~BBW, Eating, MWG – a college Senior relates the story of her love affair with food
Chapter 1: The Be(lly)ginning
My story begins with my fourth year at college on the west coast. I won’t get too specific, but I will say that the typical lifestyle in my area isn’t very comfortable for people like me. I’m not huge or anything. I just really love to eat and I don’t see the reason why I should suppress that desire like the rest of the skinny blondes around here.
I don’t know if suppressing that desire is even possible for me come to think of it. I’ve tried to diet many times in the past few years. It usually ends very badly for me, or I guess… you could say they end well depending on how you look at it. In either case, they end in severe binge eating for a few days, usually putting on more weight than I lost, if I lost any at all.
Anyway, before college, I was always very fit. I played a sport every season of every year since elementary school. My mother watched every bite of food I took, and I was still getting taller up until freshman year in college. I was always a late bloomer.
Halfway through last year, my freshman year in the dorms, my growth spurt stopped at a whopping 5’5’’. I also got cut from my school’s soccer team, which meant the end of my sports career. I can’t say my eating had anything directly to do with it, but I’d gained the full freshman 15 by this time, maybe even 20. I certainly wasn’t ready to stop indulging how I’d wanted to for so many years, but hadn’t been able to because of my mother’s strict rules.
The cafeteria on the campus in my building is deadly for calorie counters. They have five food categories: the “grill”, the Italian counter, the salad bar, the dessert area, and the hot food area. At the “grill”, nothing was actually grilled. It’s all deep fried. They have cheeseburgers, bacon cheeseburgers, hot dogs, fries, onion rings, fried chicken, everything my mother had never let me eat.
At the Italian counter, the pizza selection is phenomenal. You can ask for any sort of toppings you want, sausage, ham, a large variety of cheeses, vegetables, barbeque chicken, even deep fried shrimp. You can order it deep dish, stuffed crust, or just regular. They also have lasagna, spaghetti, pesto pasta, ravioli, fettuccine Alfredo, anything you can imagine.
I don’t like to remember the salad bar. It’s not too exciting. That’s where I ate when I was on my diets these past three years.. The vegetables in the cafeteria were absolutely disgusting, always wilted or almost rotten, or that’s what I always told my mother anyway.
The dessert area is probably my favorite part of the whole cafeteria. Every day there is pastries, donuts, cheesecake, carrot cake, ice cream sundaes, milkshakes, cookies, drumsticks, any sort of sweet thing you could imagine is there at some time during the year.
Everyday they also have a different special in the hot food area just in case you get tired of the other fattening foods. The specials are usually some sort of barbeque or steak dish with potatoes or potato salad. There is also macaroni and cheese, sushi, Chinese food, and Indian entrées periodically. Fountain sodas, milkshakes, and slurpees are also available every day of the week.
The part about the whole cafeteria that affected me the most I think was that you can eat as much as you want, just as long as you stay inside the cafeteria while you do it.
Anyway, I’d never had to have any self restraint with regard to food before. My mother controlled what I ate throughout my life and there was never too much fattening food around, so I had no idea how to diet. In the back of my mind, I knew I’d gain weight when I stuffed that extra piece of cheesecake in my mouth or ordered that extra milkshake every night after dinner, but I went for the short term satisfaction every time.
The first 20 pounds I’d gained by winter break of freshman year didn’t really bother me too much. Because I’d lost so much muscle mass, my clothes didn’t actually feel that tight. My breasts grew a few sizes bigger. I loved that part of it and attributed it to maturing as a woman, mostly for my mother’s benefit. I started wearing a lot of sports bras because I didn’t have a lot of extra money to go buy new bras and my regular ones were just too tight. My thighs and butt didn’t get bigger necessarily, just flabbier. My stomach, however, had gone from a perfectly flat beach babe washboard to a pronounced mound of jiggling fat, a good sized potbelly. My shirts showed a little more belly after that and my pants rode a little lower and tighter.
Truth be told, I liked it!
Chapter 2: Winter Break - Mom Hates my Expanding Horizons
I hardly noticed anything different about my body other than my increase in breast size until I went home for winter break and saw my mother. Her probing eyes found my growing belly and pinched it the second I walked in the front door.
I remember it like it was yesterday. She ridiculed me in front of the whole family, regretting watching me so closely in high school and wishing she’d taught me some will power. She worked against herself once again, making me feel fat and disgusting and… oddly enough, hungry. Overeating had become a sort of refuge for me at college. I was frequently nervous, stressed, and lonely freshman year, having not made too many friends.
