from under the warm flesh of his neck, down the glossy flat plane of his right pec. His torso looked full and ripe, that once concave belly of his looking well-nourished and full. The flesh between his pecs and groin had swelled up some, pushing over the elastic of his shorts. This added beefiness gave him a carnal quality I'd never seen in him before.

Carlos leaned over lustily and proclaimed the latest amply endowed passerby "biscocha," which meant she looked like a piece of cake, but sounded a lot more filthy in Spanish.

"What kind of taste do you have?" I scolded him, and chucked one of my pulpy half-eaten fruits at his bare chest. "Her butt's way too big!"

"Fuck you!" he laughed, and threw one back at me. It splattered wetly on my neck, and we proceeded to pelt one another with sticky orange canepas for the next ten minutes.

Next thing I knew, we were in the shower together dancing around under the tepid water, naked as bucks in heat. Long, thick and semi-hard as usual, my cousin's uncut dick bobbed between his hairy legs and brushed against my thighs whenever he turned to grab the soap or adjust the tap. Every so often, he'd move to the slotted window high over the tub, stand on his tiptoes, and peer out into the dusty daylight. He was looking for that girl, that slice of biscocha, but I couldn't have cared less.

His ass was perfect. Shimmering with droplets of water, it was strong, lean and muscular. His legs were coated with black hair that rose into thick tufts at his groin and up the crack of that beautiful behind before turning into dark peach fuzz from the waist up. I noticed that his lower back dipped in a bit, tilting his voluptuous hips and belly forward while thrusting his pouty ass back toward me, forming a sort of "S" shape out of his torso. Maybe it was this slight, sexy, distinctly Puerto Rican swayback that turned me on so much about him. My father had it, I had it, but boy did my cousin have it good.

Or maybe it was the weight he'd been putting on recently, all that hard muscle was being brown sugar coated with an ever plumpening layer of sleek flesh. I could see it better now than when we were sitting outside, now that I was standing so close to him. Between his firm chest and heavy thighs, a satiny cushion of savory belly meat had blossomed around his navel and pushed out over his hips. His tummy, fully relaxed now, hung out some and bulged over his groin. He was the fattest I'd ever seen him. He could no longer fit into the jeans he'd worn to pick me up at the airport, I was sure of it. I wanted to poke that soft, sweet pillow belly on Carlos and pinch his round cheeks, tell him he was getting chunky, tease him like he and the girls had teased me the other night.

Then I saw that his dick was starting to get hard.

"Come here! Look this!" Carlos slid his arm around my back and pulled me to the window. He held me tight, pulling me against his warm, wet body as he spoke excitedly. "There is a real hot girl for you, my friend."

Looking through the window down the hill at an angle, I could see a bikini-clad morena taking off her top and settling into a ratty lounge chair to sun herself. Her tits were nice, but she had a beer belly and her fat ass was squishing through the bottom of the seat.

"No accounting for taste," I mumbled.

"Ah?" said Carlos, his eyes transfixed. He'd placed his free hand between his stiffening cock and the tiled wall of the stall and pressed himself into the palm. He kept his other arm around me, absently kneading the firm, rounded flesh up and down my side with his long fingers. I was so close to him, standing there in the shower, that I could smell the sweet canepa juice on his lips, the sweaty, masculine musk of his hairy armpits.

"She's good," he whispered through the dizzying steam, now toying with the healthy flap of wrinkly foreskin on top of his big dick. "Good to fuck her."

Suddenly, my cousin's nipple was in my mouth and I was licking it and pulling it between my teeth. I slid my hands around his soft waist and kneeled there in the tub at his feet, kissing and licking his body. He was silent. I half-expected to get smacked up the side of the head. When I finally dared to look up at his face, I saw him through the warm spray of the shower, grinning down at me, his eyes sparkling. His long hands grabbed me by the sides of my head and drew me into his abdomen, rubbing my face into its edible softness.

Then, taking me by the hair, he pushed his tremendous hard cock right into my lips, that fat, red cockhead emerging from its foreskin to force itself against my clenched teeth.

"Tomalo," his command was warm but firm. "Tomalo, hijo. Comelo, nene."

I had never sucked dick before. Hell, I'd pretty much always thought I was a straight boy. But that cock on my cousin Carlos, it was so big and beautiful I had to have it. Besides, he was using that sexy, macho voice of his.

Throaty and silky, it echoed off the tiles as the water ran down over us, telling me to take it down, like I was his son, his little boy, and he was the Popi I'd never really had. He said it as if he was holding a spoonful of vegetables in front of my petulent lips, forcing me to put my mouth around it whether I liked it or not, because it was "good for me."

"Tomalo!"

That eight inch cock of his filled up my mouth and throbbed inside of it, shocking me with its aliveness, forcing pre-cum to drool out of my own big dick. I tried to relax my throat to take more of it down, and before long I had him moaning and pulling my wet hair.

Within minutes he was trembling, filled with lust, and my heart was pounding at how great I was making this hot young man feel. Then I felt his hands on me, forcing me up and around, his dick popping out of my hungry mouth. I didn't know what was going on. He was handling me so roughly, deliberately, he was almost hurting me.

My arms were brought up to hold onto a washcloth rack, and I was now facing away from him. He was spreading my legs, leaving my ass to stick up high in the air. For a second, nothing happened, but then I felt something wet and slippery run right up against my butthole. Instinctively, I tightened up.

"Cojelo suave, nene," said Carlos. "Take it easy."

With those words, I knew exactly what he meant, and relaxed. I wanted this guy. I wanted him real bad, and I loved it that he wanted me right now. He slid his hand around me and grabbed my dick, squeezing it, sending thrills of pleasure into my belly. Then he pushed his big uncut meat into my soaped up asshole and slowly forced his way deeper and deeper.

My eyes bulged! I groaned a strangled cry before his hand covered my mouth and he told me, "Shhh!" He took hold of my dick again and started jerking me off as he pumped my ass. I felt him behind me, a big, macho, Puerto Rican animal who had mounted me and wouldn't get off till he got satisfaction.

Before long, he was slamming it to me, grabbing me by my budding love handles, squeezing them, making me grit my teeth and gasp with pleasure.

Something cut loose in my cock and I started firing my load big-time against the moist tiles. Two weeks worth of creamy cum shot from my balls into the air, tossing me into the throws of ecstasy. My head was spinning so hard I began to lose my grip, but that was okay with Carlos. He was almost done.

Before I knew it, I was on my knees again, my cousin's huge cock having slipped from deep within my ass to wave, still-hard, in my face. I grabbed it and pumped. In seconds, Carlos started growling curse words in Spanish, and five hot jets of pearly white cum shot out of his dick to splatter into my face. I wanted to shout with joy!

But then came a knock at the bathroom door!

"What is going on in there?" It was Tio Raul, back from the supermarket. I almost died.

"Salvajamos el agua, Popi," said Carlos, the picture of serenity, his index finger suddenly planting a firm warning into the soft flesh of my slightly bulging belly.

"Yeah," I agreed, seeing my future in a whole new light. "We're saving water!"

It had been almost three weeks since I'd come to visit my Dad, and there was still no sign of him. They told me a tropical storm that had hit the east side of the island had set his work back another week or so. I would have been totally pissed off if it weren't for how much attention Carlos was paying me. We'd become friends. He was like the older brother I'd never had.

The sexy, totally hot older brother I could have only wished for!

Cristina, Carlos's girlfriend, returned from Ponce at the end of my third week in Vega Baja. She was dark and lushly gorgeous, with ruby red lips and shimmering black hair that fell over her shoulders in thick ringlets. There were round, voluptuous curves to her tits and ass, making her easily the most fuckable girl in the pueblo. She was cool towards me at first, but, despite ourselves, pretty soon we were having long conversations, hanging out together, and clowning around like sister and brother.

I could see why Carlos really loved Cristina: she was sharp and full of mischief, a spirited extrovert to offset his quiet, brooding machismo. She was a sex-pot with some brains, so it was hard for me to hate her. Besides, I think she caught on right away that I had a devastating crush on her boyfriend, and it seemed to cause her no end of delight.

Carlos loved his basketball, a hell of a lot more than Cristina and I did, and one night in the living room Cristina decided to play a little game of her own. Aunt Nilda and Tio Raul were out playing bingo, and wouldn't be back for hours. We were all slightly buzzed on beer, Nestor and I sprawled on a love seat, and Carlos spread out on the couch. He was laying in Cristina's lap, his head turned away to face the TV set across the room. Cristina had been absently rubbing his beefy chest through his thin, white T-shirt (it had a stain on it from where he'd dripped some of his huge dinner's salsa de tomate ), and I'd been transfixed by the sight.

