Exclusive: BearTrainer's Long awaited new story!

So, I am really wildly excited about this. The ever talented BearTrainer is debuting his new story, squeegee, here on my blog. Creatively "illustrated" if you will by BT, this story of a guy with a somewhat checkered past being taken under the wing of another man and shown the ins and outs of the good life (expanding his horizons and all of that ;) ) is a quite enjoyable read. So get something to eat, loosen your pants, and read the full story after the jump.

For some reason, all of the, uh, illustrations, are loading before the jump. To read the full story to see how these hot images fit into BearTrainer's story... If they aren't a good teaser, I don't know what is...

Squeegee
by
BearTrainer

There I was, minding my own business, which, as it happens, means listening to the raft of morning reservation calls and changes on the Au Pied de Cochon voicemail system—"I know I said six, but my mother-in-law's catsitter's nephew's goddaughter and her fiancé will be joining us, so I'm hoping you can find a place for us, oh please, pretty please" and "We're going to be there tonight and I'm wondering if the pastry chef could make the pecan tart with macadamia nuts instead, since my husband loves macadamias and it's his birthday and all"—when, over the rim of my first cappuccino, what should I see but a Tuesday morning vision of male beauty, at least by my standards.

Tousled, sleepy-faced, and very blond, he lumbered out of the pickup he just parked in the white loading zone in front of the restaurant and carried what looked like a large dishpan toward our front door, snug white tee displaying a good solid set of shoulders, biceps and forearms, dusted with fur and sporting a workman's tanline. Maybe 25, older, younger? I wondered. He was too bulky to be much younger, and he was wearing a resentful, pouty mug on his face—clearly not a morning person—and moved with a heavy, masculine deliberation that had clearly left his light, care-free impetuous youth now far behind. As he put the pan down in front of our bank of floor-to-roof picture windows and turned around to get the rest of his equipment, I carefully put my own coffee down, lest I spill all over myself, for there it was, in plain sight: all the gymwork of the upper body on him setting atop a bunch of sweet pudge, poured into a cheap pair of brown, pin-striped dress pants from Walmart, big asscheeks wriggling under the shiny fabric and what couldn't be less than a 34 waistline tugging on a pair of lovehandles. What kind of workout routine was this that built him so nice and hard upstairs and left the rest of him deliciously neglected and soft below? From my perch, thoroughly unabashed, I simply continued to stare, motionless, eyes riveted upon him, as he trundled back from his truck carrying a gallon jug of Windex and, mystery revealed, a thick, wide squeegee mounted on a six-foot broomstick. He was the window-washer. Ah…..

And so, I watched as the final part of my morning treat was delivered to me. Dipping his long pole in the pan, he began, oh so carefully, to wipe, wipe, wipe from top to bottom, the action of which, naturally, made his shirt ride up oh so sweetly, oh so unself-consciously, oh so inevitably, until a luscious white bulge of beginner Buddhabelly pooched out over his pants, visible through the blur of the wet window like some kind of high-toned encourager-porn dream sequence in that DVD I wish someone someday would take the time to make.

Renny's voice startled me out of my reverie, stage-whispering

"Gagliardi's nephew," in my ear after creeping up behind me without warning. I literally gasped.

"Give me a fucking heart attack, will you? Shit!" And then catching my breath, I spun about to face our resident kitchen wag and my partner in crime at what all of us in-house called---with deep affection, of course--Piggyfeet. Eyebrows raised, I burbled, "No way. We're not going to be having our windows cleaned by this bo-hunk every day, are we?"

"Oh yes. Got the whole story last week from Darlene, of all people, who wormed the story out of Frank Gagliardi who felt he needed to give us a heads-up. Paragon of morality that he be." I noticed that Renny himself, for his being all casual and whatever, was, nevertheless like me, breathing a little heavier himself and had a glassy, unmoving eye fixed upon the window as well. "He told her that he was sending Byron to us, just in case we wondered. And, well, isn't he up your own personal one-way alley."

Renny paused for effect. "Fresh out of County, on parole for the next two years, needed a job."

Down came the squeegee and crystal clear, the heft and breadth of Byron was again before us. What a delight? And to think, I thought I was going to have just another humdrum Tuesday catering to the bourgeoisie. "County, eh? Hence…the physique."

"Oh yeah." Renny made his trademark know-it-all moue and nodded.

"Yeah. One has to presume it's a lovely train wreck of recovery from wicked crystal habit, jail weight-lifting and greasy, starchy 3-squares in aluminum tins. Twelve months in the lock-up will do that to a guy." He licked his lips.

"I'm actually a little impressed he's in the shape he's in, aren't you? Usually they really let go. He's just, well, healthy-looking. At least for now, I'd say."