On campus the cafeteria had come to be my second home. Whenever I was nervous before a big test or anything, I would go stuff my face and forget about whatever was making me nervous for about twenty minutes. It would always make me feel better. Sometimes I’d take my computer and my books to the cafeteria and sit in there for hours, continuously eating and studying.
Lots of kids do that, but few eat as continuously as I did and few focus mostly on the dessert table. I have a terrible sweet tooth. A trip to the cafeteria was always something to do when I was bored and alone in my dorm room. My roommate was a skinny blonde varsity cheerleader that had plenty of friends and never really stayed in the room.
There were always people at the caf, even though I didn’t know many of them usually. Most psychiatrists would probably diagnose my use of the cafeteria as some sort of eating disorder, but I think a lot of college students can identify with my feelings. Why do you think the freshman 15 is so common? I just wish my mother could understand that…
When my mother poked my expanding tummy in front of the whole family, I was already prepared. I went went straight to my bedroom and pulled the tub of red vines I had brought from school out of my suitcase and started shoving them in my mouth. I’m not sure if it was out of embarrassment or guilt or both, but it seemed to make me feel better. It was as if I was saying, “Take that, Mom! I’ll eat whatever I want right under your nose!”
I came to consider her attempts to make me skinny insults, attempts at controlling me, reasons to rebel. I’d make it a point to get caught eating whatever fatty food I could find when my Mom came home from work. I’d make nachos, milkshakes, cookies, and frozen meals and sit on the couch to gorge myself pretty much daily, just to throw it in my mother‘s face… and because it tasted really, really good.
The 8 days worth of Chanukah dinner parties at friends’ houses and feasts on Christmas Eve and Christmas day at my aunt’s house didn’t help either. At big dinner parties like that, my mother couldn’t watch over me because she was always socializing with the other parents.
I relished the freedom and gorged incessantly. I can’t remember a single dinner party that winter break that I didn’t feel absolutely sick after. There were always plates and plates of appetizers, a buffet style dinner, and of course, loads of extra dessert. I’d usually spend the last half hour of the dinner party in an empty room of the house laying on my side on a bed or sofa, rubbing my belly and burping, trying to digest enough to interact comfortably with the rest of the guests.
It’d get to the point where standing up made me sweat because of how uncomfortably full my growing belly was. Various comments about my increasing weight and gluttonous eating habits obviously circulated around the dinner parties. I, of course, heard a lot of them although nobody ever said it to my face… except for my mother.
Hearing comments of that sort just made me eat more. They also made me wear baggier clothes. I’d wear chunky sweaters and billowing shirts to hide my growing midsection. This gave my mother the idea that I was ashamed of my weight gain and she toned down her criticism a little bit. This didn’t curb my eating though.
Eating at those parties replaced the awkward social interactions with all the kids from high school that I’d been forced to be friends with since kindergarten because my mother was friends with their parents. I had always been the least popular child at the parties and had always felt uncomfortable and self-conscious at the gatherings. I kept myself busy by continuously eating and standing by the buffet tables, only leaving time for brief encounters with the other kids.
Chapter 3: Finally Back to School – but never to the gym again!
By the time I got back to college from Winter Break, I’d gained another ten pounds in only 3 weeks. Everybody at school had gained a little weight over break though so nobody really said anything. We’d all been used to eating the greasy dining hall food and tasty home cooked meals were guaranteed to put a few extra pounds on even the skinny blondes.
My roommates and I decided that we should all get back in shape after we got back from break, so we went to the gym. While getting ready to go, I pulled on the little shorts I used to wear to the gym before the college 15... plus another 20. They were red “booty shorts” that said AHS soccer on the butt. The ten extra holiday pounds didn’t help me get into my workout shorts at all. Most of the winter break weight had gone straight to my ass and thighs, with a little resting around my belly button.
I pulled on the red shorts, having to put in a little more effort than usual to get them over my plump hip region. I remember them feeling a little snug, but being amazed at the image I saw in the mirror. From the front, the shorts sat above my flabby thighs. My inner thighs touched before my shorts came between them. They looked like some sort of strange bathing suit bottom. The back was even more appalling. The C’s in soccer and the H in AHS were stretched ridiculously sideways and the seam down the middle looked like if I bent over, it would rip. The cloth barely covered the bottom of my growing butt.
