The Belly Illustrated

I. FREEDOM TO MCFATTEN

It all started with the golden arches.

I had just turned 16 years old and gotten my driver's license.  For me, that freedom opened up the world of my food fantasies; and at that time, McDonalds was the focus of my attentions.  No more begging for a trip to McDs, depending on the goodwill of others.  Now I could drive my own car through drive-thrus, load up and eat to my heart's content.

Suddenly I was limited only by my cash flow, which was ample, and my waistbands, which soon were not.  There were five McDs within ten miles of my house, and I began to frequent each one of them.  Any time was a good time, as they say.  In that very first week of having freedom to drive my own car, every spare moment found me feasting: happily scarfing big macs and chicken nuggets and french fries - oh, the pounds of hot, salty, pleasantly greasy french fries.  In that first week I packed on ten pounds, all in the belly.  At the end of sophomore year, I had been the only girl in my class to pass the 200 pound mark.  After a couple of weeks of McDonalds, I was up to 218 pounds.  In a way, the new freedom was scary; I wondered what would stop me from eating myself up to the 300s or even 400s.  The answer turned out to be: nothing.

On one particularly hot summer day before starting junior year, I had visited three drive-thrus to get my greasy fix.  I bought two double-quarter-pounders and a large fry at each one, pulled over into some shade to enjoy them in my air-conditioned car, then headed to the next drive-thru.  I was eating - okay, inhaling - burger number five when my cell rang.  My best friend, Ramesh.

There is a lot to understand about Ramesh, years of history between us, but I will spare you the details.  He is a thoughtful, artistic guy one year younger than me, and currently heavy into neogothic music.  We both felt like outcasts and our friendship eased the daily stresses of not fitting in.  Somehow we always had a good time together, despite the fact that we had almost nothing in common - well, maybe a sense of humor.

"Come get me now!" he hissed into the phone, skipping all the formalities of Hey, whatcha doing.  I could guess that he'd been at it with his mother again.  Probably on account of that Twist or Die concert he went to last night.  "I'll be there in five," I replied through a mouthful of meat and cheese.  Oh well, I thought, I was really too stuffed to attempt burger number six at that moment.

He was waiting for me at the top of his street, clearly desperate to be somewhere else.  I knocked all the fast food litter off the passenger seat and onto the floor, and Ramesh jumped in.  "Where to?" I asked.  "Anywhere, just drive," he answered.  We didn't have to talk about the fight he was fleeing; it had all been said before.

"Want a burger?" I offered generously, but only because I knew the answer.  Ramesh looked half-starved but seldom had any appetite.  Of course, I was the opposite - a very fat girl, growing more overweight, and feeding my face constantly.

"Nah.  Marlee, you have trashed this car, chick, since I saw you yesterday.  Did you eat all those burgers today?" he asked, kicking at the family of cardboard boxes around his feet.  It was a rhetorical question.  Ramesh knew my obsession with McDs and anyone could see how much I'd been eating lately. His eyes took in how my bare belly was overflowing the unbuttoned waistband of my pants, but he made no comment.  There are some things you just don't point out to your best friend.

"I wish you could've come with me last night - it so rocked, seriously freaking rocked.  They came on from the sides of the stage swinging on metal cables, wearing chainmail with flashing lights around the edges..."  He went on in detail, and I kind of tuned out.  Twist or Die was music I tolerated out of friendship.  I could just barely put up with it, but Ramesh was always dead serious about music, so I held my tongue.

Within a few minutes we were cruising through a rather sketchy part of town.  "Hey, stop here, stop - I know what we're going to do.  We're going to get tattoos," he informed me, like it was some foregone conclusion that I wanted a tattoo.  The thought had actually never crossed my mind.  We pulled up in front of a beautifully hand-lettered sign, The Ink Artiste's Studio.  "I want to get Twist or Die, right here," he said, indicating his upper arm.  He hopped out and stood there waiting.  "Um, aren't you coming with me?"

I didn't want to.  I was sluggish from the burgers and fries; so miserably bloated that I knew my belly couldn't be squeezed back into my unbuttoned pants, and I didn't want to waddle out of my car in that condition.  How I wished I could just stay in the car and eat that last burger, and maybe take a nap.  I stalled, trying desperately to think up a tactful way to suggest this.

"Marlee.  Bring your burger and come on," he said, reading my mind.  It felt like an obligation of best-friendship, so I went dutifully.