"You are such an expert on jail trade, can't believe I forgot," I couldn't help saying sarcastically. In the end, though, Renny was right. Byron was no light-weight, that was for darn sure, his broad, sullen face plump and almost jowly, large pecs with thick nipples rounding out firmly enough to cast a shadow. There was, all the same, a youthful vigor about him even with the poundage and I could see in how he moved a kind of fire to get things back on track for himself.

Knowing his backstory, I could see all of he had gone through, reflected, stroke by stroke, as he cleaned our windows: used to the good life of carefree partying, with the drugs keeping him nice, tight and lean, plenty of friends and money and sex, and then, busted, confined for a year to what ended up being an adult male feeding pen, abundant food dished up on schedule, grinding inactivity, the uselessness of lolling about the dorm and yard. Desperate to keep his looks and his sanity after about piling on about 25 pound of chub, he starts to hit the weightroom, jogs a little now and then, and tries, best as he can, coming off amphetamines, to stay away from hyper-sugary institutional desserts, doing his time and hoping against hope he won't end up looking like the rest of soft, blowsy self-pitying cons in their jumpsuits, doughy, white and prematurely middle-aged. Now, he's back on the outside, dependent on his uncle's charity for a lowly minimum-wage gig as squeegee, an arrest record, meth habit and 30 extra pounds following him around, an unshakeable ballast of misspent youth. No wonder he looked sullen, or was this his particular version of grim determination? Shit, you could tell the guy was one of God's great eaters, flashing his sweet rolls of firm newfat, a broad bubble of an ass shifting restlessly, stretching the back seam this way and that, as he worked up more than a little bit of a sweat doing his job in front of the two of us.

After sharing a few hypnotized moments of admiring lust with me, with a click of the heels Renny laughed lightly and turned. "Got to get back to stuffing my andouille sausages, baby. So sorry I can't stand here and blab and drool all day as you make your plans."

"Plans?" I said, with mock naïveté.

He snorted loudly. "I may not know jail trade, but I know you. How many poor hapless waistlines have you sabotaged, while here so far?"

"You need to remember that Danny came here heavy. I always get blamed but…."

"There is heavy and then there is HEAVY." Renny waved his hand. "Yeah, yeah, yeah, don't say it. 'I didn't put a gun to his head to eat himself up over 300 on Frances' napoleons and tiramisù.' Ring me in the back if you want Squeegee to have a good solid country breakfast, ok?"

"Poor guy is scowling he's so hungry," I murmured. "Anyone can see that."

Renny was going to leave, but we stood for a few more moments, boring holes into the plate glass with our gaze. "Anyone could see that. He needs a meal."

"Something substantial. He's got a long day of hard work."

"But plenty of protein too."

"He can always work on definition later."

"Much later."

"How about a nice generous pile of French toast with a goat cheese scramble on the side, and fresh orange/grapefruit."

Renny walked to the kitchen. "You have ten minutes."

"Love a challenge."

Squeegee. My new project.

In the first stages, there are usually a couple of prime considerations. Managing their self-consciousness is always an issue, as is the general wariness of straight guys in the Bay Area who know the score and can't really be tricked the way that some carefree, mindless fuck fiction would have it. So, like a soufflé, rich but light, it requires a light touch. That day I had to improvise, so pulling one of the fresh baguettes out of their Semifreddi bags by the front busboy station, I slathered it up with honey butter and chopped off a theatrically large piece and then, paying him no attention whatsoever, I passed by as he did his work and dashed out to my car in the lot across the street, in order, of course, to do nothing in particular. I made sure to take my sweet time coming back, though, sauntering, nibbling a little on the end of the fragrant tartine as I paused at the door and gave him a little encouraging smile.

"Great work. Thanks. Especially on sunny days like this, the windows make all the difference."

He politely smiled back and mumbled, "Thanks."

"Frank probably didn't tell you but if you want some coffee or lemonade or something, let me know," and then, making as if not waiting, I swung open the door, ready to stop if there was even a moment's hesitation on his part. And there was—he raised his eyebrows adorably.

"Oh, coffee," he sighed. And I stopped. "Very good coffee, too. Special blend exclusively for the restaurant from Kona growers."

He smiled more broadly. "That would be great."

I very deliberately took a large bite out of my baguette prop and chewed long and hard before answering with all the officiousness of professional waitstaff, one foot in the door. "Cream? Sugar?"

"Yeah, both. If it's not too much trouble."

Hmm. He seemed polite enough. Nothing like the discipline of "yessir, nossir" on the inside for a year to make a fine bit of overfed beefcake nice and docile. "Well, you just come on in, when you finish up that panel."

Even without the a/c, the restaurant was cool and dark this early in the morning, and I pretended to be all wrapped up complicated table arrangement charts, when the soon-to-be-conquered Byron tentatively opened the door and peeked inside.

"Hey, there," I said, and pointed my thumb over to the bar, where I met him and poured out a cup of the fresh brew we all kept on hand for us, setting it out for him as if he were our first honored customer of the day, my own large and quite unfinished, heavily buttered baguette right there on the counter. "I'm Grant, by the way."