I was in a little bit of denial and I didn’t really have any more athletic shorts cute enough to wear to the school gym, so I took off the red shorts, struggled into some black spandex and then put the booty shorts back on. The spandex looked like it was choking my thighs. It made my ass and upper thighs look smaller, but fat bulged out at the bottom and it made my stomach much more pronounced, overflowing out of the tight waistband.
That was the first time I really noticed my muffin top. I threw on a white wife beater and was getting ready to head out the door, but I realized that my shirt kept riding up my pot belly. I attributed this to the fact that it was new and it shrunk in the dryer. That was a common excuse for me because I hadn’t done my own laundry in high school and didn’t really know how, so I attributed most of my clothes “shrinking” to the dryer. I changed into a baggier white T-shirt that only showed a tiny bit of my jiggly tummy. I took one more look in the mirror and decided that I looked fine, definitely not like I’d gained 30 pounds. I mean, the red shorts still fit fine, 30 pounds really isn’t that much, right?
My friends gave my outfit a few funny looks, but I was oblivious and they didn’t say anything about it. We walked the half mile to the gym and by the time we got there, I was already sweating. My usual routine was running a slow mile on the treadmill, getting off to stretch, and then running a fast mile. I’d usually do some light lifting and heavy ab work after that, but this time was very different. I got on the treadmill and entered my usual speed, but it felt a lot faster than ever before. I was struggling to keep up with my slow mile pace and had to bring it down a few notches.
My T-shirt wouldn’t cover my bouncing belly when I ran and my spandex was riding higher and higher on my bulky thighs the longer I ran. Everything was jiggling and bouncing like I’d never felt before. I loved the bouncing sensation, but I felt self-conscious about all the new movement on my behind and in my exposed gut.
I went about a quarter of a mile before I was too winded to keep going. I stopped the treadmill, practically drenched in sweat, and decided to stretch and then start up again at a really slow pace so I wouldn’t look too pathetic. As I bent over to touch my toes, I heard a loud ripping sound and felt my red shorts get looser. I immediately sprinted to the bathroom and hid in a stall for about ten minutes before deciding to take off the ripped red shorts and walk home as inconspicuously as possible in my spandex.
Lots of girls just wore spandex to the gym. Granted they were usually thin volleyball players, but I wasn’t too far off I didn’t think. I put my hair down and my sunglasses on so people wouldn’t recognize me as the girl that just split her pants. Before going to my dorm room, I spent about a half hour in the cafeteria, eating away my sorrows.
Spandex is a horrible thing to wear when you really want to eat. I ate a few slices of stuffed crust pepperoni pizza, a large curly fries, a chocolate milkshake, and two pieces of cheesecake. The tightness of the spandex made me feel a little sick, just because of the intense pressure on my underbelly, not to mention I was a little self-conscious about wearing it. By the time I left the caf, my shirt showed all the way to my belly button and I looked like I might be pregnant.
It was then I think that I first realized that I had a problem, an addiction. I knew that that stuffed full feeling was my first resort for coping with any sort of negative feelings and I felt okay with the idea. I just loved that feeling of being stuffed to the brim. It was a defiant rebellion to the anorexic society of today and I considered myself a rebel. I was also motivated by the wonderful taste of all the fattening foods available at the cafeteria and the satisfaction I felt at eating whatever I wanted.
I rationalized myself into being comfortable with this. At least it wasn’t alcohol or drugs and at least it didn’t compromise my ability to function at school and in social situations.
By the time my roommates got back from the gym, I’d decided that I was never going again. I never wanted to relive that experience, or even think about it again.
Chapter 4: Loving the Cafeteria
My body really started changing after that. I was having serious self esteem issues with all the changes that were happening, but my negative feelings about my blossoming body just made me spend more time in the cafeteria.
Some weeks were worse than others, but I was gaining at least a few pounds every week and my eating capacity was increasing exponentially. It took more and more to fill me up, but I would go to any lengths to get that full feeling. My stomach seemed to be learning how to expand to fit more fattening food, making me look unquestionably pregnant after many of my cafeteria visits.
I remember one particular visit from that time period very well. It was during finals week of winter quarter. Obviously, finals week is a very stressful time and it requires a lot of comfort food. It was Wednesday of finals week and I’d spent most of the week in the cafeteria. I usually went to eat in sweatpants and baggy T-shirts because I was still very ashamed of my huge appetite and didn‘t like other people seeing my gut after I stuffed myself, but this time I had gone in jeans and a wife beater because I’d just come from a very stressful final exam.