Anyone can guess what happened next... an hour later I sat next to Ramesh, watching the needle go in and out of his dark skin, and he was telling me I absolutely had to get one too.  He described it in such poetic terms; the most exquisite pain, a revitalizing sensation, I think he said.  I sat there in a tattoo studio next to my friend, with my sweaty, porky gut hanging out, eating my sixth double-quarter-pounder of that day and it was barely lunchtime... and I knew what symbol I wanted pierced into my skin:  the golden arches.  A yellow M on a field of red.  I told the Ink Artiste and he did not bat an eyelash.  (Nor did he card either of us, which was a good thing since we were of course underage.)

"That's lovely, where do you want it?" he asked.  Could there be any doubt?  "Here," I said, patting the thickest roll of fat just to the right side of my navel.  Ramesh was right about the pain... it was exquisite and completely took my mind away from feeling uncomfortably stuffed.

Much later that night, I lay in bed eating a bag of double-stuff Oreos with a huge mug of milk, thinking about this rash decision I'd made... it was just so thrilling.  I adored the food under those golden arches, and I was excited to think about advertising it with my growing belly.  It was a better high than any drug I'd tried; I felt I had done something very brave - marking my body as a deliberate glutton, my appetite spelled out for everyone to see.


II. OUT OF CONTROL

From that day on, I had a new obsession.  Tattoos can be addictive, like the food from McDs.  Actually, after about a month of eating McDs every day, in every possible combination, I actually started to get a little tired of it.  I found myself craving Arbys instead:  roast beef and cheese, with those wonderfully seasoned curly fries smothered in cheese sauce, and a large side of deep fried cheese sticks.  

Soon the scale had jumped to 230 pounds.  I had a to buy a few new larger outfits to cover my expanding girth.  I couldn't stop pigging out, but at least I tried to keep my widening belly respectably hidden behind a waistband and out of sight.  The secret knowledge of my tattoo fanned the fires of my already voracious appetite.

And the next thing I knew, I was begging Ramesh to go back with me and get another one.  He declined the tattoo, but came along and kept me company.  His tat had been an act of rebellion, and maybe he was already sorry he'd done it.  If so I couldn't blame him; I thought Twist or Die was about as revolutionary as New Kids On The Block.  But there are some things you just don't point out to your best friend.

The Arbys logo with its big floppy cowboy hat joined the golden arches on the other side of my navel.  The Ink Artiste remained very professional and just noted very casually that his workspace was bigger than a few weeks ago.  "That seems to be the trend," I agreed cheerfully.  "Rapid growth and outward expansion."  As if my huge fleshy belly was just another stock on the market - like Arbys and McDs, the unwitting corporate sponsors of my gluttony.  I told him I'd be back in a week or two to add Oreos.  Ink Artiste, who turned out to be a very good guy named Gordon, wrote later on his website that was the day he realized I was going to be an interesting project.

The foods came in phases, cycling in and out of my remaining high school years, but my weight was only headed one direction.  My belly grew heavier - and more colorful.  Krispy Kreme doughnuts were one brief but passionate affair, as I approached the 250 pound mark during my junior year. I became so obsessed with these sweet goodies that for a couple of weeks, I never went to bed without a dozen box, microwave-warmed.  On Valentine's day they sold heart-shaped Krispy Kremes filled with raspberry jelly, and somehow I managed to smuggle in and devour two dozen before the end of the school day.  All my assignments that day were decorated with sticky pink fingerprints.  According to a chart in my health book, at 253 I had gone past the limits of "overweight" and was now officially obese.

SaraLee earned her place on my wall of fame:  those frozen eclairs and pastry creampuffs were so heavenly, and so fattening, and you could take them anywhere.  A ziploc bag full of cream puffs, stashed in a jacket pocket and raided unobtrusively at ten minute intervals, could get me through to lunch time.  Unless I lost control and ate them all in the first class period.  Oh, SaraLee!

Lunch was a different story.  Ramesh and I would sit at our outcast table in the corner of the cafeteria, and I would eat my school lunch and then race the clock to gobble up most of his home cooked lunch, which was usually quite fattening.  I had overheard his mean-spirited mother on the phone telling someone "That boy needs some fattening up!  Unlike that big huge porker of a girl he hangs out with."  But as long as she kept Ramesh - meaning me - supplied with Reeses cups and macaroni and cheese, she could say whatever she wanted.  Her son stayed wiry while I grew porkier.  Somewhere around 265 pounds, Reeses and Kraft Cheesy Macaroni joined the parade of foods marching across my gut, and then school was finally out for summer.  I longed to lash back at that nasty woman for how she was always ragging on Ramesh.  I wanted to lift up my shirt sometime and show her where all her fattening lunches and peanut butter cups had ended up.  Of course I didn't, in case it was possible to make things at home worse for him.  Ramesh still got a kick out of it though; he called me his porky piggy and it was our private joke.

