Chapter 1 - self-actualization

She couldn’t remember where it came from. Really, that wasn’t something you could remember, because its origin is unclear: nature, or nurture? Hardware, or software? Innate, or ingrained? To fully unpack that would take teams of experts with such a morbid curiosity into kink that they would have to invest years of research and interviews with thousands of people who also are dedicated enough to finding out the answer to the question “why does *this* shit turn me on?” So no, she didn’t know why she liked it. But she could recall two of the earliest instances of being turned on by it.

The first must have been right at the beginning of puberty, where being “turned on” didn’t mean much except a tingle that she had no idea what to do with. She was minding her own business, watching cartoons like any other day, when a new episode of this one show had all the characters get fat. To the average kid, it served as a cautionary tale to eat healthy or else this could happen to you, god forbid. While her rational brain got that message loud and clear, another part couldn’t help but be fascinated by the character’s transformations. There was this subtle helplessness to the situation that she got fixated on, and for whatever reason that felt good to think about. Whenever that episode reran, she always paid extra attention.

The second moment of realization came on her first day of high school. This girl, Cassie, was thin at eighth grade graduation, the last time she saw her. Then seeing her 3 months later at freshman orientation having put on probably 20 pounds, Cassie caught her eye. She could not stop staring and wondering what had happened to her. It was the first time she experienced perceiving someone getting fatter in real life, and from then on she was hooked, unconsciously scanning every room she was in to see who was fat, or who was getting there.

She reminisced on these cornerstones of her sexuality every now and again when she would perform her daily exercise of cursing why she was the way she was. That day’s round of self-flagellation was brought on by the one object that has more power over you as you step on it: the scale. 166lbs. She always thought of herself as being a 140 kinda person, so this shook her. She knew she was softer, but now she was clinically overweight. The eye can fool you, but the numbers don’t lie. She was mildly devastated, and significantly turned on. These were the two wolves that raged inside of her, and she was a bit tired of the whole ordeal.

“Why couldn’t I have been into gimp suits, or being a leather-bound dominatrix that stomps men’s balls with her heels? Something respectable, ya know?”

She wished she could get rid of this swelling desire to get fat, and often she did. Well that isn’t accurate. She never got rid of it, she would just ignore it, cover it up. She would get off watching people gain and stuff online, and while she could enjoy it for the sake of it, she also had to ignore the projecting she was doing. Deep down, watching others gain was a way of safely performing it for herself, in her mind. The girls playing with their bellies and eating McDonald’s in the car were vessels for herself to pretend she was partaking in the kink. She deduced this recently after being transfixed by her new weight in the mirror. After a morning shower, passing by the bathroom mirror she managed to muster the courage to give her body more than a frantically hurried glance. She stopped and inspected as much as she could see from that vantage point. B cups were feeling too small, and she noticed her tits falling a little lower down her chest than before. A double chin was in its infancy, with a tiny roll on her neck shape shifting as she pivoted her head. Her arms lacked any definition. She now had that chub where the breasts and armpits meet. The outer thighs had cultivated freshly formed cellulite. But last and certainly not least, her belly. She spent a good 2 minutes focused on it, doing the classic move of sucking in hard and pushing out as far as she could. Without any restraint, she could tell she was packing a gut now. Any small shirt she used to wear now would give away this chubby belly, lifting up to expose some skin and having her navel be more pronounced through the fabric. Thinking about this while playing with her belly had her very wet, and confirmed to her that gaining would probably end up being a massively orgasmic experience. And while she watched feedees sit and eat and play with themselves, she realized she was living vicariously, wanting to be like them, to feel what they feel, to touch what they touch. Those thoughts had been there all along, it just took noticing her own gain to understand it.

After years, her craving to gain had broken out of solitary confinement. It had vowed revenge, and it enacted it the moment she stepped on that scale.

“Oh my god, I’ve gotten fat…”

A statement of such immense weight, it changed the course of everything. She couldn’t immediately recognize what was going on, understandably. The negative connotations she always associated with herself getting fat put up a strong defense in the name of the socially acceptable and conventionally attractive. Being 166lbs was unacceptable: what did people think of her? Were they cataloging the changes over the past few years? Did her crush at work notice and get turned off by it? Her self-consciousness almost won out this time, until she came to the awful realization that those insecurities made her horny as fuck. That realization was then followed by the reflexive kink-shaming aimed at herself, which melted away as she went to her bathroom mirror again and played with her softness. She lifted up her shirt and pulled out all the belly and hip fat she was hiding in her pants, revealing a very defined muffin top. She patted to watch the small ripples move across the entire surface of her chubby abdomen and sides, and pinched at what was well passed an inch on all she could get her hands on. For the moment, she was enjoying herself the way she did watching gainers online.