I was still wearing the same jeans as I had fall quarter, but they looked very different on me than they had then. They were extremely tight, but they were stretch jeans, so they accommodated my increasing girth in the lower half of my body relatively easily. They made the fat on my lower back bulge over the top of them and they rode low beneath my burgeoning paunch. My expanding love handles were also very visible above the tight waistband.
They honestly looked completely ridiculous, looking back on it, but I really didn‘t have the money to buy a bunch of new clothes every month. It was a losing battle to try to keep up with my rapidly increasing weight with fitting clothes so I just wore my clothes until they gave out and then switched to sweats. The white wife beater was an extra long one that covered my bouncy new belly, but it was still pretty tight and a little see through, as all wife beaters are.
The slight imprint of my deepening belly button and my now D cup breasts struggling to get out of my C cup bra were completely visible. Anyway, I thought that I’d just failed my calculus final and I couldn’t wait long enough to take the time to go back to my room to slip into some serious eating clothes. I thought my wife beater was long enough to cover my stomach even after I ate my fill from the dessert area, so I chowed down with abandon.
I don’t even remember how much I ate, but I know it was a lot. I hit every area of the cafeteria except the salad bar once without any problems. I was full, but I knew I had ample room left in my stomach, maybe not in my shirt though. My extra long wife beater was riding up embarrassingly, showing the pink imprints on my bulging belly from sitting in my tight jeans while the food going down my throat pressed the skin on my flabby underbelly harder and harder against the waistband of my jeans.
There weren’t too many people in the cafeteria because everyone was out taking their finals, so I just let it all hang out. I was too stressed about school to care about what my peers thought about my body. The wife beater was still a good inch and a half below my belly button. I hardly felt uncovered at all, so I decided to take a few more trips to the buffet. I got a plate full of fries from the grill, a milkshake, and went back for seconds to the dessert table like I did every time I ate. I absolutely love dipping my fries in a chocolate milkshake; the combination of sweet and salty is my weakness.
When I sat down, I could feel the food in my belly press against my pants forcibly. I stood up again, pulling my jeans down a little farther in the front to put less pressure on my full gut. I pulled the plate I’d gotten from the dessert table to me and dug in, not realizing that a few girls I’d met once or twice before were sitting at a table next to mine.
I polished off two pieces of cheesecake and a danish pretty easily, forgetting that I had all those fries and the milkshake left. I leaned back in my seat, absentmindedly sliding a sticky hand under my beater and caressing my taut belly skin. I was very full, but when my eyes fell on the fries and milkshake, I just couldn’t resist. I could no longer sit forward because of the pressure my pants put on the bottom of my full belly.
I sat back, hand still rubbing my gut, leisurely taking fries one by one and dipping them in my milkshake. After the fries were gone, I sat sipping my milkshake and burping under my breath for about ten minutes before I set the empty cup down and tried to stand up. Not anticipating the weight of my sagging paunch, I got about halfway up before my legs gave out and I plopped heavily back in my chair.
Along with the slap of my widening rump on the plastic seat and the sloshing sounds of the milkshake and pounds of food in my full belly, I heard an odd popping noise and then a loud, zippp! The button on my jeans had finally given out under the pressure of my heavy midsection. The zipper had unzipped fully once the button popped off and my swollen gut had surged out onto my lap.
I sighed with relief and relished my belly’s newfound freedom for a moment before hearing the snickering from the nearby table of girls. I blushed with embarrassment and threw a napkin over my stomach and hoped they were only laughing at my failed attempt at standing. My beater was now a good inch above my belly button and there was no hope of getting it to cover my pink belly, let alone my undone pants.
I contemplated my options: staying in the cafeteria until I digested enough for my shirt to cover my stomach and zipper again, just walk back to my room with my pants undone and my belly hanging out, or tie the front of my pants together with a napkin so that they didn’t fall down and walk back holding my notebook in front of my open zipper. I decided on the third option and tied a napkin to the two front belt loops on my tired jeans, held one hand over a notebook, pressing it into my inflated belly, and used the other hand to hoist my heavy upper body out of the chair.
I waddled as fast as I could, which was actually very slowly, out of the cafeteria, right past the giggling table of skinny girls in athletic clothing, hiccupping and burping embarrassingly as I passed. When I got home, I immediately stripped out of my tight clothing and took a long nap to forget about the embarrassing day, waking up later with my hands cupped on my squishy belly and a renewed feeling of hunger deep in my expanded gut.