At the next commercial she turned and smiled when caught me staring at what she was doing. Carlos remained equally absorbed in the go-go dancers and flying Don Q bottles as he was in his baloncesto superior. Wrinkling her nose mischievously, her soft tongue protruding slightly between smiling lips, Cristina began to trace the lines of Carlos's body with a nonchalant fingertip. She'd been teasing him all week about all those the pounds he'd put on while she was away (her pet name for him this week was "Gordito"), but I could tell she really adored it. Her hands were always all over him.

Slowly, she pulled up his T-shirt, tugging gently to free it from the tightness of his jeans. Between the thready hem and the worn denim waistband, a dark quarter moon of his stomach was revealed. The tawny manflesh of his belly was forming an ever-thickening, plushy cushion over his lower abdominals, a ripeness that was now easily pushing out over the tightness of his jeans. She poked it, admiring how the soft flesh gave under her sharp nail, like a juicy roast cooked to perfection and ready to be basted.

Carlos still looked sexy, fantastic even, but if he didn't watch out he was going to wind up on Cristina's dinner menu, I mused, fattened into one of those butterball Latino men forced to clean his plate every night by his foxy wife, who then turned around and flirted with the young, hot-looking salseros at the shopping center.

Cristina gazed at me as she rubbed Carlos's belly in smooth, even circles, soothing him, making him drowsy, turning him on a little. A moment later, she reached over with both hands and opened the button of his jeans to make him more comfortable. I'd watched the two of them do this in order to finish eating some of Nilda's bigger banquets. Their bellies would pull their T-shirts taught, slowly rolling forward as they stuffed themselves. Though I'd always wanted to, I'd been too embarrassed to do the same.

Still laying there watching TV, he let her do this, his T-shirt hiked above his navel, his sumptuous middle now free to swell out a bit more. To my growing delight, Carlos's belly actually forced his zipper wide open, leaving an expanse of rounded manflesh nearly four inches across between the button and buttonhole on his jeans! His cock, of course, had done some bloating itself, and seemed just about to pop out of the taught denim.

Carlos seemed perfectly comfortable under her probes and playful teasings, as if it was his destiny to allow his hot, muscular body to grow soft and contented in the arms of one of the sexiest Puerto Rican girls alive. In fact, each pound he gained seemed to be a source of pleasure to these women.

Each day since Cristina's return, she and Nilda would force Carlos onto the bathroom scale. As the numbers crept steadily higher, pushing closer and closer to that major 200 pound mark. I couldn't help but feel they had some ulterior motive, as if this were some kind of bizarre pre-marital ritual. Or as if the size of added bellyfat gave Cristina status with her cheerfully ogling girlfriends. After all, the flesh on his body was little more then meat and muscle, there to be nourished, cultivated, fattened and ultimately enjoyed by women, and Carlos knew this. Nilda, Cristina, Iris and the girls--even I treated him like a god, gorging him on home-cooked meals, watching each morsel of food pass between those sexy, kissable lips; squeezing him into tight clothes at the plaza so we could tease him, admiring his progress all the same; stroking him, praising him, letting him fuck us when ever he wanted it. What was a set of love handles and a growing beer belly but more of sexy Carlos to tease and cherish, especially when the shoulders were so broad, the biceps so thick, the chest so deep and the cock so big? The softer edges and fattening gut did little or nothing to diminish the package of hot machismo that was my cousin Carlos.

Flushed and half-dead with embarrassment, I nervously looked toward Nestor.

To my surprise, his long, sexy fingers were absently stroking the growing mound of his own crotch! He was smiling at Cristina and had to be just about as turned on as I was!

Taking note of the effect her handiwork was having on all three of us guys, Cristina leaned down and whispered into Carlos's ear. Whatever she said did the trick, because in the next five minutes all four of us were piled on the bed in Carlos's room, and Nestor and I were watching Cristina peel Carlos the rest of the way out of his T-shirt and jeans.

"Vamos, gordito, I want to see how my little fat boy looks in just his underwears," she grinned. "Y los playeros, tambien."

Before long, Nestor, Carlos and I were comparing our bodies for her. We were posing, flexing, and making muscles for her in that sweltering little bedroom, like eager school kids trying to impress the prettiest girl in the class. She was merciless with Carlos, poking him in his fat belly with her painted fingernails and teasing him in Spanish about how chubby he'd gotten; that is, until she set her sights on me!

Carlos won easily, of course. His body was in its top form, despite the extra of weight he'd put on. He was prime beef from his strong chin and hairy pecs, down to his fur covered ass, round as globes and hard as stone. Cristina rewarded him with hot, wet kisses all over his body.

How me and Nestor cracked up! Cristina's kisses left glossy red lipstick marks all over Carlos's wriggling, writhing, slightly chunky torso. When he suddenly pulled out the giant snake of his cock in an effort to shock her, she didn't blink an eye. She even left a shiny red lipstick ring around the bloated head of his flesh-coated shaft!

Well, Nestor couldn't take it anymore and, sweating like a bandit, he pulled out his own monstrous pinga for a few quick jerks. Light-headed, all I could do was stand there and gaze at my cousin's and his buddy's hunky, macho bodies as their big, hard dicks rose hypnotically, and bobbed and swayed in front of them like dancing cobras.

Cristina then spoke in Spanish to Nestor. She asked him if he wanted to kiss her! After looking at his grinning (and slightly tipsy) amigo, he said "Claro que si." Of course, there was a condition: first Nestor had to make me kiss Carlos first! And not just once, either. I was supposed to kiss him everywhere she had kissed him and left lipstick!

Without hesitation, Nestor grabbed me, pinned my arms behind me, and shoved my face into Carlos's chest. They all laughed as my mouth was pushed onto one of his nipples.

"Suck it!" Cristina commanded.

I did as she told me, and lost control. My own thick cock sprang free of my briefs and shot up like and arrow to thump against my plump belly. It was all everybody needed to see!

Carlos, Cristina and Nestor laughed and started talking in Spanish really fast. I could barely understand them, but from the tone in their voices I guessed they intended to have a little fun with me. "There is a kiss mark on Carlos's culo, Nestor, put his mouth on that one!" said Cristina

She made her boyfriend turn around and backed him into me. I found my face plunged into his beautiful backside, and I took the opportunity to inhale deeply. He smelled musky, manly, and I was glad that Nestor was responding to this triguena's orders with so much vigor.

I pushed my tongue up into the rim of my primo's asshole, thinking that he would scream and stop this whole, crazy scene. But to my surprise he laughed and said in Spanish that a little dog was licking him up his behind.

"Maybe the doggy is hungry," said Cristina with a sly grin.

"Nestor, give the perrito something to eat. Let's turn Carlos around once more. There is another kiss mark in front!"

"No!" I shouted. I figured if I didn't struggle and put up some token resistance, the guys would rag me for the rest of the summer-even though we were 'drunk'. Struggling mightily against Nestor, I could feel his hot breath on my neck, and his huge prick rubbing up against my back as he pulled me around to Carlos's waiting meat. It had gotten so hard, the fat head of it was pushing through his entire length of foreskin. The lipstick around it looked like a bright red collar about the neck of an angry serpent.

"Go ahead, Popi," tempted Cristina, here eyes aglow, her fingernails scraping at the soft flesh at my sides. "Eat it. Que se come todito. Spanish food is good for you. It will make you fatter!"

Straining to get away only made my cousin and his friend try even harder to make me suck that gorgeous cock. It was dribbling pearly cum now, and every square inch of my flesh felt like it was on fire. Carlos had to grab my hair, and Nestor had to pry my jaws apart before I would take it into my mouth, but when I finally did...well, letting out a long, slow moan was all I could do to keep from devouring it whole!

"Tomalo, Nestor, tomalo, tomalo," said Carlos. He was telling Nestor to fuck me! To this day I thank my lucky stars that Nestor seemed to like being told what to do!

Before I knew it, tall, lanky, blackhaired young sex-god Nestor had fired a wad of hot spittle between my spread cheeks, and started drilling his nine inch monster where very few had been before. Grabbing my hips, he shoved himself more and more deeply into my aching bowels. It felt like a hot iron was being pumped into the pit of my belly. It only made me suck Carlos harder.