Around this time I was coming to realize that I was at war with myself and would have to make a choice: either stop indulging and control my appetite, or accept my ballooning body as a natural consequence of being me, Marlee.  The first option was unthinkable, so my weight gain continued out of control.


III. AN ENDLESS BINGE

The summer between my junior and senior year was an endless binge.  It was just too hot to leave the house, so I ordered in every day.  I spent weeks laying on the couch, watching TV and rapidly packing on the pounds.  For a person as fat as I had become, air conditioning is a requirement for surviving the summer.  I could work up a sweat just waddling from couch to front door to get my pizza.  

Pizza Hut and their thick buttery stuffed crusts fattened me up for two and a half months.  Whatever dry bread was left after devouring all the cheese, I'd use it to soak up that melted butter they provided in those handy little cups labeled "dipping sauce."  Of course, there was plenty of other food in the house besides pizza.  Most nights I would polish off one extra large stuffed crust cheese lovers pizza before bed.  Once towards the end of summer break, I ordered and ate two pizzas and a basket of wings, and passed out on the couch because I was too bloated to get up and go to my bedroom.  Even the next morning, I was still so painfully engorged that I couldn't bend over to pick up the empty pizza boxes off the floor.  So much food strained the limits of my stomach that I really wondered if it could explode.  

That day I visited Gordon to get Pizza Hut inked onto my massive right breast, and his poker face finally failed him: he was unable to hide his shock at how much heavier I'd gotten in just a few weeks.  But I was starting to come to peace with the fact that my weight was a runaway train, rolling towards 300 pounds.

On the way home, I stopped to check my weight at the pharmacy, since I'd maxed out the scale at home.  304 pounds.  The chart I'd ripped out of my old my health book said that I had reached the final frontier, morbid obesity.  Like my scale at home, that chart didn't even go beyond 300 pounds.

But I did, and that was when the problems really started.  At the beginning of senior year, when I returned from summer break nearly 40 pounds heavier, morbidly obese at 304 pounds, I could no longer fit into a normal desk and had to sit at a special table in each of my classrooms.  That wasn't the only problem:  my weight made walking any distance a huge effort, so after every class change I arrived out of breath, sweaty, and usually late.  On top of that, at the beginning of the school year I bought lots of new clothes, which were roomy and comfy at the time.  They soon grew snug, then tighter and tighter.  By winter break their waistbands were biting viciously into my soft rolls of fat, sometimes making it hard to breathe.  But all these were minor annoyances, compared to the pleasure of wallowing in food and watching my body expand.  

During senior year, I added KFC, Little Debbie, and Mayfield (yup, the ice cream advertised by its big fat cow) - and by that time, my stomach was a collage.  My car was stocked like a candy store on wheels, so I could munch chocolate bars and cookies on the way to school and on the way home.  Gordon added Twix and Chips Ahoy to my thickening rolls of belly fat.  Even my teachers knew that my backpack was usually half full of food, so by spring I no longer even tried to sneak my constant gorging.  Why bother to hide my eating and my food, when my growing obesity was so obviously out of control?  And so, with no shame to slow me down, my weight kept soaring.  Only Ramesh seemed to understand.  He always brought me food when he could.  He never said a word to embarrass me when I'd eaten so much that I needed help to get up out of my chair; he just helped me up.  Some things that you just don't point out to your best friend.

When I finally graduated, Marlee the chunky girl had become Marlee the beached whale, and everybody had something to say about it.  There were the standard stupid jokes that my graduation gown must be a circus tent, but amazingly, they no longer hurt me.  Some jerk went around taking bets about how much weight I'd gained.  When he approached me at our graduation ceremony and brazenly asked me, I proudly told him:  I weigh 328 pounds, and I've gained over 100 pounds in less than two years.  

I had really come to like my porcine body, my enormous fat thighs and hips, my tremendous belly, my massive breasts.  I tried not to care too much about how difficult it was becoming to walk even short distances.  True, there was the relentless bellyache from constant overeating.  But I had come to enjoy the pain of gluttony, just like the pain of getting tattooed.  As they played that traditional graduation tune and I lumbered slowly and heavily across the stage, I began to wonder: what kinds of food could I get on a college campus, and more importantly, would the desks be big enough to hold my weight?