My College Story
By Anonymous1111
(Courtesy of Fantasy Feeder)
By Anonymous1111
(Courtesy of Fantasy Feeder)
Chapter 1: The Be(lly)ginning
My story begins with my fourth year at college on the west coast. I won’t get too specific, but I will say that the typical lifestyle in my area isn’t very comfortable for people like me. I’m not huge or anything. I just really love to eat and I don’t see the reason why I should suppress that desire like the rest of the skinny blondes around here.
I don’t know if suppressing that desire is even possible for me come to think of it. I’ve tried to diet many times in the past few years. It usually ends very badly for me, or I guess… you could say they end well depending on how you look at it. In either case, they end in severe binge eating for a few days, usually putting on more weight than I lost, if I lost any at all.
Anyway, before college, I was always very fit. I played a sport every season of every year since elementary school. My mother watched every bite of food I took, and I was still getting taller up until freshman year in college. I was always a late bloomer.
Halfway through last year, my freshman year in the dorms, my growth spurt stopped at a whopping 5’5’’. I also got cut from my school’s soccer team, which meant the end of my sports career. I can’t say my eating had anything directly to do with it, but I’d gained the full freshman 15 by this time, maybe even 20. I certainly wasn’t ready to stop indulging how I’d wanted to for so many years, but hadn’t been able to because of my mother’s strict rules.
The cafeteria on the campus in my building is deadly for calorie counters. They have five food categories: the “grill”, the Italian counter, the salad bar, the dessert area, and the hot food area. At the “grill”, nothing was actually grilled. It’s all deep fried. They have cheeseburgers, bacon cheeseburgers, hot dogs, fries, onion rings, fried chicken, everything my mother had never let me eat.
At the Italian counter, the pizza selection is phenomenal. You can ask for any sort of toppings you want, sausage, ham, a large variety of cheeses, vegetables, barbeque chicken, even deep fried shrimp. You can order it deep dish, stuffed crust, or just regular. They also have lasagna, spaghetti, pesto pasta, ravioli, fettuccine Alfredo, anything you can imagine.
I don’t like to remember the salad bar. It’s not too exciting. That’s where I ate when I was on my diets these past three years.. The vegetables in the cafeteria were absolutely disgusting, always wilted or almost rotten, or that’s what I always told my mother anyway.
The dessert area is probably my favorite part of the whole cafeteria. Every day there is pastries, donuts, cheesecake, carrot cake, ice cream sundaes, milkshakes, cookies, drumsticks, any sort of sweet thing you could imagine is there at some time during the year.
Everyday they also have a different special in the hot food area just in case you get tired of the other fattening foods. The specials are usually some sort of barbeque or steak dish with potatoes or potato salad. There is also macaroni and cheese, sushi, Chinese food, and Indian entrées periodically. Fountain sodas, milkshakes, and slurpees are also available every day of the week.
The part about the whole cafeteria that affected me the most I think was that you can eat as much as you want, just as long as you stay inside the cafeteria while you do it.
Anyway, I’d never had to have any self restraint with regard to food before. My mother controlled what I ate throughout my life and there was never too much fattening food around, so I had no idea how to diet. In the back of my mind, I knew I’d gain weight when I stuffed that extra piece of cheesecake in my mouth or ordered that extra milkshake every night after dinner, but I went for the short term satisfaction every time.
The first 20 pounds I’d gained by winter break of freshman year didn’t really bother me too much. Because I’d lost so much muscle mass, my clothes didn’t actually feel that tight. My breasts grew a few sizes bigger. I loved that part of it and attributed it to maturing as a woman, mostly for my mother’s benefit. I started wearing a lot of sports bras because I didn’t have a lot of extra money to go buy new bras and my regular ones were just too tight. My thighs and butt didn’t get bigger necessarily, just flabbier. My stomach, however, had gone from a perfectly flat beach babe washboard to a pronounced mound of jiggling fat, a good sized potbelly. My shirts showed a little more belly after that and my pants rode a little lower and tighter.
Truth be told, I liked it!
Chapter 2: Winter Break - Mom Hates my Expanding Horizons
I hardly noticed anything different about my body other than my increase in breast size until I went home for winter break and saw my mother. Her probing eyes found my growing belly and pinched it the second I walked in the front door.
I remember it like it was yesterday. She ridiculed me in front of the whole family, regretting watching me so closely in high school and wishing she’d taught me some will power. She worked against herself once again, making me feel fat and disgusting and… oddly enough, hungry. Overeating had become a sort of refuge for me at college. I was frequently nervous, stressed, and lonely freshman year, having not made too many friends.
