Why Do We Gain Intentionally?

(Readers--for no reason I can understand or correct, all the images I've added to this post are not showing up when I view the blog.  I have tried to reload them to no success.  Hopefully the text will be useful, but the images really made a difference) Hey Professor Fatology.

I have a question regarding about why we want to gain fat intentionally. I have read that usually our personality, wants, needs and other ideas situated about one's self are created. Or drawn from external factors. So basically is the want to be fat caused by external factors for example:

Many of us strive to be like our parents at a young age and we learn at an early age from our parents on how our roles are going to be like whilst we develop.

 Another example to explain my example:

A child has grown up with a father who  is overweight. Striving to learn from his father and trying to subconsciously be like him. He has a desire to gain fat and be fat as his father. Another factor could be that his father who was fat, had left the family at an early age, and the child has no influence to learn from and manages to find bits of information of the lost male influence in his life and learn from that. Still attaining that being fat is like being his father, bringing a lost relationship to him. And soon somehow confuses being fat as a more erotic sensation and finds he wants to get fatter


Do you see where I'm going with this?
(You can use this as blog post)

From Curious Gainer

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Dear Curious Gainer,

 

Perhaps it would best to review a personal feeling that I have a spectrum or continuum exists within the gaining community.  Put another way, there are extreme ends on a scale, where for some individuals there is an overwhelming erotic component to gaining, being fat, or being with someone who is, that is very similar to a sexual orientation. For a person with this sort of “sexual orientation,” it’s not going to be able to change any more than you can “change” a true gay man into a straight one no matter how much “quack therapy” you force him to experience. I’m deliberately using “quack therapy” precisely because every major psychological, psychiatric, and medical professional association in the United States (and a similar movement is happening in the U.K.) has formally denounced reparative/ “pray away the gay” efforts. In fact, the state of California has just passed a law making it illegal for adolescents to be subjected to this sort of “repair” attempt” to “fix” something that’s not broken—and these terrible efforts have clearly led to the depression and frequent suicides of young people who have had to go through them.

 

Going back to the analogy of sexual orientation, there are clearly people who are bisexual. There is also a continuum of bisexuals, where some are more attracted to men than women. Just so, I suspect there are people in the gaining community who are erotically attracted to fat people, but to some extent have no problem being in a relationship with someone who isn’t.  But just as a male bisexual may be more drawn to another male, there are very likely people in the gaining community who are happy to be with a lean partner, but would be even happier if the lean partner porked up.

 

Then there are “civilians” (as they are called in the gaining community) for whom fat isn’t a major erotic drive, but isn’t a “deal breaker.” These may include the folks you describe in your e-mail. In my experience, this will include people who belong to cultures where it’s expected people who become a couple will gain weight, and being fat is a clear signal to that community the couple is doing well—it’s “happy fat.” I think this is a clear example of what you’re thinking about. The couple (or the children, where some cultures see chubby children as “healthy” children) aren’t really focused on the eroticism of weight gain, or larger waists, but are conditioned to think of it as part of adulthood, or being successful.

 

There are undoubtedly some people who follow the path you’ve suggested.  I’m thinking of a specific individual whose father abandoned the family when he was four years old.  His earliest memories were taking his father’s old t-shirts, putting them on to experience the “smell” of his father, and stuffing pillows underneath his t-shirt to try to be more like his missing father. As a family therapist I’ve also seen things can go “both ways.”  For example, a child may try to model himself after his father/parents/relatives who are well bellied.  I have also seen children who are so angry at their parents/relatives, they make a decision to do the exact opposite of what they feel the “other” does. As a family  therapist, I don’t usually get to see people who are doing really well—I tend to see people in crisis or who are troubled. Just so, when a kid “acts out”, he or she doesn’t do it at “random.” The “acting out” child of a teacher will “act out” by failing a class. The kid of a cop will get arrested.  And you don’t want to know what the acting out children of Preachers do. Some children who are raised with parents who are health freaks will “rebel” by eating junk food and gut growing, just as some children raised by parents who don’t hold back at the dinner table rebel by refusing to eat, or upping their exercise to stay skeletal. Some of these behaviors start up as a type of “rebellion” and then end up being a very hard to end.

And here’s what I want to stress, because I have worked for years in a profession that is based on the “medical model,” where the first question is, “What’s wrong?” with a person. In many cases, this is a really bad question to start with—because, as with sexual orientation, there isn’t “something wrong,” but simply what these days the medical profession calls, “a normal sexual variation.”  This brings us to the idea of “kinks,” where, for example, being tied up for some people is an exciting spice to an on-going relationship, but not something that’s vital to a relationship.  This is different from the Fifty Shades of Gray “thing,” where it’s a “lifestyle.” Gaining for some people, or being with a gainer is an exciting spice for some people, a lifestyle for some, and a “meh” for others, where a partner adding pounds isn’t any more erotic than him having a receding hairline, but isn’t something that ends the relationship because the other elements of their relationship are what counts.