The way he was looking at the polished zinc bar counter, the china cup and saucer, the gleaming steel sugar bowl and creamer, the stylish demitasse spoon made me think that it had been a long time since he had had a cup of coffee in anything but a styrofoam 7-11 cup. "Byron," he answered, between sips, after adding more sugar, more cream. "You know my uncle?"

"Yeah, for years now. Has done great work with the maintenance for us. I myself didn't intend to end up as assistant manager here, just wanted the maître d' job, but dealing with the contractors now and then comes with the territory."

He continued checking the place out, the damask linens, the crystal glassware, the ultra-modern lighting system sleekly running about the ceiling and cunningly focused on the artwork and flower arrangements, a laboriously effortless chiaroscuro effect creating that "dining environment" for which Au Pied was, justifiably, known and lauded. "Quite a place," he said as he settled in on the barstool to drink his coffee, resting his thick forearms on the counter on either side, out of prison habit, to protect his food.

I munched further down on my baguette, mostly so as to have an excuse to wave it around and tempt him with the fragrance of honey. "It can be a big pain in the ass, you know working with the public, especially rich people."

I pretended to organize the garnishes at the bar, figuring he wouldn't know that that was probably the last thing someone in my position would ever get involved with in a high-toned establishment such as this one. And right on cue, the bar phone rang. God bless Renny.

"No," I said, looking around. "I have no idea….he did?.....well, he's not here now…..me?.....no…." I caught Byron's curious glances for a second or two, absorbed in my phone conversation, and then, said, "No…..not really….but…." holding his eyes this time and putting my hand over the receiver. "Have you had breakfast? Renny from the kitchen said that the manager asked for breakfast but seems to have disappeared."

"Breakfast?" Byron's eyes lit up involuntarily but his expressionless, guarded face didn't change.



"Nothing fancy, really. I've already eaten," I gestured at my excuse of a tartine on the counter, "And those guys back there are too busy to take the time."

He looked over toward the windows, he only had a couple left to do, and then at his watch. It was a good sign, this long hesitation, the way that the very concept of breakfast was stopping him in his tracks. Did he mean to rub his stomach with his big paw, or was that his sexy, child-like way he had learned to communicate to his feeders that he was hungry? A sheepish, grateful smile appeared. "I got time."

I hung up quickly and with all the naturalness in the world, hustled off to the kitchen, saying on the way, "For all the food we serve here and throw out, I just hate to see any of it go to waste."

As I knew he would, Renny supplied a high mountain of French toast on a large plate, adorned with fresh fruit, with a tasty scramble big enough for three, with hefty slices of buttered toast—bread to go with your bread, sir?—and a pot of warmed nutmeg syrup, the smell of which was fairly intoxicating.

Byron drew back a little at the generosity of what he was being served, crisply folded napkin offered as if it were only to be expected, and seeing his reaction, I tried to mitigate the impact, by explaining, "As you can see, our manager is used to being pampered." I would have loved to stand right there and watch every sweet, carbo-rich morsel disappear into that pouty, kissable mouth, watch the sugar take effect and glaze his eyes over with food bliss, watch him dig in quick and then slow down until he had a hard time sitting forward and yet, continue to plow through till the plate was clean. But it was neither polite nor strategic to make my Squeegee too aware of the web being woven around him.

So I tapped the bar, said, "Take your time. Might be the only break you get today, huh?" and moved back to my desk behind his back, where, unbeknownst to him, I had nevertheless had a clear view of him in the big wall mirror. I didn't miss a moment of any of it--the way he dipped a spoon in the syrup to taste it first and actually licked his lips with his pink tongue, how he folded the slices in half, cut through, taking large mouthfuls, enjoying how filling it was, how sweet, how comforting to eat in a cool, quiet place, not rushed, food prepared with style, and lots of it, all for him. He buttered his toast from the tub I had left on the counter, spooned the eggs on it to make little scramble sandwiches for himself which he devoured like French-toast chasers. He mopped the syrup and butter off the plate, using his big fingers to nudge the food on to the fork, and half-way through, I could see him realize that there was no need to rush.

That was when the full potential of him became clear to me, for he suddenly relaxed, a big sack of a musclechub lost in the good food spread out, all the tension gone. The mirror gave me the frontal view of his greedy mouth and porky face, but the back-side view, from my desk, was all the confirmation I needed for my plans: soft belly roll folded over into a spare tire of flab ringing him, his plump tits sagging nice and round now that he wasn't sitting up straight and holding himself high, scooting back a little to make room for more eats which made the breadth of his ass, hips and thighs all the more obvious, waistband low in the back as his overfed bubblecheeks pulled it down, crotch tight in the front between a pair of spreading hams, all the seams taut as 250 pounds settled into 200 pounds of pants.


