My own sense of one food to help you gain would be your favourite snack munchies. I have bowls of nuts and raisins and Bombay mix and so on everywhere. When I'm gaining, I eat pretty unconsciously all the time, just cuz there's always food right near my hand.

As something of an anomaly in this conversation--I've been married for 24 years (yes, to the same person), we have never been strictly monogamous and are currently not living together--I thought I might weigh in, as it were.

We fell madly in love almost at first sight. And while the years since then--31 in total--have been stormy, we have always loved each other. BUT, there have been years of not speaking, and certainly years of struggling, and living apart for work, and now living apart for me to explore the intense feeding desires I've had all my life.

What I mean is this--if you go into a relationship imagining it will be sweetness and light and hearts and romance, you're probably going to be quite disappointed. But if you go in thinking 'This matters to me, and I'm going to try really hard to stick it out,' and then you put real energy into talking to your partner about your feelings, there's every reason to believe you can make it work.

Unless, of course, you choose badly, which we've ALL done at some point or other.

I don't have pets now, but had a cat and a beautiful red albino called Curly. She stayed in the US when we moved to the UK, just as our cat did. Curly looks a lot like the snake below, but with more white.

I'm with Arkansas. I have no doubt they hurt, were unwieldy, and so on, but lung-crushing? Not a chance. Unless she has some extreme bone density problem we don't know about.

What a lovely post.

I also think about immobility. Given a host of very frustrating health issues, I'm not sure I'd like it, but I also think I would get there far earlier than most for the same reasons. So who knows.

The biggest scare about immobility is, of course, whether or not one has a partner who can be relied on to stick with one. And given the stats on relationships in general lasting, if I were seriously thinking about gaining to immobility, I'd be given serious pause by that question.

My shrink thought feeding sounded quite tender and lovely. I haven't talked about it much, but I've said in passing that I prefer myself fat, and I like it on others, and (obviously) that I have feeding fantasies. I may yet talk more about it, but the first forays were surprisingly positive.