Her arousal conjured an idea: why not do a stuffing? She rationalized that it didn’t mean anything beyond the one time. She wasn’t committing to anything, she just wanted to see her belly at its maximum capacity, to see how it would look bloated and pouring out of her pants. She was in her feelings playing with her belly, and she was chasing those feelings as far as she knew to go. The issue was settled.

The grocery store she frequents is open late and has a stocked baked goods section, so she headed there to get the biggest chocolate cake she could find. She thought it was cliche to go with cake, but she genuinely loved eating it which meant it would be easier to put away even when her stomach was begging her to stop. Peering into the refrigerated shelves housing the cakes, she didn’t know which to choose. The one adorned with poorly rendered frosting footballs looked like the biggest and the best bang for your buck, but there was a taller, more sophisticated cookies ‘n’ cream cake on the bottom shelf that caught her eye solely on an aesthetic level. It was one of the hardest decisions she had to make that week, but the footballs won out. It doesn’t make sense to use the better cake to stuff herself with, something like that deserves the respect of being savored over time. She had just grabbed her choice of cake with both hands when she could swear she heard her name being called from behind.

“Ella… Ella!”

“Oh hey Jessica, what’s up?”

“Oh nothing much, just missed you at work today. It was a fucking madhouse as usual, and they had me with Jake so I’m dealing with his bullshit all day too. It’s whatever, I get to sleep in tomorrow so I figured I’d grab stuff tonight so I can sleep as long as I want. What about you, what’s the cake for?”

Ella was pretty blindsided by the situation, she had a one track mind for this stuffing so she wasn’t even considering the possibility of running across someone and having to justify the cake to them.

“Yeah it’s for my brother’s birthday tomorrow.”

“Ah okay, that should be fun. Are you guys watching the game too then?”

“What, uh, what game?”

“Um, the Super Bowl? I assumed with the football cake you were doing a two birds with one stone thing.”

“Oh, no, I guess not, I wasn’t even thinking of it.”

“So he’s just into football then, or…”

“Yeah he’s big into it, ever since he was a kid.”

“And this party for the football guy isn’t going to have the game on?”

Ella could feel some sweat trickling from the pores of her forehead, but she was able to reassure herself that nobody knew her secret. Her story didn’t have to be straight, this wasn’t an interrogation.

“I’m sure he’ll probably switch to just watching that at some point then. I guess it slipped my mind, I never really cared about it, even the commercials are overrated.”

“Did you really just say that? You’re lucky I need to go now because I can’t let you slander my Super Bowl commercials and live.”

“I’ll never take it back,” she said so seriously it could only come across as sarcasm.

“Haha, okay, I’ll see you later.”

“See ya Jessica.”

After Jessica mercifully left on her own accord, Ella B-lined it to the self check-out and drove home as legally fast as possible, giddy with excitement for what she was about to do, and how she narrowly avoided revealing her plot to her coworker (or that’s how she liked to think of it). Having to lie about what she was doing made the affair feel much more taboo, more erotic.

She brought the cake to her coffee table in the living room, grabbed a fork and knife and plate from the kitchen, and plopped down on her couch. Sitting with it, knowing what she was going to do to it, the cake looked a lot more intimidating. Obviously nothing was making her eat it all in one sitting, but she thought that’s what she was supposed to do. “Let’s just do this one piece at a time, no pressure.” She put the Bachelor on the TV, since she needed to catch up and figured a distraction would help her blindly eat more. The first piece was dissected methodically, like how she normally ate it, at a party or a restaurant. She sliced off each corner of the square, and then each new subsequent corner those cuts had created, working her way to the middle until the corners got too small and she just finished it off. The first piece took about 4 minutes, because she was also paying attention to the show. Watching an audiovisual monument to western beauty standards and heteronormativity made her night that much more conflicted. None of those women were even chubby-adjacent, they were all in shape and very pretty. Ella couldn’t help but compare herself to what she was seeing. These were instagram models, yoga instructors, farmer’s daughters, or else just the most attractive girl working at the orthodontist’s office. She saw herself in one of the brunette’s who didn’t look so artificial, but that girl was certainly not over 130. She knew it was stupid, but it was impossible not to believe, at least for the duration of an episode, that having someone love you required this kind of “beauty.” She finished a second piece of cake but didn’t grab another one. That sour pain at the back of your throat when you are about to cry flared up, and she was back to hating herself.

