You might think gaining 100 pounds isn’t for you. Even if you may dream longingly of stretch marks or online-only, plus-size shopping (and who among us doesn’t?), you are probably thinking that the gluttonous luxury of being 100 pounds overweight takes life-long training. It’s just like becoming an Olympic athlete, you say; you have to start out young. Eat those twinkies early in life and build up a history of successful weight gain, just like the pros.

Not so. I am here to tell you how you or any fit, slim adult like you can take a lifetime of thinness and turn it all around. You, too, can reach the storied heights (and breadths, and girths) of obesity, just like millions of others around the world! Fatness! It’s a growing trend!

DREAM BIG!

Maybe you have dabbled in small amounts of weight gain before. The freshman fifteen? The I’m-studying-abroad-and-therefore-the-calories-in-this-cheese-don’t-count twenty? Remember how easy and fun it was to put on those pounds? And how delicious? Sure you do. Now is your chance to do it all again, bigger and better.

First, you’re going to want to set yourself up for success. Create a life and a support system that will encourage weight gain. The following factors will help you find and keep the fat, so add as many of these to your life as you can:

• failed/failing/toxic romantic relationships
• family drama
• failed/failing/toxic friendships
• financial upheaval
• school/carreer related stress
• working overtime
• faulty brain chemistry
• sedentary job

If you manage to achieve everything on this list, congratulate yourself! You are set up to achieve an especially dramatic and accelerated weight gain!

Now, the lifestyle factors. Choices typically portrayed as “unhealthy” by “the media” (pshaw) will benefit you here. Again, consume as much as possible of as many different items on this list as you can:

• wine
• cigarettes
• cheeseburgers
• french fries
• burritos
• pizza
• BBQ
• cheese
• pasta
• chips
• candy
• soda
• beer
• fried chicken
• fried cheese
• fried potatoes
• fried breaded anything
• whiskey

Sounds good, right? It is. It is fucking delicious. Have some more, why don’t you?

If you want to earn bonus fat points, go out to dinner a lot. you can order tons of rich, fattening, high-calorie foods that will come in huge portion sizes. Better yet, you can simultaneously drink yourself silly on high-calorie booze and charge it all to your credit card. Food, booze, and increasing debt — this gives you the sought-after triple bonus. It will complement your triple chin just perfectly. SCORE.

How will you have time for all this eating, drinking, and general decadence and debauchery, you ask? Easy. Cut exercise out of your schedule. If you’ve achieved the right life factors listed above, you’re probably too depressed, anxious, stressed, and hungover to work out anyway. You won’t have the energy to get up off the couch. People may tell you that exercise is a great natural anti-depressant, but don’t worry about that. You know what else works? Food and alcohol. Enough cheese fries and whiskey and you won’t remember your problems at all. Belly up to the bar, friend.

Now, if you are someone who has previously stayed within a few pounds of your “normal” weight, you might find the increasing numbers on the scale to be a bit disconcerting. Stop weighing yourself. Period. Just don’t ever weigh yourself for, like, three years. If you get weighed at the doctor, turn your head while the number flashes across the digital scale. Don’t look at yourself naked in the mirror. Don’t look at yourself naked at all. Don’t look at yourself in the mirror at all. Don’t even own a full length mirror. Shower with your eyes closed. Take photographs of your friends, but don’t be in a photograph taken by someone else. Just squeeze your eyes shut tight for the duration.

Pretty soon, you’ll wake up fat! Congratulations!

Now you are set to enjoy the many benefits of being very obese. If you’re a woman, your tits are probably enormous now, like a 40-DDD enormous. You don’t have to worry about attracting too much of the wrong kind of attention, though, because you have somehow (while becoming physically almost twice as large as you once were) become nearly invisible. You won’t be spoken to unbidden while out at the bar (this means more time for you to spend with that pint of beer and plate of jalapeno poppers); customer service professionals will ignore you; you will fade into the background of every group activity.

But wait, there’s more! You will get to fully experience every inch of a pricey airplane seat — unlike your skinny neighbors, you will be pressed firmly into every corner of the seat. Skinny people only get to sit on, like, half of the seat at one time. Being stuffed in so tightly is also probably safer in the event of a crash.

You’ll benefit when buying clothes, too. A size 18 pair of jeans has, like 3x the amount of fabric as the same pair in size 2, but do you have to pay 3x as much? No, you do not! In fact, your fashion budget will stretch extra far (just like your stretchy pants will) because the expensive designers won’t make clothes in your size. But Target will. So will Old Navy. Old Navy doesn’t really want fat people in their stores, though, so if you shop there you’ll have to shop online. This is another hidden benefit! You can stay on the couch in your crumb-covered pajamas while you shop!

But wait, you’re not convinced that being 100 pounds overweight is all it’s cracked up to be? You did all that work, all that eating, and now, you kind of regret it? Well, you can’t turn back the clock, no. But stick around, because I also know how to lose 100 pounds.