Lusting for Fat: Gainers Come Out of the Closet

July 1, 2010 — -- He goes by the name "Git," a 22-year-old man from Kentucky who is on a quest: to weigh as much as he possibly can.

The photos of him as a skinny 18-year-old college student are startlingly different than the love-handled, 245-pound man that he has become.

"Lately I've been infatuated with the physics of my belly," he writes on his blog, Gitbigger. "I'm starting to notice how it moves with me, how it gets in the way, and it makes me daydream about how it will feel when I'm bigger."

"The more attention I pay to it, the easier it becomes to imagine sizes like 300, 400. I like to think I don't romanticize it, but I can't help lusting over those sizes."

Those who are obsessed with gaining weight are known as "gainers," a once-underground proclivity that is squeezing its way out of the closet as the voices for fat acceptance grow louder.

Sometimes, the practice is sexual – so-called "feederism" -- when the gainer is aided by a "feeder" who takes on more and more control as the gainer becomes physically incapacitated.

They seek each other out online with acronyms like BBW (Big Beautiful Woman); SSBHM (Super Sized Big Handsome Man) and FFA (Female Fat Admirer).

An array of online blogs like Feeder Fantasy, Dimensions Magazine and Feed or Get Out extol the virtues of getting bigger.

"The days of justifying our fatness by lying and saying we have a mysterious genetic or metabolic disorder are over," says the Bigger Fatter Blog. "We now freely admit to and embrace what the fat haters would call gluttony. We are fat because we eat huge amounts of food and we like it."

And, as major health experts have noted lately, they say, "fat people are now the overwhelming majority."

One fat acceptance blogger wrote: "I'm tired of all of us being treated like circus side shows."

AnnMarie, who runs a BBW web site told ABCNews.com she is not a gainer, but defends the privacy of a plus-size world.

"We're just large people trying to navigate a world that is not built for us, in social lives that are set up to belittle and degrade us, and we try to maintain happiness, dignity, love, jobs, families," she wrote. "We're only different because we aren't apologizing for who we are. We're only different because others want to keep making us feel that way."

The National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance also condemns the practice of so called "feederism," because it coerces a person to become larger.

In a special report, the celebrity magazine In Touch Weekly looks at what it calls Hollywood's "big new obsession" and the perks of being overweight: "fame and fortune."