On campus the cafeteria had come to be my second home. Whenever I was nervous before a big test or anything, I would go stuff my face and forget about whatever was making me nervous for about twenty minutes. It would always make me feel better. Sometimes I’d take my computer and my books to the cafeteria and sit in there for hours, continuously eating and studying.
Lots of kids do that, but few eat as continuously as I did and few focus mostly on the dessert table. I have a terrible sweet tooth. A trip to the cafeteria was always something to do when I was bored and alone in my dorm room. My roommate was a skinny blonde varsity cheerleader that had plenty of friends and never really stayed in the room.
There were always people at the caf, even though I didn’t know many of them usually. Most psychiatrists would probably diagnose my use of the cafeteria as some sort of eating disorder, but I think a lot of college students can identify with my feelings. Why do you think the freshman 15 is so common? I just wish my mother could understand that…
When my mother poked my expanding tummy in front of the whole family, I was already prepared. I went went straight to my bedroom and pulled the tub of red vines I had brought from school out of my suitcase and started shoving them in my mouth. I’m not sure if it was out of embarrassment or guilt or both, but it seemed to make me feel better. It was as if I was saying, “Take that, Mom! I’ll eat whatever I want right under your nose!”
I came to consider her attempts to make me skinny insults, attempts at controlling me, reasons to rebel. I’d make it a point to get caught eating whatever fatty food I could find when my Mom came home from work. I’d make nachos, milkshakes, cookies, and frozen meals and sit on the couch to gorge myself pretty much daily, just to throw it in my mother‘s face… and because it tasted really, really good.
The 8 days worth of Chanukah dinner parties at friends’ houses and feasts on Christmas Eve and Christmas day at my aunt’s house didn’t help either. At big dinner parties like that, my mother couldn’t watch over me because she was always socializing with the other parents.
I relished the freedom and gorged incessantly. I can’t remember a single dinner party that winter break that I didn’t feel absolutely sick after. There were always plates and plates of appetizers, a buffet style dinner, and of course, loads of extra dessert. I’d usually spend the last half hour of the dinner party in an empty room of the house laying on my side on a bed or sofa, rubbing my belly and burping, trying to digest enough to interact comfortably with the rest of the guests.
It’d get to the point where standing up made me sweat because of how uncomfortably full my growing belly was. Various comments about my increasing weight and gluttonous eating habits obviously circulated around the dinner parties. I, of course, heard a lot of them although nobody ever said it to my face… except for my mother.
Hearing comments of that sort just made me eat more. They also made me wear baggier clothes. I’d wear chunky sweaters and billowing shirts to hide my growing midsection. This gave my mother the idea that I was ashamed of my weight gain and she toned down her criticism a little bit. This didn’t curb my eating though.
Eating at those parties replaced the awkward social interactions with all the kids from high school that I’d been forced to be friends with since kindergarten because my mother was friends with their parents. I had always been the least popular child at the parties and had always felt uncomfortable and self-conscious at the gatherings. I kept myself busy by continuously eating and standing by the buffet tables, only leaving time for brief encounters with the other kids.
Chapter 3: Finally Back to School – but never to the gym again!
By the time I got back to college from Winter Break, I’d gained another ten pounds in only 3 weeks. Everybody at school had gained a little weight over break though so nobody really said anything. We’d all been used to eating the greasy dining hall food and tasty home cooked meals were guaranteed to put a few extra pounds on even the skinny blondes.
My roommates and I decided that we should all get back in shape after we got back from break, so we went to the gym. While getting ready to go, I pulled on the little shorts I used to wear to the gym before the college 15... plus another 20. They were red “booty shorts” that said AHS soccer on the butt. The ten extra holiday pounds didn’t help me get into my workout shorts at all. Most of the winter break weight had gone straight to my ass and thighs, with a little resting around my belly button.
I pulled on the red shorts, having to put in a little more effort than usual to get them over my plump hip region. I remember them feeling a little snug, but being amazed at the image I saw in the mirror. From the front, the shorts sat above my flabby thighs. My inner thighs touched before my shorts came between them. They looked like some sort of strange bathing suit bottom. The back was even more appalling. The C’s in soccer and the H in AHS were stretched ridiculously sideways and the seam down the middle looked like if I bent over, it would rip. The cloth barely covered the bottom of my growing butt.
