General

I don't know if there was any one trigger, one key event. Or if there was, I can't identify it and at this point, I don't know if I ever will, because it's been so long.

Back then, I was very little. I do remember when I was maybe 2-3, I was on an aircraft. You know how little kids may fidget or flail around. At one point my hand sank a little deep into a plump flight attendant's forearm, and I remember it felt *so* nice, although I pulled my hand back as quickly as I could.

Fast forward a little bit.. preschool/kindergarten; most adults who seemed nice and kind in my life were either overweight or obese. Who doesn't like kind, nice, considerate, and patient? So maybe I made that connection? Correlation doesn't imply cause, but I didn't know that yet.

But this kindergarten teacher I had, was a total bitch and witch who was mean to me. She was also skinny.

I don't want this post to get too long, so I'll fast forward a little more. One of the favorite teachers I had, was always overweight, probably obese technically with somewhat jiggly limbs and cankles. The secretary at the school was also morbidly obese but seemed nice, and didn't mind that I went to the front office for various office supplies for school.

When puberty was starting to hit, and I started to look at women in another way, it was always the slightly heavier ones who appealed to me. Perhaps because of that loose correlation earlier, or because fat people really do seem more jolly. Or somehow, the really skinny ones just looked like they were starving, weak, and fragile.

But I'm not supposed to like fat women, was I? This was the 90s. The Macarena and Richard Simmons was in full swing, probably a continuation of the fitness crazy from the 80s. The 90s also had Slice Orange soda.. a pity that today's kids will never be able to try it. Americans were also considerably thinner in those days. I tried to check out chubby girls but then I was afraid to get caught. Not because of the regular reasons a teenage boy was afraid, but because they would see that I was looking at the fat one, not the skinny one who I had considerably less physical attraction too.

Of course, I also saw the various magazine and television advertisements about weight loss drugs, diets, programs, and procedures. In most cases, I thought the before looked better. Or would look better if she had styled hair, makeup, etc. like she did in the "after" picture. Ever notice that? They made it even more dramatic.

So one day, I thought to look for the opposite on the World Wide Web, back when everyone used Yahoo! and Excite! Anyone even remember Excite! anymore? It came before AskJeeves, which later became Ask.com. Ebay and Amazon were still new. Google was extremely new and almost no one heard of it yet. No Facebook, YouTube, or MySpace even. Forget about Twitter, SnapChat, et. al. You get the idea, but I digress.

I think the exact phrase I used back then was literally "weight gain before and after" in the hopes I'd find something. A lot of hits were about weight loss.. but finally, I found something! I came across Dimension's Magazine (back when it was more than just a message board) and even the original FatNat's back when that was around. I mostly lurked but was nevertheless glad to have found it.

It was also the first time I saw things like The Weight Room and other weight gain stories, or progression pictures such as SexyMic (CurvyDreamer wouldn't come until later).

Nowadays, I think this is a very exciting time to be an FA. Even as recently as a decade ago, stores almost never had plus size mannequins. Now most stores have them. Certain brand names were forced to offer larger sizes or else likely lose all their sales as they are pushed to the fringes of irrelevancy.

Okay, I think this is one of my longest non-answers I have posted in awhile, and I even rambled in a couple of places.. I don't think it was necessarily any one thing, but a combination of factors over many, many years.

Either way, it's now clear. Do I want a skinny woman who looks like she might die if she loses 20-30 lbs, never enjoys sweets, alcohol, or a big juicy burger/steak, and tortures herself at the gym for hours a day to be rail thin, all of which will probably put her in a constant bad mood?

Or do I want the woman who blisses out on sweets, can really party, eats a big meal and enjoys it all, is far more fun to hug (as well as more well... prurient, sexy things), and won't deny herself, especially after a hard day at work?

I think it's clear which one is the winner to me here.

After talking with a lot of FA in online fat communities, I've concluded that there is no one factor. Some had fat influences in their life, others didn't. Some awakened to it as kids, some at puberty, other in adulthood. Some had strong reactions to some of those cartoon episodes, others didn't.

I have read that a lot of this sort of thing (templates of attraction) seems to gel in our brains in the relatively high hormone period around ages 2-3, which is generally younger than we can access our memories. So that by the time we can remember anything about it , it feels like we have always been that way.

For me I had some positive thoughts about fat earlier, but it really hit me when I read a pseudo-fairytale kids picture book called the Pumpkin Giant, where both the princess and the boy she eventually marries are so fat that they can't walk and have to roll to get around. I realized it wasn't realistic, but at the same time I knew I wanted that.

Cartoons: Pigs is Pigs, the Daffy Duck in which he "saves" the turkey as Thanksgiving approaches by eating his food, the Bugs Bunny in which he gets fat, multiple episodes of Homer Simpson particularly the one in which he decides to get fat enough that he can be allowed to work at home.

Cartoon Strips: Lil Abner in which Stupifyn Jones is fattened up by the wives so that their husbands will ignore her, Lil Abner in which his girlfriend gets trapped in a cave with mushrooms that cause her to get fat, Winnie Winkle in which her chubby friend starts gaining weight and it turns out to be because her boyfriend wants her to eat and get fatter.

A girl that I was friends with in 8th grade who worried about getting fat and had me bring Oreos, ice cream, and similar in quantity to her babysitting jobs with the idea that, if she ate enough, she would get sick of eating and lose weight (come on, it was 8th grade). She would eat to the point of being bloated and needing to undo her pants, after which we would make out and ask me to rub her stomach so that she would feel better.