And he still ate, in a world of his own gourmet table, unstinting, civilized breakfasts, followed by long lunches and siestas, festive suppers, late night dinners of many courses, where he could be and would be encouraged to indulge in all the good things of life, fill up, relish, soak up the sweetness, engage in the overnourishment he had come to crave. He let his eyes flutter shut now and then, letting the soft animal of his big, burgeoning body love what it loved. He'd sigh occasionally, and the best part was how, at the end of it all, when every scrap of toast and eggs had found its place on him and the plate was squeaky-clean, he cast a surreptitious glance about and took my half-eaten baguette that I had left there to finish off on his own. What a fatty food-sneaker! That was the moment when I knew I had him good.

I gave him a few moments to digest and then joined him back at the bar with the dregs of my own coffee. Up close it was erotic to see him flushed with a sugar high, those solid shoulders and arms propping him just enough so all the firm, well-fed fleshiness of plump pecs and bobble-belly could hang loose. He was breathing heavy, more because he scarfed it all down so quick than because it was all that much for him, and I could see that tell-tale glitter of incipient food frenzy in his eyes, probably what he looked like on the way to score tina and do a run, but now turned full-force on to what I hoped would be his new, legal addiction—overeating himself into obesity. Clearly, if I were to bring out another breakfast, he'd eat it. He didn't have it in him to stop himself. I smiled sweetly as I took his plate. "Guess you haven't eaten for a while."

"Not like that, no. Did Frank tell you…?"

I nodded, the soul of understanding and compassion. "Yeah. Whatever. No one's perfect." Then, intentionally changing the subject, "How about that nutmeg syrup, huh?"

Beneath long eyelashes lashes, he rolled his baby blues back in his head and smiled a chubby smile. "Wicked good."

"I've seen some customers literally drink it out of the pourer."

"Yeah?" He winced at the thought and then, picked up the container, peering into it.

"Pretty sweet." Which was when he caught me by surprise, stopping me dead with a look of sheer, penetrating, utterly unexpected directness, switching in an instant into a full-grown, fierce-looking ex-con. The air was electric with tension as he leaned forward toward me. "There better be more where that came from. I'm going to want more."

The baby-blues had turned grey and steely in a flash, and he took one of his thick sausage fingers, wiped it around the inside of the syrup glass, and sucked on it hard. "I like that stuff, a lot."

I was completely taken aback. Good thing dealing with aggressive customers for many years now at least let me preserve the outward trappings of good manners. "Don't worry, Byron. There's plenty. I'll make sure of that."

But to tell the truth, watching him pack up and leave that day, walking slower with a belly jut and the flush of some attention, I couldn't help but feel a slight shiver of fear. Don't get between him and his fix—I guess that was the moral of the first part of Squeegee's story.

Not that I had any intention of depriving Byron of his breakfast. Of all the insipidities I could spend my pathetic tip money on, paying Renny $15 under the table every other day to accustom this scrumptious ex-junkie window-washing parolee plumper to a good solid daily feed at the PiggyFeet trough until some serious results began to show---let's just say I have spent a lot more on a lot less fun. As it turns out, we were only scheduled to have our windows shined up every other day, which frankly was OK by me. It'd be a little much, I thought, to be lavishing breakfast on him daily anyway. He might catch on, and then how would I get my evil kicks then, huh? Plus, alternate days gave me time to put my head together with Renny to plan a nice, satisfying menu for Squeegee, something that would appeal, compel, seduce Tubby into making damn sure he never called in sick.

He was there bright and early all right on Thursday, and Mother Nature herself, who from what I can tell has long been a big fan of all things excessive, appeared to have smiled on the inauguration of my new project: unseasonably warm weather for a Bay Area July meant it was in the high 70s, even at 9 a.m. And that meant a wonderful treat for me which I espied over the edge of my podium. Byron was in cargos and bright orange tank top, all of which probably did fit in the baggy way they were supposed to when he bought them a year ago but which now grabbed the overblown chunkiness of him in all the right spots—bowing out nice and round in the middle, belly flab and deep navel bouncing with every ponderous step, hunky-chunky thighs and bubblecheeks hefting and wrestling about under the tight khaki, all his smooth pink skin flushed with the heat.

He waved at me inside and smiled shyly, setting up his stuff on the sidewalk, and wanting him used to being treated with respect and graciousness, I waved back and glided forth effortlessly, carrying a large, almost bowl-size cup of coffee, set aside for lattes which some especially gauche customers insist on slurping down after a fine repast. But, this morning, just for B-man, I tucked in about a half dozen of those super-sweet amaretti we use to garnish the ice cream sundaes. Baby likes sugar. Baby gets sugar. Baby gets nice and fat.

"Man, thanks!" he said, loving the coffee but peering at the odd biscuits.

"Never had these." He crunched away and opened his eyes wide at the pure aromatic impact of them.

"They're Italian. We use them for desserts here."

