Chapter 5 - lipid (part 1)

As before, any vague intention by May to “do better” quickly fell by the wayside. In no small part, this was because there was a strong, and growing, inverse correlation between her productivity and the healthiness of her food and the serving-size appropriateness thereof. As the new advanced manufacturing strategy for CalPERS gathered steam and May collected further responsibilities to research and develop further, sub-sector related strategies, her appetite only increased.

Another eight months flew by and May had been redirected into the healthcare file. Any coworker commentary on the irony of this posting was strangled in the crib for two reasons: firstly, because her immense weight gain remained an effective secret to almost everyone on staff, and, secondly, because of her incredible performance at her job. The outputs of her advanced manufacturing work paid early and strong returns for the fund, and afforded her yet more trust - and responsibility - from the senior executives.

Her next project, however, brought her to a topic that was frighteningly close to home: the healthcare implications, and investment opportunities, of obesity.

May, having grown more and more complacent with her ever-growing size, looked at the statistics and research in the field with personal experience that provided some novel insights.

Having sworn off the scale after an interlude a few months after her last weigh-in, showing another thirty-poun gain, she knew, at least abstractly, that she was continuing to get larger. However, she continued to show less than zero interest in changing any of her behaviours. Her bras grew tighter, she traded up two sizes in her chair (“just to be extra comfy”) and carried on eating to her heart’s content.

Her body was finally starting to adjust to the fact that she was truly fat. While her belly remained an outlandishly large part of her body, it had finally woken up to the fact that it was made of fat, not some bizarre gravity-defiying human rubber. While the top rounded out from the bottom of her breasts with a spectacularly smooth curve that still suggested (an outlandishly large) pregnancy, it now extended so far out from her torso that it indeed succumbed to gravity, and fluffier, looser fat had begun to hang towards the floor. It was as if, slightly below her belly button, the visceral fat of the top of her belly was melting at the bottom. It was extending far enough now that, despite her height, the entirety of her genitals were hidden if you stared at her head-on.

Much to her chagrin, her body’s betrayal felt particularly cruel in this context. As if being absurdly belly-heavy wasn’t bad enough, her mons venus had now decided it wanted to join the party. From the fluffier “lighter” parts of her belly that obscured everything below them, a whole new biome of her body was developing.

Her public mound now had grown to obscure more and more of the entrance to her vulva, joining the bottom of her belly in a pantomime of the larger appendage’s shape. It created many a strange feeling, particularly when she was trying to masturbate, as it made it harder (than her belly made it already) to reach inside of herself.

The only solution to that particular problem -- particularly since she had little interest in, and, she suspected, few opportunities to, date -- was to purchase a considerably larger wand, with an extender that allowed her to reach particularly hard-to-get-to spots.

Perhaps the only main upside to the continuing onslaught of pounds was that her breasts had finally decided that they wanted to join the party. They had now rounded out into almost-impressive honeydew-sized orbs that necessitated several bra upgrades. Comfortably into DD territory, she breathed a sigh of relief that between her expanded bust and wide hips, she’d passed through the Bear-like territory she’d inhabited for a few months with her huge belly and thick thighs, but few other curves.

Maybe it was the shift in her body type towards something more recognisably feminine that changed her attitude somewhat, but the more she dug into the research, the more her interest in, understanding of -- and, crucially, respect for -- fat shifted.

She poured over the recent scientific and cultural literature, seeing herself more and more in the evolution of society towards fatness. And indeed, while her shape was somewhat peculiar, her trajectory was hardly novel. A 2017 report put it as starkly as one could:

Since 1991 the prevalence of obesity has increased by 65% in men, and 25% in women. It was estimated that in 2010, England contained 6.6 million obese men (33% of the population) and 5.9 million obese women (28% of the population). The proportion of men predicted to be obese was greater than the proportion of women. It has been estimated that on current trends, by 2050, 60% of males and 50% of females will be obese.

