When the strawberry cream cheesecake disappeared there was only one suspect. It was the same that time when the ice cream vanished, and when the Christmas cake went walking on December 23rd. It was Phil. It was always Phil. It was Phil who drank all the Coca Cola and it was Phil who ate all the sweets on Halloween. When he was five he ate all of the chocolate spread from the jar before putting it back in the cupboard. He once, aged seven, ate his brother’s packed lunch before they even left for school. At eleven he was caught with his hand in the biscuit tin and at fifteen he was suspended from school for drinking the preschooler’s milk. Now aged twenty seven he was exactly the same. Phil was still a thief.

His parents were not to blame. They were good, honest, hard working Americans who believed in supplying their children with everything they needed, who gave their children a better life than they had. There was always plenty of food on the table and their boys’ bellies were kept more than full, but for Phil it wasn’t somehow enough.

The family had moved to England when Phil was only three years old. It was a real pain for his parents to leave their home in Oklahoma but the opportunity had been too good to pass up. The Church had put its faith in them and paid them well to spread the word. They were true believers.

The move meant that Phil and his older brother were placed in a normal community school. This was fine at first but it didn’t take long for the misunderstanding British state to begin to interfere. At first it was the teacher who reported her concerns about Phil’s weight and the fact that it only seemed to be increasing. He hence found himself being prodded and measured by the school nurse who only tutted and shook her head as she typed her notes into her laptop, while he helped himself to every lollipop on her desk. It was his brother though who brought the real trouble home when he thanked the nurse for commenting on his twenty pound gain. His polite gratitude was enough for the nurse to raise the concern to the next level. When both boys cheerfully explained to the social service lady that, yes, their parents were purposefully feeding them fatter, the issue came to a head.

Phil’s parents protested that it was their choice, it was their religion, and that nobody had the right to interfere in how they chose to raise their children. Years of legal arguments followed with the case occasionally making local and national news. Phil and his brother were intermittently withdrawn from school throughout their childhood but always returned when some social servant or legal type would complain that they were more at harm from the ‘homeschooling’ than they were at school. Homeschooling consisted of cooking class, baking class, and home economics (in order to ensure that they were getting some maths), “If you buy ten donuts at £1.50 each then how many calories will you consume?”

This cycle continued for almost sixteen years. Phil’s parents won their case just as their youngest son finished school. Their message spread and mission complete they immediately arranged their return to Oklahoma. The whole family was thrilled to be returning to live with their own kind. Phil’s Dad had always painted their home state as being a land of milk and honey where portion sizes were bigger and refills were free. Phil though would not get to see his homeland. He was denied entry to the United States due to a criminal conviction for shoplifting a bag of Cheese Doritos when he was fourteen. Phil’s parents had made him and his brother dual US/UK citizens several years before. The US may have been more open to allowing its citizens to overeat than the UK was but it was not open to “foreign criminals.” 

Phil was forced to stay in England, where at the age of twenty seven he would once more be arrested for stealing a strawberry cream cheesecake.

Due to the publicity that his parents' case had received, Phil was a minor celebrity within the gaining scene in England. He was the fat American kid who had fought against the system and won. And he had the belly to show it. He weighed as many stones as he was years old and most of it sat around his waist. His massive belly barrelled out over his fifty inch jeans and bounced with every step he took. He had scruffy curly hair that stuck out the bottom of the cap that he always wore and a permanent five o'clock shadow across his huge double chin. He was casually dressed but always looked clean due to the fact that he showered and shaved every day, unlike some men his size who found personal hygiene too much of an effort. 

Always popular with his peers, Phil led an easy life in England. His church provided him with a generous allowance which allowed him to continue with his gains. He had never had a job as he had never needed one. Every day was a delight, full of snacks, treats, and massive meals. Phil didn’t need to steal, he never had. It was just a habit that he had learnt at a young age and couldn’t shake. It had never mattered how much he already had; he always wanted more.