Skewered like a happily fattened pig between Carlos and Nestor's cocks, sucking and being fucked, jerking myself off all the while, I literally stopped thinking. All I could do was feel these hot, young Puerto Rican men using me for their pleasure, plunging themselves into my body. Looking back on it all, I guess you could say there wasn't a guilty bone in their tough, muscular (and in Carlos's case, gloriously overfed), swaybacked cuerpos.

They pumped me as thoroughly as any workout we'd ever had, jamming me until they started trembling and breathing hard. Then they pulled away from their respective holes and waved their cocks in my face.

"Mirame," said Nestor, the palm of his hand flying up and down the shaft of his dick. He stepped a few feet back from me, and let fly an amazing jet of sizzling cum. It hit me in the face from a yard away.

"!Ave Maria!" cried Cristina, and she gave the proud island boy a round of applause.

"!Sangano!" said Carlos, who then stepped back a full five feet from me.

Gasping, pulling at his huge dick like mad, he manage to shoot an arc of cum clear across the bedroom and onto my hungry lips. At that point, I had no choice but to release my own volley straight up into the air.

When some of my cum landed on Cristina's bare ankle, Carlos and Nestor made me lick it off before we all fell into a big, exhausted pile.

A few minutes later, as my primo and his sexy compadre dozed, Cristina slid over to give me a warm kiss, a deep affectionate poke into the soft of my Puerto Rico-fattened belly, and a knowing wink.

"Gracias, Cristina," I whispered with what must have been my most satisfied smile of the summer. "Muchisimas gracias..."

Can you catch fat?

Hey boys,

A good friend of mine pointed out this relevant article in the New York Times, and I thought it'd pass it on to you guys. It's a good relevant read. I'm gonna try to resume more regular updates, I promise. Read "Fat Factors" after the jump.

August 13, 2006
Fat Factors

By ROBIN MARANTZ HENIG
In the 30-plus years that Richard Atkinson has been studying obesity, he has always maintained that overeating doesn’t really explain it all. His epiphany came early in his career, when he was a medical fellow at U.C.L.A. engaged in a study of people who weighed more than 300 pounds and had come in for obesity surgery. “The general thought at the time was that fat people ate too much,” Atkinson, now at Virginia Commonwealth University, told me recently. “And we documented that fat people do eat too much — our subjects ate an average of 6,700 calories a day. But what was so impressive to me was the fact that not all fat people eat too much.”

One of Atkinson’s most memorable patients was Janet S., a bright, funny 25-year-old who weighed 348 pounds when she finally made her way to U.C.L.A. in 1975. In exchange for agreeing to be hospitalized for three months so scientists could study them, Janet and the other obese research subjects (30 in all) each received a free intestinal bypass. During the three months of presurgical study, the dietitian on the research team calculated how many calories it should take for a 5-foot-6-inch woman like Janet to maintain a weight of 348. They fed her exactly that many calories — no more, no less. She dutifully ate what she was told, and she gained 12 pounds in two weeks — almost a pound a day.

“I don’t think I’d ever gained that much weight that quickly,” recalled Janet, who asked me not to use her full name because she didn’t want people to know how fat she had once been. The doctors accused her of sneaking snacks into the hospital. “But I told them, ‘I’m gaining weight because you’re feeding me a tremendous amount of food!’ ”

The experience with Janet was an early inkling that traditional ideas about obesity were incomplete. Researchers and public-health officials have long understood that to maintain a given weight, energy in (calories consumed) must equal energy out (calories expended). But then they learned that genes were important, too, and that for some people, like Janet, this formula was tilted in a direction that led to weight gain. Since the discovery of the first obesity gene in 1994, scientists have found about 50 genes involved in obesity. Some of them determine how individuals lay down fat and metabolize energy stores. Others regulate how much people want to eat in the first place, how they know when they’ve had enough and how likely they are to use up calories through activities ranging from fidgeting to running marathons. People like Janet, who can get fat on very little fuel, may be genetically programmed to survive in harsher environments. When the human species got its start, it was an advantage to be efficient. Today, when food is plentiful, it is a hazard.

But even as our understanding of genes and behavior has become more refined, some cases still boggle the mind, like identical twins who eat roughly the same and yet have vastly different weights. Now a third wave of obesity researchers are looking for explanations that don’t fall into the relatively easy ones of genetics, overeating or lack of exercise. They are investigating what might seem to be the unlikeliest of culprits: the microorganisms we encounter every day.

One year ago, the idea that microbes might cause obesity gained a foothold when the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Louisiana created the nation’s first department of viruses and obesity. It is headed by Nikhil Dhurandhar, a physician who invented the term “infectobesity” to describe the emerging field. Dhurandhar’s particular interest is in the relationship between obesity and a common virus, the adenovirus. Other scientists, led by a group of microbiologists at Washington University in St. Louis, are looking at the actions of the trillions of microbes that live in everyone’s gut, to see whether certain intestinal microbes may be making their hosts fat.

If microbes help explain even a small proportion of obesity, that could shed light on a condition that plagues millions of Americans. Today 30.5 percent of the American public is obese; that is, nearly a third of Americans have a body-mass index over 30 (which for someone of Janet’s height is 186 pounds). The Department of Health and Human Services says obesity may account for 300,000 deaths a year, making it the second-most-common preventable cause of death after cigarette smoking. It’s been linked to various diseases: diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, gallbladder disease, sleep apnea, osteoarthritis and some cancers. “Individuals who are obese,” the department states on its Web site, “have a 50 to 100 percent increased risk of premature death from all causes, compared to individuals with a healthy weight.”

If microbes do turn out to be relevant, at least in some cases of obesity, it could change the way the public thinks about being fat. Along with the continuing research on the genetics of obesity, the study of other biological factors could help mitigate the negative stereotypes of fat people as slothful and gluttonous and somehow less virtuous than thin people. There is, of course, the risk of overemphasizing how potent the biological forces are that make some people prone to gaining weight. Biology sets the context, and that is critical, but obesity still boils down to whether a person eats too much or exercises enough. The danger in bending too far in the direction of a biological explanation — whether that explanation is genetics, infectobesity or some theory yet to be discovered — is that it could be misinterpreted, by fat and thin alike, as saying that behavior is irrelevant.



Jeffrey Gordon, whose theory is that obesity is related to intestinal microorganisms, has never had a weight problem. He’s a rangy man, and when I met him he was dressed in a plaid shirt and clean chinos stretching over long, long legs. He wanted to be an astronaut as a kid, but he was too tall, 6-foot-2 by the time he was a teenager, and he says that back then, NASA was training only astronauts short enough to squeeze into the little space capsules of the day. Gordon has a big friendly face and curly brown hair that make him look younger than 58. He was a competitive swimmer as a child, from age 9 through his undergraduate years at Oberlin, but these days he seems more nerd than athlete: he continually makes puns, for one thing, and he alludes frequently to “Star Trek.”

“Are you ready to begin our Vulcan mind meld?” he asked when he collected me at my hotel in St. Louis, where I went to meet him and his colleagues at the Center for Genome Sciences at Washington University, which he directs. In a way, I was indeed hoping for a mind meld; I wanted to find out everything Gordon knows about the bugs in our guts, and how those bugs might contribute to human physiology — in particular, how they might make some people fat.

Of the trillions and trillions of cells in a typical human body — at least 10 times as many cells in a single individual as there are stars in the Milky Way — only about 1 in 10 is human. The other 90 percent are microbial. These microbes — a term that encompasses all forms of microscopic organisms, including bacteria, fungi, protozoa and a form of life called archaea — exist everywhere. They are found in the ears, nose, mouth, vagina, anus, as well as every inch of skin, especially the armpits, the groin and between the toes. The vast majority are in the gut, which harbors 10 trillion to 100 trillion of them. “Microbes colonize our body surfaces from the moment of our birth,” Gordon said. “They are with us throughout our lives, and at the moment of our death they consume us.”

Known collectively as the gut microflora (or microbiota, a term Gordon prefers because it derives from the Greek word bios, for “life”), these microbes have a Star Trek analogue, he says: the Borg Collective, a community of cybernetically enhanced humanoids with functions so intertwined that they operate as a single intelligence, sort of like an ant colony. In its Borglike way, the microflora assumes an extraordinary array of functions on our behalf — functions that we couldn’t manage on our own. It helps create the capillaries that line and nourish the intestines. It produces vitamins, in particular thiamine, pyroxidine and vitamin K. It provides the enzymes necessary to metabolize cholesterol and bile acid. It digests complex plant polysaccharides, the fiber found in grains, fruits and vegetables that would otherwise be indigestible.