Interestingly, back then, obesity still had a fairly clear class separation. Back in 2017, research had shown that:

Adults working in unskilled manual professions are over 4 times more likely to be classified as morbidly obese compared with those in professional employment, with women showing a larger difference than men. It is estimated that by 2050, 15% of females belonging to [highly professionalized and wealthy classes] and 62% for the females belonging to [lower-income, less-skilled households] will be obese. However, the predicted difference is lower for male adults, 52% of males belonging to[highly professionalized and wealthy classes] will be obese compared with 60% of [lower-income, less-skilled] males.

Roughly a decade and a half later, post the global pandemic and, interestingly, the increasing prevalence of highly processed meat alternatives and other lab grown foods, this gap had closed dramatically. More and more, despite the sophistication of the diet industry and various “health” products bought and sold with ludicrously high margins, people of all incomes and education levels were simply getting fatter and fatter.

And that’s where May got a simple idea that took her healthcare investment scan a few steps further: instead of trying to fight fat, why not profit from it?

Her premise was simple: no matter what the health data said, people continued to get fatter and more sedentary. The ease of modern living, particularly as investments to fight climate change and build an overall more sustainable society layered on top of one another, had made the world a more and more comfortable place to live. And comfort, through the wide availability of low-cost, high-calorie food, was increasingly translating into weight gain.

Most importantly to her, the economics could not be ignored: in 2021, the World Obesity Federation had estimated that the average national cost of obesity was in the range of 2% of gross domestic product in many countries but projected that by 2060, that number would be more than double in high-obesity countries such as Brazil and Mexico. In India, where the number had originally been projected to double from less than 1% of GDP in 2021 to 2.75% by 2060, rates had already jumped to 1.9% and represented potential economic losses of $450 billion dollars per year.

This meant while exact numbers were tricky, that investing in obesity-related technologies and services represented a multi-trillion market globally.

The best part was, particularly from the perspective of the epicentre of global obesity, American productivity and economic output would only improve as a result of investments that mitigated the impacts of obesity. From the view of a pension fund that tried to improve American economic outcomes at the same time as it generated stable returns for California’s former public servants, a win-win like this was an opportunity too good to pass up.

With an entire team behind her, including consulting doctors and technologies, the contours of an investment approach started to develop. An effective investment strategy would focus simultaneously on addressing areas of consumer discomfort related to obesity and then reducing the impacts related to productivity, efficacy, and economic output.

This meant focusing on reducing either reducing or eliminating some of the major health challenges of obesity, such as high blood pressure, diabetes, cholesterol, various heart disease challenges, bone,] and joint problems, sleep apnea, and general mobility issues. Each of these areas would form the basis of an area to invest in, eventually supporting companies that focused on producing technologies, services, and infrastructure that fat people would pay for to address the challenges they faced.

The idea here was to forgo the classical strategy of investing in pathways to reduce people's weight, and rather assume that they were going to get fatter -- and that technologies and services would be needed to support them as they did. It flipped the script on decades of prior investing behaviours and left behind that favourite American pastime of moralizing about fat people, and instead adopted the most evolved and enjoyable of American traditions: making money.

There was also a clear cultural dimension to this work, as well. As Americans (and the world) got fatter, the cultural perception of fat was shifting. The fascination with “thickness” in the late 2010s and 2020s had evolved into something, well, wider. The National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance had shifted both its mandate and its name from “acceptance” to liberation just after the US became a majority-obese country. NAAFL, as it became known, became an increasingly important political constituency, cutting across political dividing lines in peculiar ways.

A strong majority of the United States’ largest people still lived in Southern and Republican-controlled states, despite the spread of obesity to every corner of the country. And yet the Democratic party’s late 2020’s pivot towards a more explicitly leftist stance, and a longstanding connection with America’s fattest demographics, Black and Indigenous peoples, made them a contender in many of these races. The struggle to “get out the fat vote” became a core pillar of any successful candidate’s pathway to victory.

This created fertile ground for both policy shifts and a cultural movement that was increasingly looking toward what it could do to make their country more fat-friendly. Or, put another way, a spectacular environment to invest in.

As May became more and more embroiled in her strategy development, her appetite and weight gain only increased in intensity and she began to personally experience in real-time what the needs of her eventual customers would be.

With every added pound, it seemed like new shifts or requirements for her life were required.