He gobbled them down, confirming my well-trained instincts at discerning the weakest spots in diet resolutions such as the hapless victims of my ministrations might be so bold as to entertain. Squeegee, however, seemed to be walking very willingly to the House of Ruinous Delights. I could smell the almond paste on his breath when he said, "Yeah, it's almost like I need to keep my blood sugar up these days. I mean, you go from doing jackshit in jail to, all of sudden, having to work a regular schedule."

"And active physical work, too."

"I've been trying to skip breakfast, you know, I don't want to get too big now that I don't have time for the weights, but…." He paused and I could practically hear the gears turning.

"But…?"

"Don't take this wrong, I'm not asking for charity, but the other day that breakfast was, like, the best thing I had ever eaten. I've never been to a place like this, you know, to have dinner, lunch, whatever."

"It's pretty over-priced actually, but I can at least say that the food is great. I'm not sure I could afford to eat here either. And," I laid a fraternal hand on his shoulder, "No need to apologize. Feeding people is what we do here. That breakfast might have been the best you ever ate but fact is, Renny my bud in the kitchen whipped it up in, say, three minutes, takes no time at all to cook up some eggs, griddle some French toast, make it look pretty on the plate, when you are used to doing it fast and quick in a restaurant kitchen." Was Byron's mouth-watering? Probably the after-effects of the sugar bombs.

"You hear about breakfast being so important and all, and Tuesday was really a lot easier for me after that."

"Well, that's good to hear. So plan on having breakfast—on us. We're more than happy to help guys like you get back on your feet, and it's not a problem on our end. In fact, Renny was thinking you might want to be our taste tester today."

He laughed, flashing big dimples and softening chin. "The guinea pig." The flirtatious cheek of him! Darn good thing I wasn't my own snug cargos that day. "Get your work done and come in, when you are ready to help us out."

Was it my imagination or did our big old Squeegee work at record-pace that day, making that bank of windows glitter like nobody's business in ten minutes? Would the day ever come when he might actually wear that "Will Work For Food" I still have in the drawer, bought a few year back during a hot and heavy dalliance with a previous feedee who, alas, never really went the distance? Hope springs eternal. In any case, he was inside lickety-split, it seemed, all moist and panting from bending over and from, I imagined, the eagerness to "help us out."

Sexy as it was to have seen him wiggling his width about awkwardly on the barstool the other day, if he was going to be irresistibly brought down by my secret encourager machinations, better to give the growing guy all the room he needed to spread out and relax and enjoy himself. So, I waved him over to the banquette along the wall, where, not coincidentally, a pair of corner mirrors gave me a three-dimensional view of his girth, and, voilà, out came Renny's creation which I placed in front of him with an overdone flourish, as if he were a genuine customer.

"Pancakes?" he said, gleefully, looking up at me. "I love pancakes."

"Ahh, but these are special…."

He dove in and then discovered that these were no ordinary pancakes, but were in fact filled with rich cream cheese that had been whipped with the nutmeg maple syrup, such that, as he cut into them, the filling oozed out obscenely and released a very intense fragrance of sugar and spice and everything nice. The effect of it on him was as planned: here was a dude slung up somewhere between a San Pablo trailer park and the dog races, a guy who had undoubtedly come of age eating nothing but cheap, packaged, microwave dinners and snacks from jars, bottles and boxes, whose most far-out idea of the "high life" was to party with his tweaker buds and do shooters at Hooters. And now, thanks to the magnanimity of none other than the critically acclaimed Berkeley restaurant Au Pied de Cochon inspired by world-renowned California cuisinière Alyssa Wadders, our boy from the sticks was being acquainted with the way that food could be so much, much more to him, a path to the good life where things were clean, tasteful, civilized, and friendly; a harmless way of exercising his sensuality in the form of that big greedy appetite for pleasure which had gotten him into trouble in the first place, but which here at the table, centered on the food, on the eating of food, on the joy that food gave him, could now be indulged without any serious problems. Never had post-incarceration rehabilitation been so elegant, so gustatorily enticing, nor—I quivered with the thought--so potentially lethal to that waistline or the numbers on his bathroom scale. He took one bite of the stuffed pancake, a big bite dripping with milkfat, nutmeg and surreptitious encouragement, and he groaned deeply with satisfaction. Saying nothing, he took his time, spooning in another and another, eyes half-shut from a sugar climax, whimpering like a weaning shoat as he took a long, lingering time to clean his plate, mouthful after mouthful after revelatory mouthful.

"Oh god…I've never tasted anything like this."


I smiled down at him, watching him let go, shirt creasing carelessly around the folds of his fleshy torso, belly soft and slack, ready to make room for more, fat ass cushioned with a comfort that made it easy to stay there.

"So they're good," I said, matter-of-factly.

He chuckled and looked up. "Way good. Like having a pancake, cream-filled donut and cheese danish all at the same time. It's blowing my circuits."
And your belt buckle, I thought.

