‘Hello, I’m a female gainer new to all of this. I was wondering how to develop a full, round belly. The more weight I gain, the more I develop rolls. I’m very self-conscious about them. Are rolls less attractive in the stuffing community? I’d love any input. Thanks.’
ChubbyAnteater has a problem and she probably is not going to find the solutions in the pages of Cosmopolitan. It is, to put it lightly, a weird world in which we live.
You might have heard of ‘feeders’ and the fat girls whom they attend to (if you haven’t, I highly recommend you watch the 2003 documentary Fat Girls and Feeders – it does what it says on the tin), but now there is a whole new fetish on the market. Stuffers – which I assure you is the PC term for these women – purposefully overeat in order to gain weight, before posting before and after photos on the internet, gathering fans along the way. And, although there are a small number of stuffers in the UK, this is a subculture that can largely be found in the US.
What we’re doing isn’t really that bad – people eat a lot every day, I don’t really see why it’s so different for me.
I spoke to Lindsey, a 27-year-old stuffer who lives in Memphis, who has been over-eating (to put it lightly) for about two years. ‘I’m about 22-stone now, but I want to get heavier. I don’t know exactly how many calories I eat every day, probably around 4,000 or more.’
But it’s not really a question of how much she’s eating, it’s more about why.
‘The thing is, it makes me feel good. I like posting photos online and getting men to comment on them telling me they love how I look.’
Lindsey has a boyfriend who supports her quest to get bigger the whole way – but when I asked whether he minds about the health implications, she shut down: ‘What we’re doing isn’t really that bad – people eat a lot every day, I don’t really see why it’s so different for me. My boyfriend likes it, so I don’t care if other people judge me.’
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If you have some time to spare, I would recommend a perusal of the ‘stuffers’ sub Reddit, although some of it is NSFW territory. As well as people sharing YouTube clips of their favourite bellies and videos entitled, ‘One of my favourite bellies’, there are threads discussing the problems of increasing one’s capacity.
‘I just found out my BF has a stuffing fetish,’ writes one user. ‘He like to see me stuff myself till my belly has a visible bulge. However, it is different from the typical feedee/feeder fetish because we both don’t want me to gain permanently.’ It rather puts the problem of your boyfriend not liking your lipstick colour into perspective.
I wasn’t a happy teenager, I was always a little bit pudgy and different to the other girls in high school. But when I started becoming a stuffer I felt more confident and sexy.
Tammy Jung is one well-known stuffer. A 24-year-old from West Hollywood, she goes to extreme lengths to make sure she keeps piling on the pounds, not least the fact her boyfriend uses a funnel to pour ice cream milkshakes straight into her mouth. In one interview she explains how she weighs herself every morning and night to ‘see how I did, and be proud of myself.’
Interestingly, when discussing her journey to becoming a full-blown stuffer she describes how she was insecure when she was younger – always worrying about being too fat. However, when she reached 200lbs, she says she ‘woke up and felt the best I ever had in my whole life.’
Lindsey also echoed these sentiments: ‘I wasn’t a happy teenager, I was always a little bit pudgy and different to the other girls in high school. But when I started becoming a stuffer I felt more confident and sexy. I didn’t even lose my virginity until a few years ago when I was just beginning to eat a lot. I know it sounds weird, but being bigger definitely made me feel less anxious in the bedroom.’
For some women, the idea of gaining weight and feeling better about themselves seems like an oxymoron, but for stuffers that’s exactly the point.
‘My boyfriend likes what I look like, but it’s my decision to do it – it’s not like he’s force-feeding me pies or whatever,’ Lindsey tells me. And what about the money she makes from selling her pictures online (which can be sold for anything from $10 to $50 a pop) – is that split equally, too? ‘We take the photos together, so of course he gets some of it,’ Lindsey explains. ‘But a lot of it just goes back into buying more food!’
Seems like a pretty extreme cycle of indulgence.
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In some ways it’s quite liberating to see tag lines like the one on the Stuffer 31 website, ‘Whoever said a sexy belly should be flat?’, but reading a little more of the site’s content is slightly less comfortable reading. ‘Pregnant models and burping beer bellied babes are also here to show off their growing bodies,’ for instance, or ‘Navel lovers will find plenty to poke around at… Morphs, inflation and crushing take the fetish deep into fantasy.’
So when does this particular fetish move from wonderful to weird?
I still love him but I am not going to let him feed me to death.
Well, in a way it depends on what the women are getting out of it. If we take Tammy and Lindsey at their word – women who get pleasure and enjoyment from over-eating and sharing their bodies with the world – then that’s great. But should we really be celebrating these blatant displays of gluttony? Especially considering the looming obesity crisis which we are all, by now, very well aware is causing serious problems, especially in America.
More than one-third of US adults are obese and fetishising over-eating is not exactly going to help things. Not only this, but whether it be for their rolls or their large thighs, the focus is still entirely on women’s bodies.
On one forum an American woman questions how to deal with her feeder boyfriend: ‘My doctor was pressuring me to get weight-loss surgery, and my lover wanted me to gain over a hundred pounds more… I still love him but I am not going to let him feed me to death.’ And although there are also Tumblr pages dedicated to over-weight men, the fetish seems to be predominately focused on female stuffers.
Google ‘America, fat girls and fetish’ and you will be greeted with 8,690,000 results. Being a stuffer might not be to everyone’s taste, but that doesn’t mean it’s not popular. And while I am a big believer in the idea that you should do whatever you need to do to make you feel good, this fetish does push the boundaries not just sexually, but of these women’s health.
Let’s just hope our pals across the pond don’t take things too far.
Follow Lucy on Twitter @DraperLucy
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Picture: Andrew B Myers
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.