And it helps extract calories from the food we eat and helps store those calories in fat cells for later use — which gives them, in effect, a role in determining whether our diets will make us fat or thin.

In the womb, humans are free of microbes. Colonization begins during the journey down the birth canal, which is riddled with bacteria, some of which make their way onto the newborn’s skin. From that moment on, every mother’s kiss, every swaddling blanket, carries on it more microbes, which are introduced into the baby’s system.

By about the age of 2, most of a person’s microbial community is established, and it looks much like any other person’s microbial community. But in the same way that it takes only a small percentage of our genome to make each of us unique, modest differences in our microflora may make a big difference from one person to another. It’s not clear what accounts for individual variations. Some guts may be innately more hospitable to certain microbes, either because of genetics or because of the mix of microbes already there. Most of the colonization probably happens in the first few years, which explains why the microflora fingerprints of adult twins, who shared an intimate environment (and a mother) in childhood, more closely resemble each other than they do those of their spouses, with whom they became intimate later in life.

No one yet knows whether an individual’s microflora community tends to remain stable for a lifetime, but it is known that certain environmental changes, like taking antibiotics, can alter it at least temporarily. Stop the antibiotics, and the microflora seems to bounce back — but it might not bounce back to exactly what it was before the antibiotics.

In 2004, a group of microbiologists at Stanford University led by David Relman conducted the first census of the gut microflora. It took them a year to do an analysis of just three healthy subjects, by which time they had counted 395 species of bacteria. They stopped counting before the census was complete; Relman has said the real count might be anywhere from 500 species to a few thousand.

About a year ago, Relman joined with other scientists, including Jeffrey Gordon, to begin to sequence all the genes of the human gut microflora. In early June, they published their results in Science: some 78 million base pairs in all. But even this huge number barely scratches the surface; the total number of base pairs in the gut microflora might be 100 times that. Because there are so many trillions of microbes in the gut, the vast majority of the genes that a person carries around are more microbial than human. “Humans are superorganisms,” the scientists wrote, “whose metabolism represents an amalgamation of microbial and human attributes.” They call this amalgamation — human genes plus microbial genes — the metagenome.

Gordon first began studying the connection between the microflora and obesity when he saw what happened to mice without any microbes at all. These germ-free mice, reared in sterile isolators in Gordon’s lab, had 60 percent less fat than ordinary mice. Although they ate voraciously, usually about 30 percent more food than the others, they stayed lean. Without gut microbes, they were unable to extract calories from some of the types of food they ate, which passed through their bodies without being either used or converted to fat.

When Gordon’s postdoctoral researcher Fredrik Bäckhed transplanted gut microbes from normal mice into the germ-free mice, the germ-free mice started metabolizing their food better, extracting calories efficiently and laying down fat to store for later use. Within two weeks, they were just as fat as ordinary mice. Bäckhed and Gordon found at least one mechanism that helps explain this observation. As they reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2004, some common gut bacteria, including B. theta, suppress the protein FIAF, which ordinarily prevents the body from storing fat. By suppressing FIAF, B. theta allows fat deposition to increase. A different gut microbe, M. smithii, was later found to interact with B. theta in a way that extracts additional calories from polysaccharides in the diet, further increasing the amount of fat available to be deposited after the mouse eats a meal. Mice whose guts were colonized with both B. theta and M. smithii — as usually happens in humans in the real world — were found to have about 13 percent more body fat than mice colonized by just one or the other.

Gordon likes to explain his hypothesis of what gut microbes do by talking about Cheerios. The cereal box says that a one-cup serving contains 110 calories. But it may be that not everyone will extract 110 calories from a cup of Cheerios. Some may extract more, some less, depending on the particular combination of microbes in their guts. “A diet has a certain amount of absolute energy,” he said. “But the amount that can be extracted from that diet may vary between individuals — not in a huge way, but if the energy balance is affected by just a few calories a day, over time that can make a big difference in body weight.”

In another line of research, Gordon and his postdoctoral researcher Ruth Ley compared the microflora in two kinds of mice: normal-weight mice and mice with a genetic mutation that made them fat. Like humans, the mice had microflora consisting almost exclusively of two divisions of bacteria, the Bacteroidetes and the Firmicutes. But the proportions differed depending on whether the host was thin or fat. The normal-weight mice had more Bacteroidetes than Firmicutes in their gut microflora. The genetically obese mice had the opposite proportions: 50 percent fewer Bacteroidetes, 50 percent more Firmicutes.

It isn’t clear what the functional significance is of having more Firmicutes in the gut, nor whether the observed difference is a cause of the obesity or an effect. But Gordon wanted to see whether something comparable happened in humans of different weights. Over the past year, he and his colleagues have evaluated stool samples from 12 obese patients at a weight-loss clinic at Washington University, along with some normal-weight controls. They want to see if there’s such a thing as lean-type and obese-type microflora, and whether weight loss leads to a change in a person’s microbial community.

Gordon says he is still far from understanding the relationship between gut microflora and weight gain. “I wish you were writing this article a year from now, even two years from now,” he told me. “We’re just beginning to explore this wilderness, finding out who’s there, how does that population change, which are the key players.” He says it will be a while before anyone figures out what the gut microbes do, how they interact with one another and how, or even whether, they play a role in obesity. And it will be even longer before anyone learns how to change the microflora in a deliberate way.



You might think a microbial theory of obesity could change people’s views about the obese, perhaps even lessen the degree to which people think that obesity is the fat person’s own fault. But anti-fat sentiments seem to be deeply ingrained and resistant to change, as reflected in a rather unlikely place: New Scientist, a British magazine. In an article last year describing the work of Gordon and two groups of researchers in England who were also investigating the link between obesity and gut microflora, the author, Bijal Trivedi, was quite sympathetic to Gordon’s hypothesis. But the article — which is, remember, about a possible biological cause of obesity — was presented with a headline that still managed to depict obese people as lazy and gluttonous. It was called “Slimming for Slackers” and was illustrated with a fat man in a sweatsuit — the “slacker” of the title — sitting beside a partly eaten chocolate doughnut, waiting passively for thinness to arrive.

This is not to single out the New Scientist editors; they are just reflecting the generalized belief that there’s an element of laziness in anyone’s obesity. “Gluttony and sloth are two of the seven deadly sins,” said Ellen Ruppel Shell, author of “The Hungry Gene.” “We ascribe obesity to a character flaw.” This is what leads to the psychic pain of being fat, the social isolation of having a condition that everyone believes to be completely within your control — as if it were a voluntary purgatory, a case of willfully digging your own grave with your dinner fork.

I found that this attitude exists even among obese people, including a woman who was a research subject in Gordon’s clinical study. Joan was one of the obese patients at Washington University who sent Gordon stool samples as she lost weight (15 pounds over the course of a year, which she eventually gained back when she stopped dieting) so they could be tested for various microbes. She said she hasn’t been curious enough to try to find out about her microflora; she’s too busy, and besides, she already knows where to place the blame for her excess weight — not on a microbe but on herself. “I know that I’m not being obedient, I’m not using my body the way God intended,” said Joan, who asked me to refer to her only by her middle name. “I know how I’m supposed to eat, but I’m not having a healthy appetite, you know what I’m saying? I’m not wanting to be obedient.”

But it’s not about obedience — or at least not only about obedience. “The biochemistry of the body of the obese person is very different from that of a lean person,” said Richard Atkinson, Janet S.’s former physician. “If the obese person gets down to a lean person’s weight, their biochemistry is not the same.” Losing weight is hard, keeping it off is harder and, especially for some unfortunate souls, the body seems to work against itself in the struggle.



There’s another way that biological middlemen might be involved in obesity — in this case, not the gut microbes (mostly bacteria) with which we co-exist but the viruses and other pathogens that occasionally infect us and make us ill. This is the subspecialty that is being called infectobesity.

The idea of infectobesity dates to 1988, when Nikhil Dhurandhar was a young physician studying for his doctorate in biochemistry at the University of Bombay. He was having tea with his father, also a physician and the head of an obesity clinic, and an old family friend, S. M. Ajinkya, a pathologist at Bombay Veterinary College. Ajinkya was describing a plague that was killing thousands of chickens throughout India, caused by a new poultry virus that he had discovered and named with his own and a colleague’s initials, SMAM-1. On autopsy, the vet said, chickens infected with SMAM-1 revealed pale and enlarged livers and kidneys, an atrophied thymus and excess fat in the abdomen.