"So it's not too bad being a guinea pig, huh?" Every last part of me wanted to slide right in there next to him, at that moment, gently grab that flab of his, fresh, new and jiggly, call him "squeegee," "guinea piggy," "piggyfeet's newest piggy-feeder," reinforce what I knew I would be successful at turning him into over time. But I didn't. I did instead what needed to be done for now: I went back into the kitchen and brought out another six of these stuffed pancakes, their starchy, intoxicating perfume hitting Byron full in the face and he moaned helplessly, eyes bright with foodlust and even a little bit of fear.

"You told me you liked that nutmeg syrup...so…"

He winced and let his eyes alternate between the irresistible temptation on front of him, the high pile of food that he soon would be wearing on his hips and soft, low-slung Buddha-belly, and my own expression of implacable, unruffled, determined bonhomie. And as he spoke his piece to me, "Don't get me wrong, they are really great, but maybe I could finish a couple more of them, you could help, I dunno, someone in the kitchen…." it was impossible not to notice how his hand reached for the big spoon automatically, how he scooped up yet another enormous mouthful, how without thinking, like a natural porker, he began to feed, unable to stop himself because he wasn't even aware he was doing it, and once he started tucking it in, Round Two of stuffed pancakes, there were no more words, just gentle grunts, the smacking of buttery lips, and occasionally the sound of the cushions shifting, as he leaned back to catch his breath but only for a second until the draw of the table made him lean forward again, bench creaking, jockeying those overfed thighs and fattening ass into position so he could continue to pamper himself, sucking down the pleasure, the guiltless pleasure of what I was going to make sure was his incurable new compulsion.

I swear by the end his sweat smelled like cream cheese and nutmeg. Where was it coming from? The plate was empty, a gooey mess of smeared feeding, and I thought long and hard about whether or not to do this next thing, but he was practically passed out with the overwhelming, nearly endless gorging that he had just given into, body flaccid and bulging, food-stupid expression on him, the way they get toward the end of a good, solid, satisfying binge, and I figured it couldn't be anything more outrageous than what he had in all likelihood seen and done in jail. So I went for it: I ran my index finger along the plate, wiping up a big mound of the sweetened filling still left and put it up to his lips.


"We clean our plates around here at Piggyfeet."

Given how south it all could have gone, that singular pause, as he looked at me from below, lasted an eternity. I didn't know him well enough yet to be able to tell whether it was relief, sullen resentment, or just plain, mindless, male lust that animated his glance at me in that moment, but whatever it was, I didn't get slugged. On the contrary, my instincts proved correct and instead, he closed his eyes, parted his big lips, and, with that soft and yielding tongue of his, suckled the cream off my finger, every last little bit.

From that moment onward, an unspoken understanding had been reached between us, or perhaps better to say the unspoken understanding, for in my experience with the obese-to-be, it is always the same understanding and there is really no need to talk about it. In fact, better not to talk about it. Better, far better, far more exciting in some ways, to keep it unstated, below the radar of anyone who might guess, and simply let the inexorable process take its course.

And take its course it did with Squeegee, who soon began to "stop by to say hi" even on the mornings when he wasn't scheduled to be working, especially when he realized that the culinary generosity of PiggyFeet would be supplemented on those days by my own personal assurance of a "nice big solid breakfast to start the day." Sometimes that was in the form of a flat of fresh pastries from La Farine, at others a sizable sack of cinnamon-sugar doughnuts right out of the fryer from Cruller Corner, warm, comforting, oily, and then there were those morning when I picked up a couple of piping hot breakfast burritos from La Picante down the street, served up with the pretense that I was going to have a bit of nosh myself, the reality being, of course, that all the sausage, potatoes, cheese and tortilla mostly made their way into Byron's capacious gullet, especially once I got him all jacked up on coffee and sugar. Once a stimulant junkie, always a stimulant junkie.

Even with this special touch of my own added to hasten the undermining of whatever remnant of faltering will power he still had, it didn't escape anyone's notice that Byron always seemed to enjoyed the good home-cooking of our own kitchen best, and as long as I kept Renny's palm greased with the green, luscious morning meals kept coming out from out kitchen with a regularity that was blimping our Squeegee into a full-fledged, well-rounded gourmand. Cream-cheese stuffed pancakes were followed by an "experiment" of savory French toast stuffed with bacon, ham and pancetta that Byron was the first to taste and gobbled up with gluttonous approval. And more experiments followed, rich fattening morning meals the recipes for which our kitchen never got a chance to try out, since we only opened for lunch: crêpes thick with cream, folded over a wide variety of filling created from the previous nights leftovers---roast beef hash with sage gravy, chicken pomodoro adorned with slabs of melted provolone, seafood gumbo over rice. The guinea piggy had a real carbo jones, and I swear after a couple of weeks I caught him literally drooling as he made his way to our doorstep, big chops licking in anticipation.

