Fat experiences

I have seen many models who are gainers or feeders on various websites that seem to have scars from cutting on their arms or legs. Maybe I am naive but is there a correlation at all or has anyone else noticed this?

It is very possible. Many people eat because of anxiety (I identify myself as a compulsive dining room due to anxiety), so when something happens that triggers strong emotions of sadness, anger or uncertainty, you start eating what you catch.
And I do not say that this is wrong, but quite the opposite. If it makes you feel better, like other things you can't, it's better to eat and be happy, I say.

Maybe, I think it might just have to do with when they were younger or currently still feel like they have to fit into societies standards and it's sometimes too much for someone to handle. Cutting is then used as another coping mechanism. ? (Everyone's reasons for doing so is different)

Speaking from personal experience when I was younger I use to cut because I didn't love myself at all and it was just another way to cope with overwhelming thoughts. When I found this "community" within the same year I stopped. I learned to accept myself a little more each year. Yes, those urges still sometimes appear but I don't want to give in so I haven't done it since.

This makes sense! I definitely see a lot of this in the community and was curious.

I dated a feedee who cut her arms. Ended up ghosting me for a year and a half.

Did you ever know why she did it?

[quote]Dorian:
I'm glad someone's pointed this out. I've been noticing it for years. There's a HUGE overlap between girls who gain and girls who have cut.

Ultimately - both are technically self harm... and they're both being done for the same reasons.

Psychologically many people cut as a temporary relief from anxiety; specifically to drown out feelings of uselessness and ineffectuality. They're cutting to deafen out the silent voice that is constantly making them feel like they have no self agency.

In such deafening silence they'll voluntarily take the dopamine hit from inflicting physical damage - because it momentarily makes them feel like they are in control of their own life and surroundings.

Gaining is essentially the same thing. "I might be ugly/stupid/lonely and don't have the talent/confidence/willpower to improve my own life.... but at least I can gain weight! At least I can gain self esteem and self actualisation from succeeding at that...even if its technically self-harm too!"

Thats basically the long and the short of it.[/quote

I completely agree with this. I'm not sure how many other fellow "adrenaline junkies" would agree with this, but for me personally I skydive and bungee jump and ride crazy rollercoasters pretty much because I'm desperate for that dopamine hit you describe. I've always sort of suspected it was related to my personal fetishes. It would be incredibly interesting if someone could design a study that could reliably tell if there's a correlation between interest in gaining and a lack of dopamine or other related neurotransmitters, but that would be ethically sketchy at best.

Never have understood the self harm /cutting thing.
Is hurting yourself a way to get back at someone else?
I admit my first gain was because I caught my hubby having sex with a very large woman.
I thought if he wanted a fat woman I would get fat just to piss him off but I knew he would never accept his wife being fat.
It did piss him off that I gained 60 lbs or so.

I'm concerned by how certain you feel on this, as if it wouldn't vary from person to person. This is a long and somewhat drug-fueled ramble but my own personal theory as to why it's so prevalent is a combination of this and the reasoning behind why transgender individuals have such a high suicide rate.

Obviously being a feedee/gainer is not the same as being transgender, but in the case of gainers it's not difficult to imagine that living "in the wrong body" and being told by society that what you find attractive/what you want to be is undesirable would lead to low self-esteem and self-harm. This is purely anecdotal but I've noticed that a lot of gainers also have had eating disorders in the past, and while this can be a "chicken or the egg" situation with their desire to gain, many of us have had this fetish since early childhood, before we understood the concept of an eating disorder. I think knowing your desires are taboo leads to internalizing subconsciously the belief that if you get thin/attractive/muscular enough, you'll be able to hide from your desire to be fat.

Going on with feederism causing low self-esteem and not low self-esteem causing feederism, the whole media outlook on feederism seems to try to paint it as your exact opinion, where mentally unstable women are being coerced by men to become seven hundred pounds. Knowing that your "sexuality," so to speak, is viewed that way by society could definitely lead to cutting if that's how you cope with negative self-image.

My other thought is that maybe fetishes are correlated with mental illness in some way, in that people who are born with brain chemistry predisposed to developing mental illnesses are more likely to be "broken" sexually. This means that gaining and depression are correlated but in some individuals, neither inherently causes the other; it's just that people who gain also happen to be depressed or bipolar or schizophrenic. Maybe this means feederism is a mental illness, but there's not much research on any of this (for the sole reason that it's taboo), though again, anecdotally, I've noticed an overlap between people with autism and people with fetishes in general, and if that link could be verified in a scientific manner, it'd lend more credence to this.

My take doesn't apply to everyone, but I don't think yours does either. As with most of mental health and identity, it's more of a spectrum.

That was a really interesting deep dive, thanks for that! Particularly the one where a negative anxiety response to amphetamines seemed related to restriction eating disorders. I just wish we could actually gather data from intentional gainers ethically, rather than just studying Binge Eating Disorder and having to extrapolate. I'm sure a lot of gainers do have BED, but that element of feeling out of control during a binge doesn't always seem to be there. I don't dispute the dopamine point though, but I want to know what results in a person developing this fetish in the first place, particularly people who aren't all that into food itself in the first place. I'm interested in the outliers, I guess. For whatever reason trying to figure this out is like my white whale.