The first and most obvious challenge was heat. Swaddled in hundreds of pounds of extra adipose, May’s previous challenge of staying warm had been completely reversed. Now she struggled to stay at an even moderately comfortable temperature in the comfort of her own home. Even a few shifts of her body, particularly the bits that rubbed against one another, generated even more heat.

The only solution she really seemed to have at this point, further adding to her weight gain trajectory, was simply to move less with less on. It worked well to a point, but despite her best efforts to avoid it more and more, she still occasionally had to go out.

Which led to the second challenge: as May had gotten fatter, both moving and sitting presented new challenges. While she hadn’t weighed herself in months, she knew she was well over three-hundred and fifty pounds now. That didn’t necessarily present a problem in and of itself, especially given her tall frame, but still being so belly- and bottom-heavy meant that her mobility was already seeing some limitations and she simply had less energy to walk or move than she used to.

And when she went to sit down somewhere, even in fatter-than-ever America, a lot of furniture simply wasn’t designed for people of her size.

With a growing salary, May was able to overcome some of this. She ordered Uber XL’s as a rule. She got groceries and food delivered to the house constantly, and gradually furniture in the house was swapped for things more suited to her growing body.

And yet, as each time before, the more she struggled personally with her weight, the more her enthusiasm for her work grew. And after some high-level briefings with senior staff one day, May began to consider a somewhat audacious idea:

if CalPERS was going to pull this off, they were going to need a more nimble mechanism that would allow them to make investments quickly. Additionally, there was still some reputational risk to consider when it came to profiting from the over-stuffed average American who needed help with obesity-related illnesses and mobility challenges.

There was an obvious solution for May: start a fund specifically focused on fat-friendly products and services, signing CalPERS as a foundational (and perhaps silent) funding partner, along with other investors.

Uncharacteristically, May actually took a week off work to fully delve into this idea further. Characteristically, however, she mowed her way through snacks, meals, “treats,” and other little assists throughout the entire process. If anything, having a new, engaging challenge only increased her appetite.

Each day she funneled ever-larger quantities of calories down her throat. There were moments when Macey could only look on with genuine shock as she watched May devour entire family-sized meals -- whole lasagnas, an effective cart of dim sum, and more. She could navigate excel and documents with one hand while shoveling things into her mouth.

A little rearrangement of the apartment for May’s comfort, too, meant that she was able to work in her room’s own office now, giving her ample opportunity to eat with even less grace than she exhibited around her friend.

One day, though, a little under a month after the initial idea, she was ready. Sitting awkwardly on the couch with her laptop resting on her belly and breasts, now mostly unable to get it closer enough to the table (or her “lap” for that matter) to work, she called Macey into the living room about her idea.

Covered in Cheetos dust, with messy, unwashed hair, the formerly lanky, formerly chubby, and now objectively fat May was not exactly the paragon of professionalism that would have suggested her work was worth taking seriously.

But as her roommate plodded down the hallway and saw the first slide of a deck on their TV (that May had taken to using as part of her office more and more of late), there was an energy about her longtime friend that felt different. Even with her somewhat slobbish appearance and general attitude of lethargy, there was an energy that sparked and crackled around her as she busily typed away at her laptop Snacking sporadically while she worked, it was only after Macey cleared her throat that to alert her friend she was there, that she was snapped out of her rhythm of working and eating. Gears turned and she shifted from whatever she was doing into a warm smile.

“Okay! Thanks for coming.”

Macey looked at her quizically.

“I wanted to show you something I’ve been working on. Do you mind?”

Unsure but curious, she sat down.

“Yeah, I guess. You really have been deep in… whatever it is you’ve been up to.”

May smiled even larger.

“I know, I know! And I’m sorry if I’ve been a bit reclusive about it. I just… I think I’ve got something really cool here and I wanted to pursue it to the fullest.”

After months of obsessive work where at times Macey had begun to feel like she was losing her friend, this sudden re-emergence and awareness was a welcome change.

“Well, I’m glad you’re coming up for air finally! What’ve you been working on so furiously?”

Turning like a showman opening up his circus, May gestured to the screen and flashed up the title slide. In classic pitch-deck fashion, it was simply a single word in a crisp sans serif font, on a warm green background: Lipid.

(Con't)