The finding of abdominal fat intrigued Dhurandhar. “If a chicken died of infection, having wasted away, it should be less fat, not more,” he remembered thinking at the time. He asked permission to conduct a small experiment at the vet school.

Working with about 20 chickens, Dhurandhar, then 28, infected half of them with SMAM-1. He fed them all the same amount of food, but only the infected chickens became obese. Strangely, despite their excess fat, the infected obese chickens had low levels of cholesterol and triglycerides in their blood — just the opposite of what was thought to happen in humans, whose cholesterol and triglyceride levels generally increase as their weight increases. After his pilot study in 1988, Dhurandhar conducted a larger one with 100 chickens. It confirmed his finding that SMAM-1 caused obesity in chickens.

But what about humans? With a built-in patient population from his clinic, Dhurandhar collected blood samples from 52 overweight patients. Ten of them, nearly 20 percent, showed antibody evidence of prior exposure to the SMAM-1 virus, which was a chicken virus not previously thought to have infected humans. Moreover, the once-infected patients weighed an average of 33 pounds more than those who were never infected and, most surprisingly, had lower cholesterol and triglyceride levels — the same paradoxical finding as in the chickens.

The findings violated three pieces of conventional wisdom, Dhurandhar said recently: “The first is that viruses don’t cause obesity. The second is that obesity leads to high cholesterol and triglycerides. The third is that avian viruses don’t infect humans.”

Dhurandhar, now 46, is a thoughtful man with a head of still-dark hair. Like Gordon, he has never been fat. But even though he is so firmly in the biological camp of obesity researchers, he ascribes his own weight control to behavior, not microbes; he says he is slim because he walks five miles a day, lifts weights and is careful about what he eats. Being overweight runs in his family; Dhurandhar’s father, who still practices medicine in India, began treating obese patients because of his own struggle to keep his weight down, from a onetime high of 220.

Slim as he is, Dhurandhar nonetheless is sensitive to the pain of being fat and the maddening frustration of trying to do anything about it. He takes to heart the anguished letters and e-mail he receives each time his research is publicized. Once, he said, he heard from a woman whose 10-year-old grandson weighed 184 pounds. The boy rode his bicycle until his feet bled, hoping to lose weight; he was so embarrassed by his body that he kept his T-shirt on when he went swimming. The grandmother told Dhurandhar that the virus research sounded like the answer to her prayers. But the scientist knew that even if a virus was to blame for this boy’s obesity, he was a long way from offering any real help.

In 1992, Dhurandhar moved his wife and 7-year-old son to the United States in search of a lab where he could continue his research. At first, because infectobesity was so far out of the mainstream, all he could find was unrelated work at North Dakota State University. “My wife and I gave ourselves two years,” he recalled. “If I didn’t find work in the field of viruses and obesity in two years, we would go back to Bombay.”

Dhurandhar’s battle against the conventional wisdom was reminiscent of the struggle a decade earlier of two Australian scientists, who were also proposing an infectious cause for a chronic disease, in their case, a bacterium that causes ulcers. The Australians were met with skepticism at first, but eventually they accumulated enough evidence to make it hard to ignore the connection between ulcers and the bacterium, Helicobacter pylori. It helped that one of them, Barry J. Marshall, dramatically swallowed a pure culture of H. pylori — and promptly came down with symptoms of gastritis, the first stage of an ulcer. (The H. pylori story ended with the ultimate vindication: Marshall and his collaborator, J. Robin Warren, won the Nobel Prize in 2005.)

One month before his self-imposed deadline in 1994, Dhurandhar received a job offer from Richard Atkinson, who was then at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Atkinson, always on the lookout for new biological explanations of obesity, wanted to collaborate with Dhurandhar on SMAM-1. But the virus existed only in India, and the U.S. government would not allow it to be imported. So the scientists decided to work with a closely related virus, a human adenovirus. They opened the catalogue of a laboratory-supply company to see which one of the 50 human adenoviruses they should order.

“I’d like to say we chose the virus out of some wisdom, out of some belief that it was similar in important ways to SMAM-1,” Dhurandhar said. But really, he admitted, it was dumb luck that the adenovirus they started with, Ad-36, turned out to be so fattening.

By this time, several pathogens had already been shown to cause obesity in laboratory animals. With Ad-36, Dhurandhar and Atkinson began by squirting the virus up the nostrils of a series of lab animals — chickens, rats, marmosets — and in every species the infected animals got fat.

“The marmosets were most dramatic,” Atkinson recalled. By seven months after infection, he said, 100 percent of them became obese. Subsequently, Atkinson’s group and another in England conducted similar research using other strains of human adenovirus. The British group found that one strain, Ad-5, caused obesity in mice; the Wisconsin group found the same thing with Ad-37 and chickens. Two other strains, Ad-2 and Ad-31, failed to cause obesity.

In 2004, Atkinson and Dhurandhar were ready to move to humans. All of the 50 strains of human adenoviruses cause infections that are usually mild and transient, the kind that people pass off as a cold, a stomach bug or pink eye. The symptoms are so minor that people who have been infected often don’t remember ever having been sick. Even with such an innocuous virus, it would be unethical, of course, for a scientist to infect a human deliberately just to see if the person gets fat. Human studies are, therefore, always retrospective, a hunt for antibodies that would signal the presence of an infectious agent at some point in the past. To carry out this research, Atkinson developed — and patented — a screening test to look for the presence of Ad-36 antibodies in the blood.

The scientists found 502 volunteers from Wisconsin, Florida and New York willing to be screened for antibodies, 360 of them obese and 142 of them of not obese. Of the leaner subjects, 11 percent had antibodies to Ad-36, indicating an infection at some point in the past. (Ad-36 was identified relatively recently, in 1978.) Among the obese subjects, 30 percent had antibodies— a difference large enough to suggest it was not just chance. In addition, subjects who were antibody-positive weighed significantly more than subjects who were uninfected. Those who were antibody-positive also had cholesterol and triglyceride readings that were significantly lower than people who were antibody-negative — just as in the infected chickens — a finding that held true whether or not they were obese.

Were fat people just more prone to infection? Probably not, because the scientists also screened for antibodies to two other strains of adenovirus, and there was no difference between those who were obese and those who were not. Could the differences be explained by genes instead of by viruses? Probably not, because the scientists controlled for genes in a follow-up study that involved 90 pairs of twins. In the twin study, they found 20 identical-twin pairs who were “discordant” for antibodies to Ad-36, meaning one twin had been exposed to the virus and the other twin had not. In the discordant pairs, the infected twin tended to be fatter, with an average of almost 2 percent more body fat (29.6 percent versus 27.5 percent) than the uninfected twin — even though they shared exactly the same genes.

If Ad-36 is a cause of obesity, Atkinson says, you’re more likely to catch it from a newly infected and still-contagious thin person than from someone who has already gained weight because of its effects. Exactly what the virus does to create this kind of long-term perturbation is still being investigated. In a paper published last year in The International Journal of Obesity, Atkinson and Dhurandhar, along with five of their colleagues, presented evidence for how Ad-36 might affect fat cells directly, “leading to an increased fat-cell number and increased fat-cell size.”

As for the other pathogens implicated in infectobesity — nine in all — certain viruses are known to impair the brain’s appetite-control mechanism in the hypothalamus, as happens in some cases of people becoming grossly obese after meningitis. Scientists also point to a commonality between fat cells and immune-system cells, although the exact significance of the connection is unclear. Immature fat cells, for instance, have been shown to behave like macrophages, the immune cells that engulf and destroy invading pathogens. Mature fat cells secrete hormones that stimulate the production of macrophages as well as another kind of immune-system cell, T-lymphocytes.

Another line of investigation in the field of infectobesity concerns inflammation, a corollary of infection. Obese people have higher levels of two proteins related to inflammation, C-reactive protein and interleukin-6. This may suggest that an infectious agent has set off some sort of derangement in the body’s system of fat regulation, making the infected person fat. A different interpretation is not about obesity causation but about its associated risks. Some scientists, including Jeffrey Gordon’s colleagues at Washington University, are trying to see whether the ailments of obesity (especially diabetes and high blood pressure) might be caused not by the added weight per se, but by the associated inflammation.