I was in a little bit of denial and I didn’t really have any more athletic shorts cute enough to wear to the school gym, so I took off the red shorts, struggled into some black spandex and then put the booty shorts back on. The spandex looked like it was choking my thighs. It made my ass and upper thighs look smaller, but fat bulged out at the bottom and it made my stomach much more pronounced, overflowing out of the tight waistband.
That was the first time I really noticed my muffin top. I threw on a white wife beater and was getting ready to head out the door, but I realized that my shirt kept riding up my pot belly. I attributed this to the fact that it was new and it shrunk in the dryer. That was a common excuse for me because I hadn’t done my own laundry in high school and didn’t really know how, so I attributed most of my clothes “shrinking” to the dryer. I changed into a baggier white T-shirt that only showed a tiny bit of my jiggly tummy. I took one more look in the mirror and decided that I looked fine, definitely not like I’d gained 30 pounds. I mean, the red shorts still fit fine, 30 pounds really isn’t that much, right?
My friends gave my outfit a few funny looks, but I was oblivious and they didn’t say anything about it. We walked the half mile to the gym and by the time we got there, I was already sweating. My usual routine was running a slow mile on the treadmill, getting off to stretch, and then running a fast mile. I’d usually do some light lifting and heavy ab work after that, but this time was very different. I got on the treadmill and entered my usual speed, but it felt a lot faster than ever before. I was struggling to keep up with my slow mile pace and had to bring it down a few notches.
My T-shirt wouldn’t cover my bouncing belly when I ran and my spandex was riding higher and higher on my bulky thighs the longer I ran. Everything was jiggling and bouncing like I’d never felt before. I loved the bouncing sensation, but I felt self-conscious about all the new movement on my behind and in my exposed gut.
I went about a quarter of a mile before I was too winded to keep going. I stopped the treadmill, practically drenched in sweat, and decided to stretch and then start up again at a really slow pace so I wouldn’t look too pathetic. As I bent over to touch my toes, I heard a loud ripping sound and felt my red shorts get looser. I immediately sprinted to the bathroom and hid in a stall for about ten minutes before deciding to take off the ripped red shorts and walk home as inconspicuously as possible in my spandex.
Lots of girls just wore spandex to the gym. Granted they were usually thin volleyball players, but I wasn’t too far off I didn’t think. I put my hair down and my sunglasses on so people wouldn’t recognize me as the girl that just split her pants. Before going to my dorm room, I spent about a half hour in the cafeteria, eating away my sorrows.
Spandex is a horrible thing to wear when you really want to eat. I ate a few slices of stuffed crust pepperoni pizza, a large curly fries, a chocolate milkshake, and two pieces of cheesecake. The tightness of the spandex made me feel a little sick, just because of the intense pressure on my underbelly, not to mention I was a little self-conscious about wearing it. By the time I left the caf, my shirt showed all the way to my belly button and I looked like I might be pregnant.
It was then I think that I first realized that I had a problem, an addiction. I knew that that stuffed full feeling was my first resort for coping with any sort of negative feelings and I felt okay with the idea. I just loved that feeling of being stuffed to the brim. It was a defiant rebellion to the anorexic society of today and I considered myself a rebel. I was also motivated by the wonderful taste of all the fattening foods available at the cafeteria and the satisfaction I felt at eating whatever I wanted.
I rationalized myself into being comfortable with this. At least it wasn’t alcohol or drugs and at least it didn’t compromise my ability to function at school and in social situations.
By the time my roommates got back from the gym, I’d decided that I was never going again. I never wanted to relive that experience, or even think about it again.
Chapter 4: Loving the Cafeteria
My body really started changing after that. I was having serious self esteem issues with all the changes that were happening, but my negative feelings about my blossoming body just made me spend more time in the cafeteria.
Some weeks were worse than others, but I was gaining at least a few pounds every week and my eating capacity was increasing exponentially. It took more and more to fill me up, but I would go to any lengths to get that full feeling. My stomach seemed to be learning how to expand to fit more fattening food, making me look unquestionably pregnant after many of my cafeteria visits.
I remember one particular visit from that time period very well. It was during finals week of winter quarter. Obviously, finals week is a very stressful time and it requires a lot of comfort food. It was Wednesday of finals week and I’d spent most of the week in the cafeteria. I usually went to eat in sweatpants and baggy T-shirts because I was still very ashamed of my huge appetite and didn‘t like other people seeing my gut after I stuffed myself, but this time I had gone in jeans and a wife beater because I’d just come from a very stressful final exam.