But even old standards need to be livened with variety and I was determined to expand Byron's greed into new areas. So, glossy omelettes grew by the day from three- to four- and eventually to six eggs, the size of dinnerplates, accompanied by towers of buttered bread, rich cream biscuits, and pots of jam, with occasional mixed grill thrown in, different house-made sausages—chicken, turkey, lamb—lined up like soldiers on a battlefield andmowed down with relish before he waddled off for the rest of his work day. A measure of how primed he was, how eminently plump-able, was obvious in how quickly his new, luxurious breakfast habits resulted in what I had wanted to see from the first day: in three weeks, Byron went from pleasantly chunky to distinctly, inarguably lard-assed, cheeks puffy, chin thick, soft and lushly larded, once broad shoulders now even broader and sloping over man-breasts that shook lasciviously, abundantly, under voluminous XXL T-shirts that made his transition from beefy boy to lard-ass slob clear and present. As his body sought to find new places to store the blubber that his greatly increased intake was creating as stores for a famine that I would make sure he would never experience, rolls of fat grew under his arms, popped out nice and jiggly around his waist, and widened out the top of his thighs so that his pants cut into deep, thickly creased chub all around. Most amazing, though, was his belly that pushed out over his shorts, forcing the waistband to sling low like a sweet hammock over an unexpectedly symmetrical sphere, navel smack in the center of his shirt, bouncing gently, seductively at the slightest movement. I thought he would widen and droop, he just looked like the type to me, a sloppy-fat gainer-tub, but I was wrong. The extra forty pounds that first month came on him nice and firm, and by the end, he had blossomed into more of a rolypoly, a Michelin man, overstuffed, upholstered with sexy manfat that would show itself off now and then as his shirt rode up during a feeding or as his cotton shorts flashed the back of his shaking ass cheeks on his way off to work.

Gratifying as it was to achieve this kind of success, I couldn't help wondering whether or not more might be possible, given the ease with which Byron had given himself over to the morning feeding routine and the sensual fattening he was capable of achieving in such a short time. Just as his own appetite was grew hand-in-hand with his excess poundage, each day making that delightfully vicious cycle of lowered metabolism and increase consumption more and more his way of life, conditioning him to a life of obesity, my own desire to push the limits with him were similarly increasing. The more he showed up obediently expecting to be stuffed, the less able to restrain his piggishness in front of me (to the point of even grunting and snorting toward the end of an exceptionally delicious meal), the more lard he piled on, the more it made me think that what had begun a diversion, as an exploration, might well be taken to another level. Why shouldn't I get something permanently, deeply, personally satisfying out of all my hard work, too? As he sat there, day after day, spreading out, fatter and fatter, more and more hoggish, burying himself in the excess, was it really so unrealistic to think that he was giving it up so easy because deep down he wanted me to go to the next step? I'd occasionally catch him looking at me, eyes bright above food-swollen cheeks, looking at me with an expression that I began to realize was actually a request he didn't know, didn't have the words, to make. Easy to find out. So on a day when I knew the dinner rush would be light, the Sunday of July 4th weekend, when everyone was either out of town or barbecuing in their own backyards, I let him dab his lips with the napkin after finishing a sumptuous load of creamed chipped beef served on two sour-cream laden baked potatoes, shift his nearly 300-pound bulk around enough to give the vast balloon of his paunch the room to digest in peace with a soft belch, and then asked him what his plans were for the evening.

He sniggered a little. "Plans. I got no plans. Never have no plans." He put a plump hand on his belly and rested it, wheezing a little, looking back at me with an unformed question dancing about in his bovine gaze.

"Got no friends now that I'm not using or dealing. And sure ain't got no girlfriend at this fucking size." He laughed in a self-deprecating way and picked up the remnants of potato skins with a fork. "I got my eats, and that's just about it."

"Well, then, why don't you stop by here tonight? It's doing to be d-e-a-d. And we're all just going to be kicking back, you know."

A little smile crept over his face, double chins flushing with a scoot of the hips. "Bet you have a dynamite dessert menu."

What was I thinking? This fatty had been around the block. "Menu? We have a platter the size of Missouri," I said, giving back as good as I was getting.

And sure enough, even after plowing through breakfast enough for six, he sat there, drooling just at the thought, . "Good as the rest of the food?"

My turn to snigger, which I did, wickedly. "Three different pies, chocolate decadence torte, two different cheesecakes, caramel pudding, cookie plate….It's always such a shame that we put it all out on a display tray for the evening and then at the end, just throw out all the samples."

He had tried a couple of times to rouse himself from his laziness and shift his tonnage into gear head off to work, but there was nothing like a low center of fatboy gravity to make that difficult. So I reached out my hand and gave him a lift, pulling him forward with a good strong hand and letting him stand real close as he got his balance, the crest of his 48" gut grazing my arm.