Infectobesity has its critics, among them Stephen Bloom, a researcher at Imperial College London. Bloom said that if he were working at a research agency, he’d give money for studies into the viral causes of obesity, just in case there’s something there. But he said he wouldn’t put the theory into a medical-school textbook just yet. His main objection, he said, is that “I don’t think we need that explanation, since we have a perfectly good other explanation.” Like Dhurandhar and Atkinson, Bloom suspects that obesity has a biological cause — but rather than turning to gut microflora or adenovirus infection for an explanation, he is partial to what he calls “the lazy-greedy gene” hypothesis, his slightly disparaging shorthand for what is more generally known as the thrifty genotype.

The thrifty-genotype hypothesis holds that there was, once upon a time, an adaptive advantage to being able to get fat. Our ancestors survived unpredictable cycles of food catastrophes by laying down fat stores when food was plentiful, and using up the stores slowly when food was scarce. The ones who did this best were the ones most likely to survive and to pass on the thrifty genotype to the next generation. But this mechanism evolved to get through a difficult winter — and we’re living now in an eternal spring. With food so readily available, thriftiness is a liability, and the ability to slow down metabolism during periods of reduced eating (a k a dieting) tends to create a fatter populace, albeit a more famine-proof one.

Bloom, by the way, does not give much credence to Dhurandhar’s analogy between the Ad-36-obesity connection and the recent history of H. pylori and ulcers — even though each started out looking like just another wacky idea. “There are so many crazy theories,” he said. “But just because one in a hundred turns out to be correct doesn’t mean all the crazy theories are correct.”



Obesity has turned out to be a daunting foe. Many of us are tethered to bodies that sabotage us in our struggle to keep from getting fat, or to slim down when we do. Microbes might be one explanation. There might be others, as outlined in June in a paper in The International Journal of Obesity listing 10 “putative contributors” to obesity, among them sleep deprivation, the increased use of psychoactive prescription drugs and the spread of air-conditioning.

But where does this leave us, exactly? Whatever the reason for any one individual’s tendency to gain weight, the only way to lose the weight is to eat less and exercise more. Behavioral interventions are all we’ve got right now. Even the supposedly biological approach to weight loss — that is, diet drugs — still works (or, more often, fails to work) by affecting eating behavior, through chemicals instead of through willpower. If it turns out that microbes are implicated in obesity, this biological approach will become more direct, in the form of an antiviral agent or a microbial supplement. But the truth is, this isn’t going to happen any time soon.

On an individual level and for the foreseeable future, if you want to lose weight, you still have to fiddle with the energy equation. Weight still boils down to the balance between how much a particular body needs to maintain a certain weight and how much it is fed. What complicates things is that in some people, for reasons still not fully understood, what their bodies need is set unfairly low. It could be genes; it could be microbes; it could be something else entirely.

Janet S. is one such person. Thirty years after her obesity surgery, 170 pounds lighter than when she started, she still needs to restrict her food intake to keep from gaining it all back.

“I definitely have to diet — damn it, I should have a pass on that, don’t you think?” said Janet, now 55, a human-resources administrator in Southern California, married and with a teenage daughter who is tall and slender. Even with the surgery, and even maintaining a weight that is borderline obese (at least according to the government definition; Janet weighs 180 pounds, plus or minus 15, meaning her body-mass index hovers around the magic number of 30), she can never enjoy food with complete and carefree abandon.

This is typical of people who have lost weight — not only a lot of weight, as Janet has, but even a little weight. According to Rudolph Leibel, an obesity researcher at Columbia University who was involved in the discovery of the first human gene implicated in obesity, if you take two nonobese people of the same weight, they will require different amounts of food depending on whether or not they were once obese. It goes in precisely the maddening direction you might expect: formerly fat people need to eat less than never-fat people to maintain exactly the same weight. In other words, a 150-pound woman who has always weighed 150 might be able to get away with eating, say, 2,500 calories a day, but a 150-pound woman who once weighed more — 20 pounds more, 200 pounds more, the exact amount doesn’t matter — would have to consume about 15 percent fewer calories to keep from regaining the weight. The change occurs as soon as the person starts reducing, Leibel said, and it “is not proportional to amount of weight lost, and persists over time.”

For many people, then, losing weight and keeping the weight off requires a constant state of hunger — and when you’re hungry, you’re miserable. You think of nothing but food every moment of the day. All morning you think about lunch, all afternoon you think about dinner, and when you’re asleep, you dream of food.

Or, as Judith Moore put it in her memoir,

Current public-health messages deny this harsh reality. They make losing weight sound easy, just a simple matter of doing the math and applying some willpower. A pound of fat contains 3,500 calories, government documents say, and if you cut down a week’s worth of food intake or increase exercise by a total of 3,500 calories, then, voilà — you lose a pound. “To lose weight, you must use more energy than you take in,” states the Web site of the Office of the Surgeon General. “A difference of one 12-oz. soda (150 calories) or 30 minutes of brisk walking most days can add or subtract approximately 10 pounds to your weight each year.”

But if genes or viral infection or gut microflora are involved, then for some people 3,500 calories might not equal a pound of fat, and 150 fewer calories a day might not mean they’ll lose 10 pounds in a year. As scientists continue to investigate how obese people are different, we can only hope that a side benefit will be a more largehearted understanding of what it means to be fat and how hard it is to try to become, and to remain, less fat.

A more concrete benefit would be to develop ways to interfere with the action of the offending microbes. Atkinson, for one, foresees a day when Ad-36 antibody screening becomes as routine as cholesterol screening. He has a financial stake in making this happen; when he moved to Virginia two years ago, he started a company called Obetech to market his Ad-36 antibody test, for which he charges $450. But he said he has an altruistic motive as well. The people most likely to benefit from such testing, he said, are not fat people but thin people, whose infections are so recent that they haven’t yet begun to gain weight. But they are the least likely to pay to have it done without it being part of a routine checkup.

Based on animal studies, Atkinson assumes that people infected with Ad-36 have a better than even chance of becoming obese. “But if they watch their diet, and if they exercise, they can avoid it.” Further in the future, he said, there might be a way to administer antiviral drugs to infected individuals early enough to block the effect of Ad-36 on the fat cells.

Gordon, too, is hoping that his research will eventually lead to new strategies for treating obesity. It’s a long way off, he said, but it’s the beacon that keeps him and his colleagues working.

“How can you manipulate the microbial community to more broadly affect energy balance?” he asked, enumerating the research questions still to be tackled. “Can one size fit all, or can you match nutrition to the microbes in your gut?” After obese-type microflora are differentiated from lean-type, Gordon said, the next step would be what he calls “personalized nutrition” — matching diet to the digestive properties of each person’s unique microflora.

Such deliberate manipulation of the gut microflora is a long way off — years and years off, according to Gordon — but its possibility “is what this first phase of our work is underscoring, and we hope it will turn out to be an important tool in the fight against obesity.”

Robin Marantz Henig is a contributing writer to the magazine. Her last cover article was about the science of lie detection.

The Cruise

Originally posted at Finesse's old site (that has since been taken down), this story, who's author even I don't know, is really a solid read. It's straight, but we can look past that because of beautiful descriptions of the main character's growing heft. It's all first person, which is kind of different, and very fun. Read the whole thing after the jump.

The Cruise



author unknown





This is the story of how I gained weight, simple as that. It's a bit like one of those stories you read in women's magazines in doctors' waiting rooms--you know the ones--they tell the inspiring story of some woman who has lost the equivalent of a small child in weight, and because the reader's main curiosity is always "Well how did you get so damn big in the first place you greedy cow?" (especially if there's a before picture) the opening few paragraphs always give some lsme excuse as to how this woman came to double in size almost overnight.



Except my story is not quite like that. Firstly, I'm a man, and a young man at that--well, I'm only just 29. Secondly, there wasn't any great life crisis that led to me binge eating or losing control of my body. Thirdly, there is no second half to my story, no defining turning point, no apocalyptic bed breaking, and certainly no crash diet and resultant weight loss.



So why I am I telling you this? Well, maybe because it kind of fascinates me. It fascinates me how we look at fat people in society and how we judge them--like they're a separate species. A lazy, ignorant, indulgent other species. Slim people wander around eyeing them up and down and wondering "how did they get like that?" "Didn't they like grow out of one size of clothes and think ‘Hey, I must slow down a little on the eating here’." I know this partly because I used to be thin myself and partly because being a man rather than a woman, friends and relatives haven't been frightened of coming up to me in the past year or so and making similar comments to me as I've put weight on.



