Hi Christy.

Going purely on BMI, you would have to put on 30 pounds before you even qualified as overweight (at 146 lbs). You could eat and grow with total abandon for several weeks at least before you reached that point, and no one could tell you that you were affecting your health because you'd still be in the healthy weight range.

This would of course be a lot of fun, but it would also give you the opportunity to find out exactly how your family will react to your expansion. You'd have plenty of time to decide whether to go back or continue past the "overweight" threshold, which is good in another sense because it gets harder to lose it all once you gain more than about 30 pounds.

So, I say give it a shot and see what happens. Any one of us, or all of us, would be happy to encourage and advise you.

Happy days, man. Enjoy the reunion.

Junk food isn't necessary, just (very roughly) 3500 calories per pound that you don't burn off.

You don't have to force yourself to do much. When you're hungry, regularly eat until you're full and then have a bit more, just not enough to feel sick. Your stomach will gradually stretch and not only increase in capacity but demand more food.

If the amount of sugar in your food has serious consequences, then there's nothing for it but to carefully control the amount of sugar in your food. One simple way to help with this is to make simple recipes with two main ingredients, one sweet and one not (e.g. fruit and nuts, or plain batter and syrup) and adjust the ratio until you get something you can eat in large quantities without crashing.

Even if you were to restrict yourself to a raw food diet, it's surprisingly easy to gain weight. Search YouTube for "got fat on raw food" and you'll find an army of very surprised people whose new diet didn't work out for them.

OK, if you want to take it to the extreme then the favourite recipe around here is heavy cream (called "double cream" in Australia). Get used to drinking it from the carton and you'll be getting fatter in no time. If you mix it with soft drink at first it will go down much easier.

A simpler and possibly cheaper method is to buy ice cream, let it melt and drink it. Try a tub of that if you like. Switch flavours often.

If you ever want something more savoury, buy peanut butter and eat it from the jar. A jar a day is good for about 5 pounds a week.

Just being in Australia for a while has a fattening effect on many visitors, but we're happy to help you get faster results.

Some areas, like the Gold Coast, are absolutely packed with restaurants, cafes and fast food outlets. You could commit to buying and eating (or drinking) at least one thing from every place you see, so that you walk in one end of a mall hungry and walk out the other end totally stuffed.

Otherwise you could try having a three-course meal of three different meals every night for dinner (or do it for lunch and breakfast as well).

I've got some background on this, doc. When someone who's rapidly gaining weight hits a plateau, it's usually because the existing fat cells are all full. They then take extra energy, and at least a few days, to divide into two smaller fat cells. That's why you can keep eating and not gain anything.

When the process is finished, you can gain weight even more quickly, and it's more difficult to get back to your starting weight.

For a thin person, the first plateau tends to happen after 25-30 pounds. The next one is a lot further on because there are about twice as many fat cells to fill.

Not personally, but I'm overjoyed when this happens to someone I've been advising and encouraging. It's more like seeing a student you've been tutoring bring home an A.

Well done Jen, can't wait to see the before-and-afters.

Don't get too hung up on the blood thing. It's part of their normal diet, because both milking and bleeding a cow periodically gives more sustenance in total than simply killing it for meat. The contestants are simply filling themselves up with more of the usual.

A friend of mine got pregnant, and before she started to show properly she began to gain weight rapidly. Her belly, hips and breasts bulged out of her favourite shirts, not enough for her to stop wearing them but sufficient to make them a lot more revealing. She was tremendously excited about that alone, aside from the pregnancy itself.

Anyway Jen, good on you and good luck.

The average person can lose up to a centimetre in height each day just from standing and walking around, and regain it during the night when the fluid flows back into the spine. This would only be exacerbated by a large amount of fat on one's upper body, but I don't know that it would become permanent.