Curling up in the corner of the couch, she gave into the demands of her self-loathing and watched the show another 20 minutes. She held herself tightly to offer some kind of embrace that might comfort her, but in doing so she felt her belly really pressing against her pants. It didn’t register until the show lost her attention with some lame competition where the girls tried to write the best love song for this man they met two weeks prior. Her belly was straining against her pants, and having fully noticed it, she couldn’t not think about it. She looked underneath her shirt to see a defined roll formed above her jeans. Her fingers traced it, from above and below, and she pinched it to determine its density. Pure flab. Like earlier in the mirror, she pulled out the rest of her belly and was fixated on how much of it rolled over the lining of the jeans. She flicked it and kneaded it and did everything she could with it, thinking of how chubby she’d gotten. Looking back up at the TV, she saw that brunette from earlier, but the comparison only escalated how she was feeling.

“God, I used to look like her, I could have easily been on this show. Now I’m so fat, they would just ignore my application on principle. Look at this belly I have, I’ve let myself go and this is what I have to show for it. I would look bloated in all those dresses, and I’d have to wear a one piece to hide my constant jiggling at the pool. I could have been so sexy, but instead I became a fatty, just like every other girl watching this show and wishing they had what these girls had.”

She turned her self hate into a burning fuel for sexual arousal. She embraced it, blinded by pure libido. She sat up and let her hips out again too, jiggling them and tracing rolls that went from the front of her stomach all the way to her back. Her bra came off after that, grabbing her tits and looking down to see how her belly pushed out just a little farther than they did. The comparison had her moan to herself and slap her belly, unsure if that was a sign of endearment or punishment. She unbuttoned her pants, at first to see her belly pop and jiggle from the freeing of pressure, but then to start rubbing herself off. The TV caught her eye again, and her middle finger circled faster. At this point, she remembered the cake which was by now feeling lonely and left out. She got down on her knees at the coffee table and started to eat from the body of the cake, no more cutting out pieces. Scraping away forkfuls of cake at a rapid pace, it tasted so much better than earlier now that she internalized what it was for: to make her fatter, to ruin her body, to let go of herself and think of those girls in that Italian Villa seeing what she is doing and the disgust they would feel. Half the cake was gone and she was more turned on than she had ever been. At this point, an instinct kicked in and she ripped off her shirt and scurried out of her pants, and started to eat the cake by hand. This was how she had seen girls do it on curvage, this was how a real feedee did it. Fingering herself and eating handfuls of cake was something she had only vaguely dreamed of, and it was better than she imagined. “I can’t believe I’m doing this, I’ve completely given in. I’m a fat girl now, this is it.” She rubbed frosting on herself and made sure to let plenty of crumbs fall on her tits and her belly. She never thought it looked appealing, but now understood how sexual it was to interface with the food like that. The food makes you really feel your lack of self-control in a very physical way, it’s a metaphor made manifest.

Once about a tenth of the cake was left, she was absolutely full. Her stomach was begging her to stop, but she had to finish it. She could tell that her belly was rounder than before, still soft but tighter than it was. She rubbed it and lightly moaned to herself, pleased with the damage she had done. Now she wanted the whole thing inside of her. She grabbed another piece of cake and touched herself.

“You actually are going to eat the whole thing? Jesus Christ, you are beyond saving. I can’t believe you are letting yourself go like this.”

And she grabbed another piece.

“You will always be a fat girl, nothing else.”

Another piece.

“After this, you *will* be a fat girl.”

She goes for the last clump of cake.

“... you are a fat girl.”

She felt like she was falling. Everything around her disappeared, and she became hyper aware of her body. Her stuffed belly jiggling as she touched herself, the cake crumbs rolling down from her nipples to her hips, the sweat on the base of her back, her thighs gyrating as she spasmed from the ecstasy of the moment. In the span of 8 seconds, everything changed. She died the little death. An inverted atom bomb of pure pleasure went off. It overwhelmed her so much, she had to cry from an immeasurable, repressed joy. This moment changed Ella forever. On her knees, covered in cake and cum, she had self-actualized. She was fat, and she was going to get fatter. There was no going back.