On the day in question he was returning from the pub where he had consumed two Sunday roasts and about six pints of ale. He hadn’t had any pudding. The smell from the bakery was heavenly but the length of the queue was hellish. His never satisfied stomach rumbled like thunder as he gaped at the supersized cheesecake in the window. There was no question that he was going to have it. So, like a million times before he just lent in through the door and took it. There was no skill to his thievery, no plan. He just took it. Just like he had taken so many tasty items before. Ninety nine percent of the time he had gotten away with it. As far as he was concerned at least fifty pounds of his weight was stolen. Maybe a whole butt cheek of fat had been gained due to his habit of just taking what wasn’t his. It was well worth the risk. He took the cheesecake and calmly walked away down the street.

He sat on a bench only a hundred yards away from the bakery and began to eat. Waiting till he got home was never an option. The double clotted cream was thick and heavy, the strawberries fresh as a summer’s day. The icing sugar was the sweetest that he had ever tasted, the jam dark and sticky. The crunchy base was perfectly baked, providing his tongue with the perfect savoury balance required to prevent the rich creamy goodness from overwhelming his taste buds. It was the best cheesecake that he had ever eaten and it was going to make him so much fatter. 

The policewoman approached him just as he placed the final piece into his drooling mouth. She waited patiently, staring at his mammoth belly, while he finished chewing and swallowed. “Did you enjoy that?” She asked. “Enjoy what?” “That cheesecake.” “What cheesecake?” Phil was overconfident in his belief that he had destroyed the evidence. What was she going to do? Put him through some sort of medical examination to check the contents of his stomach? Even if that was possible all that she would learn is that he’s a fat fuck with two Sunday roasts, six pints, a whole cheesecake, and oh, a giant fried breakfast in his straining stomach. What would that prove? If they wanted to charge him with being a pig then they could just look at him and he’d happily plead guilty.

“The cheesecake that you just stole from McGuffin’s Bakery.” “Don’t know anything about it,” he replied while wiping crumbs off the top of his huge belly shelf. “So you weren’t just eating a cheesecake?” “It was a chocolate cake. I just ate a giant chocolate cake and it was delicious. You must have confused me with someone else.” “I don’t think so. A huge fat American man wearing the same clothes as you was just spotted on CCTV stealing a cheesecake and here you are not even a stone's throw from the scene of the crime admitting to eating a giant cake. You’re under arrest.” “Oh, in my defence I needed it to grow fatter.” “Save it for the judge, fat ass.”

The judge was a hardline gym bunny who wasn’t at all moved by the scattering of heavyweight protesters outside or the explanation given by Phil that the necessity to consume as many calories as possible, on a daily basis, was the foundation of his religion. According to the judge stealing food due to hunger could be deemed to be morally acceptable even if it was not legally so, however, stealing food due to gluttony was both illegal and immoral. As such he was sentencing Phil to the maximum penalty of six months in prison. Phil thought the judge to be a moron. He stole the cheesecake because he was hungry and that’s exactly what he had told him!

Phil wasn’t so worried about the prospect of a spell inside, the thought of sitting around all day doing nothing was hardly a scary one. He was mostly bothered about how much food he would be supplied with, but he needn’t have been concerned. His church, upon hearing of his new plight, sent him weekly food parcels. His parents, already feeling guilty for leaving him in England, sent him weekly food parcels. His supporters and friends in the gaining community sent him weekly food parcels. In total he was soon receiving more than three times as much food as a twenty seven year old - twenty seven stone gainer needed in order to continue steadily gaining, plus the prison food.

The first week in prison was a hungry one but once the parcels started to arrive Phil felt like he was in heaven. He ate box loads of microwavable burgers, pizzas, and kebabs. The small fridge in his cell was overflowing with cheeses, colas, pastes, and pints of milk. The majority of his stash was stored in the main kitchen so he just needed enough in his cell to get him through the nights when the door was locked. He spent his days filling himself with steaks and sauces, chicken and chips, ice cream, and cheesecakes, so many cheesecakes. With nothing to do but eat and focus on gaining, Phil began to count calories and his cellmates took joy in noting these down and weighing and measuring him. He soon became a prison celebrity as the other prisoners took pleasure in the transgressive nature with which Phil approached and enjoyed prison. No one had ever seen a prisoner before who so successfully turned prison life to their own advantage.

