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The Tao of Yoo So Fat - Contemplations from a Non-Feeder, Non-Gainer FA

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Admiral_Snackbar

Veni, vidi, Lionel Richie
Joined
Jan 2, 2007
Messages
2,920
Location
Minneapolis, MN
From my first days on Dimensions, it was always a study in perspectives. Just as you can slice the interpretation of "healthy" or "athletic" twenty different ways, so can you with size positivism, as I will term it. I lived most of my life in a closeted fashion, not realizing that the appreciation of big women (and men for that matter) was something to be celebrated.

I grew up in a family of obese people, and even worse, obese parents who hated their situation. My father was a closet bulimic until my 20s, and both of them had gone on diets in high school, losing weight, finding each other, and falling in love. That was their central tenet: Had they not lost their chub, they would never have met and I would not have existed. Take that, Marty McFly. My mother was always very busty and very apple-shaped. My dad is built like me, barrel chested, hairy to the point or quasi-simian, and no ass. He kept himself from ballooning up to 350 lbs. through his job - construction worker - and it's only been his bouts with cancer, chemo and diabetes keeping his weight in check now.

I didn't get fat until I a) got my tonsils out and b) began steroid shots for allergies in 1977. I can't pin my obesity on that so much, more on my sedentary, bookwormish lifestyle and the availability of a ready supply of junk food in the house; if I needed a Chocodile, Ding-Dong, ice cream, they were there as well as a clean-your-plate mentality. It's an odd dynamic among children how easily in those days weight gain ostracized you. I went from having kissy-poo girlfriends in kindergarten and 1st grade into Chunk from The Goonies. The cruelty thankfully didn't start with my classmates until--ironically enough--5th grade Catholic school, even though with my folks it was always an issue.

Now I rode bike, played outside, did normal kid stuff all through my childhood. Aside from pull ups, push-ups and various physical fitness challenges, I wasn't much different from other kids when it came to running and having fun. Nevertheless my parents ingrained one singular issue into my head, one which I still have in the back of my subconscious today: You will never be happy being fat. They saw it in the light of their teenage years, and worked feverishly to 'cure' me. I was on herbal diets at age ten, drinking banana protein milkshakes. My dad put me on a calisthenics program based loosely on his years in the Marines. I cut grass, pulled weeds, did everything else I needed to but with little success. Once I hit pre-pubescent years, I was caught up in religion enough to the point where it didn't matter: Why try to be attractive to the ladies? Priests can't have sex! I felt the seminary was my goal, I think even then I was deluded into thinking God kept me fat in order to shield me from the temptations of the flesh. Yeah, right. All it did was make me a joke to the guys and the safe male friend to female classmates.

Once I hit puberty, it all changed. No more focus on religion, but more girls, Dungeons and Dragons, schoolwork. Those jumper uniforms were mightly sexy when the more developed girl was in them, and such was my bane to be attracted to the girls who were chubbier and bustier than their friends. High school wasn't much different, and the introversion just sort of fed on itself, even further highlighting my limitations with the fairer sex. Again, lots of cute girls, few chubby ones, and few if any of them available in the sense my limited bravado could interpret.

All through my childhood, though, it was the chubby girls I liked. Yes, we had the usual array of cheerleader types, but the girls with some meat on their bones were the focus of my attention. I think with two of them there was this unspoken feeling, like we wanted to fool around but didn't for various reasons, mostly I think because we all came from families who somehow resented us for being fat, reinforcing the issue that we'd never date or find someone. Talking to some of them now, 27 years later, finding out they were as hot for me as I was for them but too chicken to act on it, was an exercise in repetitive facepalming.

First realizing my love of bigger women had to do mainly with my aunt. She was a taller, pear-shaped and busty woman, and was pregnant when I was 10-13. She filled out wonderfully, and I think my focus on bellies began with her. Even after the kids she stayed chubby, and while it wasn't this Oedipal type thing, her figure simply fascinated me. She dressed in a way that showed off her chub, and I hadn't seen that before--I always dressed in every way possible to conceal mine, wearing sweaters wayy too late into the spring to hide the rolls under my snugger Catholic uniform shirt. She's a big woman to this day, and has lost none of her appeal, and I'm happy she found a steady state for her weight.