While it wasn't an influence for me to go this way, there is an excellent episode of My Wife and Kids in which the wife Janet returns from a long visit caring for her mother during which she has gotten fat.

And there is the season of Mad Men in which Don's ex-wife has gotten fat and has recurring theme scenes with her doing things like sitting on the couch in the afternoon watching television feeding from large bags of chips and sharing ice cream sundaes with her daughter, including finishing her daughter's after she leaves the table.

And there is a trashy novel that my girlfriend in my Freshman year of college had and left behind when she moved out titled "The Movie Maker" by Herbert Kastle. In it, one of the characters, Cheryl, has gained some weight in part due to her feelings of guilt and frustration after accidentally crippling her husband. She ends up having an affair with a guy who enjoys her full figure. Her husband then kills himself, which pushes her over the edge. She retreats from the world and secludes herself in her condo. One of her co-workers, who had kind of a crush on her, decides to check up on her after several months. He goes to the super when no one opens the door, although he can hear the television and someone moving around inside. The super tells him that no one has seen her in months, although she gets deliveries every day. The super opens the door and the friend immediately shuts the door in his face after he enters. He describes Cheryl as almost unrecognizable, her once white bathrobe bulging at the waist as if she was in her last days of pregnancy and the remains of half a dozen meals on the table in front of her. I think that it was reading that book, which was decades before the internet, that suggested that there were others out there who had issues and fantasies about women gaining weight.

There is also "Moo" by Jane Smiley, which juxtaposes an experiment at an agricultural college to see how much fatter a pig can get when given injections of some growth hormone with a recurring short story that evolves from a girlfriend getting a little chubby to a story in which she becomes enormously obese.

If I wasn't part of this fetish before reading the last comment, I would be after.
Great stuff

I didn't know about it until I was almost out of high school, if already out of it, but I recall that there were signs of it much earlier on. It has nothing to do with characters or anything like that, but rather people I saw in my every day life.

I have always had a stomach fetish, and also a navel fetish, so when a girl's shirt goes up or is wearing a crop top, even when a girl is wearing a bikini, I get turned on.

But regarding chubby girls, I think it was 6th grade when I found the earliest signs. I remember noticing a somewhat attractive woman who worked at the daycare I went to after school had put a little extra weight. I got a little turned on when I saw her shirt go up a few times. Then there was summer school going into 7th grade. I started to gain an attraction towards this one girl who I was in elementary school with. I noticed she was a little chubby but I didn't mind, if actually liked it.

Fast forward two years later when I went to Waterworld for my 8th grade end-of-the-year field trip. I remember seeing some classmates in bikinis, some even had tummies on them. Some were even pretty chubby but still flaunted it. I knew that deep down that I liked it, but I didn't want to admit it. I even remember a classmate putting on some extra weight and getting a bit turned on by it.

It had been there for a long time but I just never realized it. It even happened at my end-of-the-year field trip for my senior year when we went to a water park. Some girls were kind of chubby but still wore bikinis.

I didn't come to realize it until I was about 19 or 20. Some girls on MySpace even posted pictures of themselves in their underwear and were chubby but I still got turned on by the sight of it.

Visually, the memory is hazy, but I can hear everything crystal clear when I think back. I was three. My family had just moved into a new house, it was late at night and I was hungry. So I asked my mom for a bowl of cereal and she said no, because "you can't eat late at night or else you'll get fat". At the time my little 3-year-old brain couldn't quite process the feelings but I think that sense of rejection over the most basic need for sustenance hammered three fundamental truths into me:

1. This isn't love.
2. When you love someone, you feed them.
3. If they get fat, that means you're doing a good job.

Growing up, I would daydream about bringing my crushes food and them voraciously devouring it, demanding more, and getting fat. It was kinda hard navigating the world of feedism at the time because most of the stories available were about force feeding an unwilling victim and I didn't want to see myself as that person...so I would secretly write kink stories just to reread when I was in the mood that usually featured someone who was undernourished for some reason or other being nursed back to health and chubbed up by a loving caretaker who was a proxy for me. Honestly, my style hasn't changed much, writing wise. There are just supervillains involved now.

Amazing that you can trace it back to a formative moment. My “awakening” happened at a similarly young age, but I have no idea of the trigger.

I was 19 years old in college. A girl wanted to make me fat and happy. She tookd me back to her dorm roome and started to cook for me. She kept saying she wanted to make me fat and happy. And got more and more excited with how much I ate. Eventually I blurted. I'm already happy! She was my first.

Not until much later in life.

My wife's first pregnancy she was insatiable with the food – demanding. She piled on tons of weight and then liked her body more after the pregnancy, gave away all of her old clothes afterwards.

I never wanted that 9 months to end. 😊

I remember posting at a weight lifting forum that I was tired of dieting. I wanted to eat what I wanted and get fat. I was beginning to be turned on by fat guys. I wanted to be one.

There was a custodian at a school where I worked who was fat and sexy. That was around 1993-1994. I still fantasize about him. He was fatter than I’ve ever been but I would love to be his size.

Around May 2015 I finally let go and gave myself permission to eat and get fat. I loved watching myself grow but I began to waver. I list and gained, lost and gained. I finally got up to and maintained at 245. I’m 5’6” so I was pretty fat, wearing snug size 44 pants. I unintentionally list about 30 lbs but I’m gaining again. I hope I can get to at least 230. My fantasy goal was 260-270.