I've seen it from both sides; for most of my life, I've been slim and toned but for the past 18 months something happened to my body so insidiously that for most of the time I never even noticed it happen. Yes, that's right--I gained nearly 100 lbs and never really noticed how I changed in that time. Is it because I'm a man? I don't know, but read my story and you can judge for yourself.



18 months ago, I was 27 and didn't have a care in the world. I was working for a big firm in New York City. This is the place where greed is good. Lunch is for wimps, and money definitely makes the world go round.



I had a good job for my age and was earning a pretty good salary. I'd managed to get myself onto the expensive Manhattan property ladder with a nice apartment not far from work, which I share with my girlfriend of five years.



One day I came into the office to bad news. Our company was going to be bought by a much bigger corporation. It was almost a certainty that we would lose our jobs. The mood was subdued and soon after we were told, corridor gossip gave a strong indication that everyone was going to get out of there pretty quickly and find other jobs before the axe fell. But it was a pretty good company and I worked in a division that was going to be needed right up until the moment when the new business actually took over. Only a few days later I was taken to one side by my boss.



"How are you feeling about the takeover?" he asked. I explained that I was a bit worried about the future, but to be honest, the reality of the situation had not kicked in by then. He continued "as you've probably guessed, we're going to be all out on our ears in 5 months or so, but that needn't be a bad thing for those that wait. You're going to be key in making sure that our business stays in good shape, and because of that, we've agreed that you, along with a few other key people, will receive an enhanced termination package when the deal is completed."



I could feel dollar signs appearing in my eyes like characters in a cartoon. The figure they had in mind was $150,000 and that was an offer that nobody my age could refuse. A deal was done and I signed on the dotted line only days later.



Well, they weren't wrong when they said I was crucial to the process. My workload shot up. I was going to the office earlier and earlier, struggling to find time to go out for lunch, and leaving work later and later. The money kept me going.



But there were sacrifices. Within a few weeks I realized I just hadn't made time to go to the gym at all--and I was almost religious in my approach to it until then. I felt guilty and made myself promises to go more often, but the workload increased and the promises came to nothing. I didn't realize it then (of course), but my eating patterns were changing also. Instead of a morning gym visit, I was taking an Egg McMuffin to my desk for breakfast. Rather than a big lunch, I was grabbing things to eat all day from the vending machine in the corridor. Finally, at the end of a long day, I was too tired to even think about cooking, and knowing that I was going to be able to afford anything I wanted, I was either eating out with my girlfriend or picking up a pizza or some Chinese to eat at home before I crashed into bed as early as possible, thoroughly exhausted.



The consequences were obvious but you must believe me when I say I never noticed at the time. My trim gym-trained 175 lbs and 6' frame grew to about 198 lbs. I guess that's not a lot over a six month period. I did notice that I was a little less fit than I had been and as my weight was gained all over (thighs and ass as well as belly), I didn't develop a huge belly or anything. My girlfriend never said a word about it, so the only prompt I received was when I noticed how my suit trousers were getting tight, especially when I sat down.



But 198 lbs isn't huge when you've been working out so I kind of drifted along. By the time it came time to leave work forever, no one had commented and I really had gained only about 23 lbs.



By this time, my gym membership for the year had lapsed and I decided not to renew it. It was expensive and besides I wasn't going to need it for another 4 months--I was going travelling!



My girlfriend and I had made the decision one night watching TV (and eating pizza—looking back, I guess the signs are easy to read)--and we'd use the money to give ourselves the holiday of a lifetime before settling back into hectic New York City life.



Traveling isn't quite the right word, though. To me at least, that word conjures up pre-university teens in self-conscious clothes hovering in strange towns clutching a copy of the Rough Guide and trying to ask for directions to the seediest part of town where a bed for the night costs less than $5.



That wasn't for us. I was 27, quite rich and successful, and I wanted some luxury after all the stress I'd been under, so we opted for a four month round the world cruise; no expense spared, luxury outside suite, full board buffet and dinner, great sporting facilities and docking in some of the most amazing places in the world. There was to be no sparing of expenses!



So we set off from New York City and within days we were in warmer climates and able to make use of the sundeck and pool. Well that was the idea. I had to wait until we'd docked in Bermuda three days later because rather embarrassingly I couldn't decently squeeze into any of the shorts I'd brought with me. When you're squeezing into your suits you don't realize that it's much harder to do the same with things that don't fasten---no one tells you that if you put a few pounds on the shorts won't even go past your thighs and over your ass, no matter how much you breathe in.



New shorts bought, it didn't take long to settle down and relax. The stops at the Azores and then other ports on the Mediterranean were almost an unwanted distraction such was the luxury we grew accustomed to on board. I'd had good intentions of using the well-equipped gym and getting back into my good habits, but to be honest, I found my first trip there such hard work and so stressful that I decided not to worry about it and just enjoy the holiday--the gym could wait until I got back--this was time to go easy on myself.



And go easy on myself I did. I'd never seen so much food. Breakfast and lunch were huge elaborate buffets that ran for about 40 feet and dinner in the evening was a lavish affair that you had to dress up for. It usually ran to 5 courses and took the form of leisurely multi-course meals of big portions that lasted for like three hours. It's almost as if they wanted you to gain weight. The evening meals got you used to sitting and eating for hours while in the daytime the limitless supply of tempting fresh food kept pushing back the limits of your stomach's capacity. There was also a midnight buffet, which was a mini-version of the breakfast and lunch extravaganzas, and snack bars open 24 hours a day, just in case any of the increasingly dedicated eaters suffered a stray hunger pang.



There were lots of knowing jokes and nods about this among the male passengers, who seemingly fretted less than their slim wives about letting out their belts after meals. Indeed I could almost feel that I was starting to challenge myself to see if I could eat more than the previous day--and with little else to do I would spend hours at the buffet perfecting the art.



It wasn't long before the new shorts I'd had to buy were experiencing the same problem as the old ones I'd had to discard. Seems were popped, stitching ripped, zippers burst open. When we made a stop in Alexandria I had to admit defeat and almost buy a whole new wardrobe just so I could get through a meal without having to undo my pants, and that was after only 3 weeks.



I was literally packing the weight on and I was starting to notice things change in my body but without ever putting all of the evidence together. More than once I got ready for dinner and bent down to put my shoes on to hear a loud rip from my trousers. I began to notice that my body seemed to jiggle independently of the steps I took as I went down stairs, and then soon when I simply walked on deck. I remember guessing after about a month that I must have put on about 10 lbs and thinking "well, that's not so bad, you're going to hit the gym anyway when you get back."



But it didn't stop there. While I fixed in my mind that on the whole holiday I'd probably gained twenty pounds at most, I was seriously deceiving myself. At almost every port, new clothes had to be bought to replace T-shirts that would ride up and expose my ever rounder pot belly, shirts that had had the buttons popped on them, belts that no longer went all the way around me, trousers which--if I could with much effort fasten the waist, I couldn't pull the zipper up, and shorts which I couldn't fit over my thighs and ass, much less attempt to fasten at the waist.



But still I kept eating--day in, day out, two hours at the buffet in the morning, three hours at lunch, and then the big dinner in the evening, with a final top-off at the midnight buffet. The more I ate, the hungrier I became as my capacity increased---and then there were the beers I was putting away in the evening, not having to worry about having a hangover the next day.



The only hangover I was getting was the one over my belt. I was getting seriously big, but strangely it felt good. I felt manly and powerful and was proud of my little belly. I say little belly because our room, rather wisely, didn't have more than a face mirror in it so I wasn't until I got home that I realized what I had done to myself.



Without any friends to kid me about my growing size, or any concerned relatives to point out that I was getting big, I ate myself around the world. I'd almost be sexually excited about going to the buffet, my round stomach growling with anticipation.



And so, the months on board passed. Eating, sleeping, and eating. Mouthful after mouthful I stuffed in my ever-fattening face; at dinner there salads laced with oil and mayonnaise; beef, pork, chicken, and fish, all served with rich sauces or gravy; creamed and buttered vegetables; biscuits and dinner rolls dripping with butter; tortes, cakes and all sorts of rich deserts. All the other meals, as well as the “open 24/7” snack bar, were the same. I was starting to shovel the food into my mouth. At dinner, I developed the art of using buttered pieces of dinner roll to sop up the rich sauces remaining in my plate. If I could have gotten away with licking the plates in public, I would have!



