Chapter 1 - An Idea Takes Hold

As the plane picked up speed, hurtling down the runway, I felt the extra jiggle of my belly against the seatbelt. The gumbo, po boys, beignets, and pralines I'd indulged in over the past four days were making their impact known.

The many rich meals I had over the weekend were all celebratory. After a long series of virtual interviews, I had landed a big job promotion and would be leading the data analytics team at the Tulane Medical Center. I'd flown out for the long weekend for apartment hunting and was shocked to fall in love with the first place I toured. Not only was I Ieaving behind the traffic of Los Angeles, but I was trading in the insane housing costs.

I'd signed a lease for the right half of a duplex shotgun house in the garden district. For half the rent of my shoebox studio near the UCLA Medical Center, I was tripling my square footage and with the raise that came from my big promotion, I was going to have a lot more discretionary income.

My landlady lived in the other half of the duplex and seemed relieved to have a reliable, quiet tenant. Widowed and in her 60s, she was a large woman who explained that she spent her time baking and with her grandchildren. She promised she would be sharing a lot of her sweet creations with me and sent me away with a copy of my lease and a dozen turtle brownies.

I had flown in on a Thursday morning on a red eye, stopping only for an indulgent breakfast at Waffle House before I began what I expected would be two full days of apartment hunting. As a Georgia native, one of the things I had missed the most was access to a Waffle House and I had fueled up with all my favorites imagining it would be a long day of touring after a relatively short night of sleep on the airplane.

When my business was completed before 11 AM, I ended up returning to my hotel where instead of eating a proper lunch, I inhaled half a dozen brownies and took a long nap. When I awoke in mid-afternoon I found myself wondering how to spend the next 36 hours until my flight home on Sunday. The only thing I had planned, besides touring apartments, was for a decadent Jazz Brunch on Sunday. After years of being away from real southern food, I wanted to leave on my flight home stuffed silly.

Over the past decade in LA, I had developed an obsession with periodic binge eating. It had started during a particularly stressful time around the ERP implementation. I had bought a tub of ice cream to reward myself for the rough week and while I laid on the couch eating Netflix, I ended up eating nearly the entire carton. By the time I realized I had consumed so much, only a few scoopfuls remained and the perverse idea to just finish them off entered my head. Later that night, my stomach was so bloated with food and I loved it.

I loved the way my midsection felt so heavy. I loved the sensation of rubbing my hands across my taut stomach as it surged outwards. And I loved how it looked, bulging against my button up shirts.

It became an instant uncontrollable obsession and I completed the same ritual every night. But once I began struggling to button my pants from work, I dieted back down to my normal 160. On my broad shouldered frame, my baseline was a stocky look, which in California made me decidedly chubby. But every few months the urge to binge would take over and I would swell to 170 or 175, rapidly approaching medical obesity before I corrected course.

As I realized my long weekend was suddenly wide open, I knew that the answer was to enjoy all the food I could jam inside me over the next 3 days. I started in on the remaining brownies, eating them as fast as I could to get me closer to that indescribable pleasure of being stuffed full.

It was late enough in the afternoon to head to an early dinner and after consulting the concierge, I ended up at an upscale Creole restaurant just a block up the street. After getting settled in at the bar, I ordered a French 75 and the crab cake beignets as I contemplated the rest of the menu. In LA, I'd always done my binging at home with takeout and delivery. The way I could dispatch a dinner for two on my own was not a common site among the rail thin celebrities and celebrity wannabes.

But in the South, it was far more common to see women with appetites and bellies and I felt like in this city with a reputation for sin and indulgence, I could enjpy myself in public. In addition to the appetizer, I ordered a bowl of gumbo, the scallops, and a creole cheesecake. As I walked out, I could feel the rich food sloshing in my gut, but I hadn't yet reached true fullness. A quick google search revealed an ice cream shop around the corner and I returned to the hotel with a giant sundae in hand.

“Was the restaurant alright or was my recommendation so bad you had to have ice cream for dinner?” The concierge asked as he saw me returning with my 3 scoop sundae.

I instantly blushed, explaining that I loved ice cream and wanted to try some local stuff as my dessert. He assured me I had made an excellent choice and then asked about my plans for tomorrow to make sure I had good suggestions for breakfast.

I ended up sitting in the lobby, eating most of the sundae as he gave me ideas for breakfast, lunch, and dinner around the Tulane Medical Center, so I could sample the best restaurants around my new job location and then again in the area of my new apartment so I could enjoy my new neighborhoods offerings on Saturday. He finished by giving me his business card and encouraged me to call if I had any questions.

His recommendations were spectacular. The next three days all started the same, with beignets and coffee before heading to proper breakfast. I ate gumbo, etouffee, poboys, Vietnamese, fried chicken, oysters, jambalaya, crawfish, and biscuits. By the time I boarded the plane on Sunday, my stomach was achey and distended but I was delighted to learn all the wonderful places near where I would work and live.

As I enjoyed the sensation of my belly pressing against the seatbelt and jiggling during takeoff, a wild idea took hold in my mind. Much like the urge to finish the whole carton of ice cream that first night of stuffing all those years ago, this voice came from the recesses of my mind and I instantly felt powerless to do anything but obey.

I was about to move to a place with a much higher obesity rate, more than a third of the population. At the same time, the only people who would know me from the interview process had only seen me from the shoulders up. With six weeks before my start date, if I simply kept eating like I had for the past four days, I could blow up in size before I walked in on day one. If everyone saw me as just another unabashed fat girl, no one would blink an eye if I didn't bring a salad to lunch everyday like I did now.

The thought of just acquiescing and becoming truly fat was intoxicating. And I practically wiggled in my seat to keep from rubbing my stomach in public in anticipation of how I would grow. No longer would I yo-yo between stocky and chubby. I was going to spend the next six week growing into the destiny I had been fighting for years. I was going to get undeniably fat.