By the end of the second week Phil had gained twenty pounds and was consuming at least fifteen thousand calories a day. His belly continued to expand and it only took the food balloon a few weeks to pick up the nickname, Phil Out, because he was, well, always filling out. His thick padded arms filled out thicker, as did his tree like legs, massive man breasts and gelatin arse. His double chin became more pronounced and hung lower. He stuffed so much food into his mouth that it looked like he was using the hanging fat bag around his neck to store the food before he swallowed it. By the end of the first month he had expanded to a fifty eight inch waist and weighed well over thirty stone. The cheesecakes kept coming, particularly the strawberry cream ones from McGuffin’s bakery, who were now doing a roaring trade selling them by the bucket load to his supporters. He ate around five of these a day, on average, and by the end of the second month was almost too big to leave his cell.

Phil’s lack of mobility didn’t dampen his appetite though, if anything it only seemed to increase it as his friendly cellmates continued to supply him with a constant stream of heavily fattening treats. After three months some of these cellmates caught on to the fact that Phil was sexually excited by his weight gain so the ones who were like that started to supply him with rubs and kisses while he continued to consume unholy amounts. Phil was just happy to receive the help and attention.

After four months Phil had burst out of his prison clothes and with no larger sizes available was forced to sit topless on his sagging bed, his ripped trousers hanging threadbare off the sides of his bulging fat thighs. Phil couldn’t believe how lucky he had been. This country, that he had been forced to relocate to as a child, that had always been against him and his kind, that had tried to force him to lose weight throughout his school years, that had tried to remove him from his parents, that he had become stranded and imprisoned in, this country had unwittingly supplied him with everything that he had ever wanted. He was in gainer heaven. He looked down at his heaving elephantine stomach and felt the endorphins flow through every inch of his immense fat. His belly was as round and swollen as a hot air balloon. He had never been this bloated before. He rubbed the thick strip of fat that lay across the top of his massively distended gut with his fat fingers and savoured the hundredth mouthful of cheesecake that he had swallowed that day. He moved his heavy hands down around the side of his mountainous belly and slowly drew circles in the feet deep layers of fat that filled out his love handles to gargantuan proportions. As he did so he wondered how fat his brother was now. Would his brother be happy for him or would he be jealous of his size? Probably a bit of both. That’s how he would feel. He reached over and picked up a burger. He needed to keep growing just in case his brother was bigger than him.

Phil was approaching the end of his fifth month in prison when he heard that he was due to be released early. A mixture of good behaviour and an appeal from the American embassy had secured his freedom. He was gutted. His cellmates weighed and measured him for the last time and he was dismayed that he would be leaving prison at only forty two stone. He was hoping to be fifty. It took four men to lift him out of the bed but once he was on his feet he was surprised at how easily he was able to walk. As he shuffled towards the cell door it soon became obvious that he would never fit through it. He sat down on the bed and ate his remaining cheesecakes while he waited for the crew to arrive and knock down part of the wall.

Outside the prison gates he was amazed to be met by an equally huge thirty year old American wearing the same baseball cap as him. It was his brother and they were the same size! The two elephants hugged as best as they could. His brother explained that their parents and the church had been working for years to try to secure his return to America and now that a fat friendly government had been voted in the state department had expedited his release.

Phil couldn’t believe that he was finally going home. “When do we fly?” he asked. His brother laughed. There was no way that either of them would ever fit on a plane. “We’re sailing on the QE2,” he explained, “it’s slow but comfortable and they have the best buffet you’ve ever seen!” Phil felt his tummy rumble in anticipation and cried with joy.

Phil and his brother arrived in New York just under two weeks later where the fifty stone brothers received a hero's welcome. Phil was a gaining star who had not only survived the oppression of the British state but had actively fought it and succeeded against all the odds - a true American hero.

He was arrested three weeks later for stealing a slice of pizza from a deli. His sentencing is next month.