"I'm so here tonight," he said softly. Was it my imagination or did I hear in his voice a note of relief and see in his body a kind of yielding, yielding to all of his appetites, even the ones that he had kept secret up to now, secret even to himself?

"Tell you what…" I matched his sotto voce. "Don’t rush. Clean-up won't be done till midnight and then we'll have all the time in the world."

Midnight it was, indeed, when he came by, which made me happy, because there are few things I like better in a fatboy than the ability to take direction.

But Squeegee had gone one better, he had slipped on a nice, extra-wide pair of cotton sweat shorts and a bright colored Hawaiian shirt that sported itsy-bitsy ice cream cones of various flavors. Smelling freshly showered, he slipped into the door way as I unlocked it, and right inside, heplayfully pointed out the design of his shirt, saying, "I thought I'd dress for dessert." The pattern of the fabric wasn't what I was checking out, though, in that the shirt was open with lots and lots of Byron was shaking free and easy in the dim lights of the restaurant.

"Cute," I said, and assuming the officious air of restaurant host I affected on a nightly basis here, I simply walked toward the rear of the house where a small alcove of a dining space flickered with candles, hidden with view.

As promised, our dessert tray of the evening beckoned. "They are just left overs, I know…."

It's always amazing to see the effect of the food on them, and it's all in their eyes, an intensity, a focus, a sheer, naked greediness takes over, the tunnel vision of a man destined to have his life run by his unrestrained love of eating. He wasted no time and slid his bulk into the big padded chair, gawking for a bit at the array before him, spoiled for choice.

"I've died and gone to heaven, haven't I?" I stood over the table, as I would for any honored guest, and tapped his hand as he reached for his first selection.

"I believe you would like to hear what we have here, wouldn't you? So, going clockwise—coconut crème caramel pie with a macadamia nut crust and meringue topping, drizzled with honey; pecan rum pie served with fresh zabaglione; chocolate-bottom mud pie in a pool of caramel sauce."

He began to lean forward, smelling the air, and with that, I decided to do as I had intended, gently cupping the large soft mantit that hung forward and tenderly rolling the swollen nipple in my fingers, as I continued, voice calm and business-like. "Then we have the house specialty, triple chocolate decadence torte, bitter sweet chocolate mousse.." I plucked a little and he moaned "…layered with semi-sweet ganache…" I plucked a little harder still and he moaned a little louder, "topped with Valrhona shavings and of course mocha whipped cream," and with that, I bounced the handful of fat playfully until he giggled and reached for his breasts with his own chubby hands to stop my teasing.

"If you don't like chocolate, we have fresh Santa Rosa plum-topped cheesecake and Meyer Lemon cheesecake. Both very fattening…" I unobtrusively sat down and let my hand deftly slide across his broad circumference, overheated blubbery lovehandles, loose underbelly, the slightly damp tittyfold and meandering down to the sweet, sensitive fatty bulging around his navel. His eyelids fluttered half-shut and when his mouth opened in a wordless gasp, I finished off.

"Naturally we have crème brûlée, served with anisette-flavored Mexican wedding cookies, and if you so desire, we can always prepare a hot fudge sundae for you, vanilla, chocolate and coffee ice cream on hand." As the impact of it all sunk in and I found myself slowly moving into his bulk, pressing up against his flanks, letting my lips play against his jowls, he was breathing so heavily from desire that his voice was nothing more than a hoarse whisper.

"You understand, don't you?"

I grasped the large spoon beside the platter, started with what I knew he would like best, the chocolate decadence, and lifted a sumptuous mouthful of it up to his face with one hand as my other hand reached beneath the table and began to pleasure him as no one had ever pleasured this fatboy before, and in two bites, my newest conquest enjoyed a climax that stunned even me, a powerful, bucking cum that shook the table and which, I swear to God, lasted an exquisitely long time, long enough for me to feed him the entire slab of lusciousness off the plate, his eyes closed, whimpering with wave after wave of pleasure..

"Yeah, Squeegee, I understand. I understand so many things." Bite of the coconut pie, gasp for breath.

"That you are going to have a wonderful time from here on." Bite of the pecan, gasp for breath.

"That you are going to feed to your heart's content and never really care how big you get, ever again." Large spoonful of crème brûlée, gasp for breath.

"That you'll wonder now and then if this is a good thing, maybe when you are 350, maybe again when you are 450, or 500, but in the end…." Oversized piece of mud-pie, whipped cream drooling down his chin, helpless groan.

"You'll remember tonight and you'll know what you already know about yourself." His lids opened slightly and he nodded passively.

"Yeah, I know, I've always known. I don't have much choice. I am what I am." And with that, he picked up the fork himself and began, on his own, to do what he knew he needed to do, feed contentedly on the remains of the decadence in front of us.

"And Squeegee," I said with a little squeeze of his belly, "We have all the time in the world. All the time in the world."

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.