I was still wearing the same jeans as I had fall quarter, but they looked very different on me than they had then. They were extremely tight, but they were stretch jeans, so they accommodated my increasing girth in the lower half of my body relatively easily. They made the fat on my lower back bulge over the top of them and they rode low beneath my burgeoning paunch. My expanding love handles were also very visible above the tight waistband.
They honestly looked completely ridiculous, looking back on it, but I really didn‘t have the money to buy a bunch of new clothes every month. It was a losing battle to try to keep up with my rapidly increasing weight with fitting clothes so I just wore my clothes until they gave out and then switched to sweats. The white wife beater was an extra long one that covered my bouncy new belly, but it was still pretty tight and a little see through, as all wife beaters are.
The slight imprint of my deepening belly button and my now D cup breasts struggling to get out of my C cup bra were completely visible. Anyway, I thought that I’d just failed my calculus final and I couldn’t wait long enough to take the time to go back to my room to slip into some serious eating clothes. I thought my wife beater was long enough to cover my stomach even after I ate my fill from the dessert area, so I chowed down with abandon.
I don’t even remember how much I ate, but I know it was a lot. I hit every area of the cafeteria except the salad bar once without any problems. I was full, but I knew I had ample room left in my stomach, maybe not in my shirt though. My extra long wife beater was riding up embarrassingly, showing the pink imprints on my bulging belly from sitting in my tight jeans while the food going down my throat pressed the skin on my flabby underbelly harder and harder against the waistband of my jeans.
There weren’t too many people in the cafeteria because everyone was out taking their finals, so I just let it all hang out. I was too stressed about school to care about what my peers thought about my body. The wife beater was still a good inch and a half below my belly button. I hardly felt uncovered at all, so I decided to take a few more trips to the buffet. I got a plate full of fries from the grill, a milkshake, and went back for seconds to the dessert table like I did every time I ate. I absolutely love dipping my fries in a chocolate milkshake; the combination of sweet and salty is my weakness.
When I sat down, I could feel the food in my belly press against my pants forcibly. I stood up again, pulling my jeans down a little farther in the front to put less pressure on my full gut. I pulled the plate I’d gotten from the dessert table to me and dug in, not realizing that a few girls I’d met once or twice before were sitting at a table next to mine.
I polished off two pieces of cheesecake and a danish pretty easily, forgetting that I had all those fries and the milkshake left. I leaned back in my seat, absentmindedly sliding a sticky hand under my beater and caressing my taut belly skin. I was very full, but when my eyes fell on the fries and milkshake, I just couldn’t resist. I could no longer sit forward because of the pressure my pants put on the bottom of my full belly.
I sat back, hand still rubbing my gut, leisurely taking fries one by one and dipping them in my milkshake. After the fries were gone, I sat sipping my milkshake and burping under my breath for about ten minutes before I set the empty cup down and tried to stand up. Not anticipating the weight of my sagging paunch, I got about halfway up before my legs gave out and I plopped heavily back in my chair.
Along with the slap of my widening rump on the plastic seat and the sloshing sounds of the milkshake and pounds of food in my full belly, I heard an odd popping noise and then a loud, zippp! The button on my jeans had finally given out under the pressure of my heavy midsection. The zipper had unzipped fully once the button popped off and my swollen gut had surged out onto my lap.
I sighed with relief and relished my belly’s newfound freedom for a moment before hearing the snickering from the nearby table of girls. I blushed with embarrassment and threw a napkin over my stomach and hoped they were only laughing at my failed attempt at standing. My beater was now a good inch above my belly button and there was no hope of getting it to cover my pink belly, let alone my undone pants.
I contemplated my options: staying in the cafeteria until I digested enough for my shirt to cover my stomach and zipper again, just walk back to my room with my pants undone and my belly hanging out, or tie the front of my pants together with a napkin so that they didn’t fall down and walk back holding my notebook in front of my open zipper. I decided on the third option and tied a napkin to the two front belt loops on my tired jeans, held one hand over a notebook, pressing it into my inflated belly, and used the other hand to hoist my heavy upper body out of the chair.
I waddled as fast as I could, which was actually very slowly, out of the cafeteria, right past the giggling table of skinny girls in athletic clothing, hiccupping and burping embarrassingly as I passed. When I got home, I immediately stripped out of my tight clothing and took a long nap to forget about the embarrassing day, waking up later with my hands cupped on my squishy belly and a renewed feeling of hunger deep in my expanded gut.