My girlfriend, having put on a few happy pounds herself, didn't want any attention being drawn to that, so she refrained from saying anything to me about my expanding figure.



I could see my face had fattened from the meager mirror in our cabin and I knew my waist had expanded some, but I didn't realize what my size was anymore because when I bought new clothes. I just tried things on until I found something that fit, without even checking the size. I guess I was in happy denial.



Nor were there any scales on board either--something to do with them not working on a surface that's moving such as the ship.



And so my midriff grew--a huge round paunch grew out in front of me, growing up as well as out and down until it met my chest, sagging and fat now from months of indulgence; once tight and trained, now bloated, puffy, and soft and heading south.



My ass, too, was now a fabulously large and round cushion for all this extra weight when I sat down, although I still actually didn't know this at the time because I still hadn't examined myself in a full length mirror.



That pleasure came, if I can call it that, when we returned. Tanned, happy, and (at least for me) decidedly well fed, we crashed back into our Manhattan apartment. The first shock came when I got up the next day to go out and buy milk and bread. My mouth started watering as I contemplated stopping at McDonald's for some sausage and egg Mcmuffins--or should it be sausage and egg Mcgriddles?--with a couple of cinnamon buns on the side to tide me over until I got home and my girlfriend could prepare my real breakfast. Without thinking, I went to the closet to put on some warm clothes (it was now winter). These were clothes I hadn't taken with me, and what's more they were getting snug before we left, remember.



Anyway, after many minutes of fruitless struggle, it slowly dawned on me just how big I'd become and with my jeans only halfway up my legs and my girlfriend still sleeping sounding, I shuffled into the hallway to look at myself in the full length mirror.



I was at once shocked and strangely excited by what I saw in the full length mirror. Reality was a shock! Standing opposite me in the mirror was a fat man. Big fat pillows of fat puffed up my chest where hard pectorals had once stood. A huge pendulous belly sagged swollen from my torso running into big rolls of soft fat around the sides.



Still in shock I turned sideways and shuffled out of the jeans now round my ankles. My ass had ballooned and now looked like two basketballs bouncing in my underwear. I ran my hands along my body, checking through touch that the image I was seeing in front of me was not some kind of weird distortion. My hands told me that what I saw in the mirror was real. My flab jiggled, quivered, and rippled as I ran my hands up from my belly to my chest and pinched the double chin of fat round my jowly face.



My god, I was huge! What had I done to myself? I stood there in shock and awe for what seemed like ages. I worried momentarily about what my girlfriend would say when she saw me so fat, before I realized that she'd seen me like this; she'd seen me GET like this…and she hadn't said a word.



With a deep sigh I waddled into the bathroom to face the bathroom scales. Despite the shock, I was experiencing strange feelings. I wasn't repulsed by my body in the way I would have expected to be if you had asked me a year earlier about how I'd feel if this happening to me. I was almost excited to find out just what the scales had to say and imagined the needle would swing round to about 215 lbs, but then I caught my reflection in the bathroom mirror again and revised the estimate to brace myself for the worst. “You're going to be nearly 225”, I said to myself and at the same moment stepped gingerly onto the scales and looked up to see my reflection while the needle settled into position and I looked down over the curve of my well-developed paunch.



My knees shuddered as my eyes settled on the dial, making the needle wobble again so that I was convinced that it was that shake that was giving the reading I was now seeing. I stiffened in order to stabilize the reading and looked down again.



263 lbs.—incredible! I'd put on more than 65 lbs in four months. I'd become an eating machine, guzzling through plate after plate after plate with no regard to my size, and this is what had happened. The slender gym-trained body had been buried beneath pounds and pounds of bloated, flabby fat.



By now, though, my thoughts were quickly diverted. I hadn't eaten since the night before and my original intention in getting out of bed was to find food, so I wandered into the bedroom quietly to find my old gym sweatpants and a large sweatshirt. I struggled to put them on, and was embarrassed to see how the sweatpants clung to my distended buttocks and huge thighs like a second skin, and the sweatshirt emphasized my sagging man boobs and deeply sunken bellybutton. They’d have to do if I wanted to get breakfast.



I think because my weight gain was so big and so sudden, friends, ex-colleagues, and relatives were too shocked or too embarrassed for me to mention my colossal weight increase the way most people will. Let's face it, I really had packed on the pounds.



Compared to my old self, I was a whale, and now I realized how big I was I began to notice other things which must have been there but I ignored… like how hard it was to tie my shoes, walk up 2 flights of stairs, walk quickly, run to catch a bus. The list goes on.



Venturing out three weeks later to buy a bigger suit so that I could start applying for new jobs I was by now not surprised to discover I had a 44" waist. It must have been only 42" when I got back, but to be honest, after I arrived home I lounged around the apartment, watching TV, always with a big plate of food balanced atop my bulging belly. I had plenty of my termination pay left; why seek a job until I really needed to? The day I finally got off my ever-widening, big fat behind to go looking for a new suit, I got on the scales again. They told me I was nudging 274 lbs already. My capacity for food was now much greater and what could have sustained me for a day previously could now barely pass for a starter.



Maybe because I was now waddling around like a true fat boy, it took longer to find a new job than I thought--3 months in fact, during which time my weight continued to rise. The suit I bought for interviews was no good for my first day in my new job at least. With many lazy days with only a fridge full of food and daytime TV and my computer for company, I'd manage to pack on another 50 lbs. The new suit I purchased to wear on my first day on the job had a 58" chest and 52" waist. The seat of the trousers had to be specially let out to accommodate my huge round ass. I was growing at an alarming rate now. Not surprising when I looked at what I was eating in a typical day. I had grown to love eating and the nice, satisfied feeling a full tummy gave me, so I ate my way through the day. In between meals, I was always snacking and munching on something tasty without even realizing what I was doing.



So in 18 months, I'd gained over 125 lbs. And I was happy. My sex life with my girlfriend (now soon to be my wife) had never been better. I think she secretly prefers me bigger which is weird but exciting. She's never tried to wean me onto healthy foods, and we've continued as before.



My gain has slowed down now, kind of leveled out, but I'm still getting bigger slowly. Right now I'm not far from 350 lbs and I have to go to a special shop for my suits, but I can afford it. Being measured for new suits is always an enlightening experience for me. Standing in the fitting room in my skintight boxer shorts, surrounded by mirrors which are angled to provide a complete view, gives me the perspective of my growing form which I never had when we were on the cruise. My broad shoulders, their width expanded by the flab on my upper arms; pillowy chest, with bulging, sagging former pectorals; ballooning paunch; lovehandles like thick truck tires wrapping around my back, topped by smaller rolls of fat; and plump thighs and calves are testimony to my ever-increasing appetite. Most amazing to me, the former gym addict, is my ass---two huge globular buttocks, jiggling, quivering, bobbing and moving from side to side within my stressed 4XL boxers as the tailor has me shift position to complete the measurements for my newest suit. From the back, each buttock can be seen in all its full, round glory, sitting high on my backside and connected to each broad, bulging lovehandle. Each fat part of my body bulges separately and seems to have a life of its own. I feel weird pride, realizing that I alone take credit for all the development. My stretch marks, like bright red lines on a road map, are testimony to the speed of my growth.



Seeing me gain yet more weight of course meant that my friends and relations got more comfortable making comments about my size--both within earshot and directly to me. I've lost count of the amount of times I've overheard "My god, Tim's just getting bigger and bigger, what's happening to him" and "he's really letting himself go, he doesn't seem to care, look at the size of him."



I don't care. Like I say, I'm happy---fat and happy. My new work colleagues have only ever known me fat. It's weird to think that they think of me as a fat guy. When we invited them for dinner one night they were silently stunned by a photo of me from two years ago they saw framed in the bookcase in the hall. I could hear them whispering in hushed tones, debating whether that could really be me, but failing to get up the courage to ask as they entered the room whether that was me or a twin brother who has somehow been given slimmer genes than me.



My increasing weight has actually been a plus on my new job. My boss has told me a number of times that I have a "presence" that impresses subordinates and customers, as well as the higher-ups. My expense account, used to entertain clients and pay for working lunches, has been a help in paying for some of my enormous lunches (enormous to others--just a regular meal now to me).



Like I said, I'm getting married soon so I'll be faced with looks of horror from little-seen relatives when they see me now. But I'll be ready for them.



Hell! I'll probably be even fatter by then, the way I'm heading. I'm thinking that 400 lbs will be a nice round number for me at the time of my wedding!