Fast forward to the college/grad school years, when ladies of every shape, size and demeanor abounded. It was like being a kid in a candy store, only you're so introverted and shy that you may as well be wearing orthodontic headgear with braces wiring your mouth (and pants) shut. It was during that time, combined with the early-year bbw adult magazines and films, that I solidified the fact I was a FA. It was an epiphany to finally realize I wasn't alone, that there were other guys willing to admit it and women who weren't shy to flaunt their size in a sexy way. Most of them were geeky and a bit shy, too, so that helped.

I didn't start dating heavily until my mid-20s, and all but one of the women were at least 180-250 lbs.. Size was not an indication of mental stability in most cases, and by the time I was 29 I was running about a 5% success rate in terms of finding someone who I was intellectually AND physically compatible with. I got into some local BBW groups at the time, but never really got into the social dating scene as I had met my wife. She wasn't the largest woman I'd ever dated, but she had the proportions and cuteness down.

I didn't really start having an appreciation for the mindset until she had WLS in 2001. It was for health reasons (mainly to have healthier pregnancies), not due to a lack of interest on my part, and while I was hesitant (at that time, it was an open procedure with a giant incision and loads of recovery time/side effects), she did it anyway. Turned out to be a fatal blow for her physical self-esteem, as she never felt quite herself after that. A combination of side effects (gallstones) and malaise effectively ended her appreciation for herself as a sexy, big woman, despite my protestations to the contrary. I liked her at her largest and her smallest, but her desire to feel sexy or to enjoy the company of other people of size complicated issues.

Despite this, I had the WLS in 2004, explicitly for health reasons. I had the lapro procedure and did not have any of the side effects she had, even though I developed a semi-chronic issue with kidney stones that I control mainly through diet. I also never lost my attraction to women of size or the Fat positive community (as my lengthy posts her will attest to). I did however encounter a strong polarity in the pro-neg WLS viewpoints. I've been on both sides of the coin directly, and yes, without going into too much detail it is a life-altering procedure and not for everyone. My wife had it at a time before it entered the quick-fix zeitgeist of weight management and did not have it for what I felt were all the right reasons. Many BBW and SSBBW pregnancies here attest to that fact. In the end, both of us were duped by a society and an outlook that said we had to be thin to fit in, and how wrong we were.

The takehome mentality I've come to over many years of this is that you have to feel comfortable in your own skin; it's ultimately up to you to decide what you want, and not to let someone's desires dictate what weight you should be. It's fascinating to me that there are women here who would have found me more appealing at 350 than at 250, despite the discomfort I felt being almost 340. There are men and women all over this site who love their particular size, want to be bigger/smaller, and a host of admirers and detractors as well. The genre has expanded, become mainstream, become--thankfully--normal. If someone had told me 10 years ago that there'd be a host of sites run by women flaunting their big bellies and happily eating to get bigger, I'd have thought them mad given at that time the narrow popularity bbw paysites had. I have my own preference for what I feel logistically works for me as a man to find personally appealing, but it's apparent many men feel otherwise, the bigger the better and all that. We have factions of gainers, feeders, food lovers and so forth all espousing the appeal of their particular size or interest, and unless it crosses over into extreme dom/sub behavior or otherwise radically unhealthy considerations, I'm fairly open-minded about it. Everyone is free to wear sunscreen and all that.

Ultimately I subscribe to a partial evolutionary perspective on size. From the days of the Venus of Willendorf to the cues we take from human origins, men have always worshipped the fertility totem, the pulchritudinous, bathycolpian goddess. The voluptuous or shapely body gives the impression of fecundity, health, vigor and maternal comfort that the men always return to for succor and safety. Despite our current motivation for stick-figure standards, I think what goes around comes around eventually. We're becoming as a culture more accepting of size, whether as an ultimate evolutionary endpoint for our sedentary culture or a reawakening of the primal archetypes that drove us in the first place to worship the prodigious female. To me it's a presentation and an embodiment of femininity that outshines the appeal of any woman in an SI Swimsuit magazine or fashion runway. It says "you call that a woman? Bask in THIS, sweetness."
 

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