Dairy Boy

by Lulu Martine

Fat. Phillip DeEarly was fat. At only five-foot-five, the nineteen-year-old college student weighed over three hundred pounds. How much over, he didn't really want to know but that's as high up as most home scales go.

His measurements were grotesque. A fifty-inch chest, plus man-boobs that added about six or eight more inches, a fifty-six-inch waist and the biggest indignity perhaps, a sixty-four-inch ass. Another inch and he'd be as big around as he was tall.

Of course, all these numbers were in his medical charts, metrically expressed, in the research office of the biomedical department at the university he attended. Including his accurate weight. How much was 167 kilograms in American? He didn't want to know.

Before joining the research program at the college, he'd tried everything to lose weight. Diets did nothing but make him sick, disrupting his endocrine systems and even circulation in his extremities. That's how he'd lost both his little toes.

They'd even proposed surgery to reduce the size of his stomach and intestines so he wouldn't be able to eat or digest as much. But other doctors vetoed this. Liposuction was also contra-indicated. It wasn't how many calories he took in, it was what his body did with them.

His personal doctor had put it succinctly, back when Phillip was still in high school. "Your metabolism is all screwy." Doctor Bluett went on. "You know what your average body temperature is? Ninety-seven degrees Fahrenheit. That's a degree and a half lower than almost everyone else's. All of your lab numbers are like that. Out of whack."

Phillip had always been heavy for his age and height but he'd really started ballooning up when he was twelve. He'd gained thirty to forty pounds every year since. "About a pound every ten days," Dr. Bluett said. It was depressing news. Phillip wasn't a genius at math but even he could see that in ten years, at that rate, he would double his current weight or more.

"Unless something can be done, I don't think you're going to make it to thirty, Phillip," the doctor had put it bluntly. His mom had had to hold his head while he wept right there in the doctor's office. She'd glared at the medico but later admitted that they had needed to know that.

It made it easier to commit to joining the research program when the offer came in from the university. And the insurance company almost insisted. Usually, insurance companies were dead set against experimental treatments but they whole-heartedly backed the proposed protocols.

Part of the problem was that Phillip's body seemed to make and store fat in preference to other metabolic activity. As he'd grown, this had resulted in him having several times as many fat cells in his body as normal people. Hungry fat cells that demanded most of his intake of calories.

And such a super-abundance of fat tissue had other metabolic consequences. For one, such cells produce estrogen. Enough that by age fifteen, excess female hormones had completely short-circuited Phillip's puberty. He'd stopped growing taller, his hips had widened, he'd grown breasts, his voice didn't change, he had no beard and almost no body hair.

Plus his male genitals had actually shriveled, testicles like raisins and a penis less than two inches long. He didn't get erections, either. He had almost no libido, which was fortunate since there didn't seem to be any girls anywhere that were interested in him.

A gay friend confided to him, though, that he might be very popular in some parts of the gay community. Phillip didn't know what to think of that but at any rate, he wasn't interested.

The research doctors were eager to get Phillip as a study subject. A lot of them were sort of nerdishly intense, not relating to the boy as a person but more as a series of fascinating numbers. But Dr. Amalie Isla de Pescaleone brought some humanity into the interactions.

"You see," she said in her charming accent, "there are three types of fat in human bodies. That's keeping it simple but it is a good start for discussion. The first type is white fat cells, they store lipids, fat, against the body's future need for energy. You've got too many of these and they don't release energy like they should, demanding more than they give out."

She made a cute Italiana face. "The second type is brown fat. Its job is to burn lipids up to keep the body warm. You have way too few of these which is why you are so uncomfortable when it's cold. You have to shiver to stay warm. It's as if your house had no furnace and instead you had to run around banging on the walls to keep the pipes from freezing."

Phillip smiled. He liked Dr. Isla de Pescaleone. She could be funny at times.

"The third major kind of fat cell in the body is pink fat." She waved a hand. "There are also tan fats, gray fats, beige fats, and blue fats, but nobody has very many of those kinds. But pink fats are usually only found in the breasts of pregnant and nursing women. They actually produce the milk that is secreted by other structures in mammary tissue."

"Is that..." he started to ask.

She nodded. "You have pink fat in your mammary glands which are over-developed for anyone who is not pregnant or nursing. Which is why there is sometimes a milky discharge."

Phillip nodded. He hated that he frequently soaked his bedding or even his clothes in the daytime with what seemed to be milk from his overly-endowed chest. It was never very much, a few ounces at most, but now he had an explanation. A very embarrassing one but an explanation.

"It's unusual but there are similar things in some of the literature," the lady doctor was saying.

He felt grateful to her for trying to minimize it. "Is there anything that can be done about it?" he asked.

She sighed. "Nothing that looks hopeful at the moment. Perhaps surgery eventually. Still, your other metabolic problems need to be solved first because they might actually be life-threatening. The production of a bit of milk might actually be helping to slow down your weight gain."

She went on. "We haven't been able to reduce your caloric intake much below about 2200 without bad effects on your circulation, enzymes and other systems. And at that level, your body is storing about 20% as fat. Which works out to a weight gain of a pound every ten days."

Phillip nodded.

"The milk production is probably another 100 calories a day, which means your body is functioning on what is left over, about 1100 to 1200 calories. That's astonishing. You have an amazingly efficient metabolism. That's pretty much a crash-diet level of nutrition."

Phillip felt his hopes sink. Was he doomed to be a 700 pound freak and die before his thirtieth birthday?

"Exercise seems to just increase your body's base demand, So if you exercise enough to burn 400 more calories a day, this simply increases your caloric demand by about the same amount. It's probably still worth doing but it isn't a solution."

Dr. Isla de Pescaleone took his hands in hers. "Brown fat may be the key. The different kinds of fat can change into each other. The difference is which organelles are active inside the cells. In brown fat, energy-producing mitochondria are switched on and the energy so produced is turned into heat by the cell. The mitochondria get larger and give the fat its brown color."

Interesting but Phillip felt like the doctor was about to give him information more relevant to a solution to his problem. "We've found a drug that seems to help turn white fat into brown fat. If we could produce more brown fat turning calories into body heat, we might at least reduce your weight gain."

Phillip readily agreed to a program of increased exercise and the drug that encouraged brown fat. After six weeks, he had still gained about a kilogram, or two pounds. So, he wasn't getting fat as fast as before but he'd still double his weight in fifteen years.

Back to the research clinic. Doctor Wilfort Parmenter looked like a gamer geek more than a doctor. He had long greasy hair and a pimply face, a slight overbite and thick glasses. He talked through his nose and he smelled of Pepsi and pizza.

"The key is going to be the pink fat," he whined. "We don't even need to give you drugs to encourage milk production, stimulation of the breasts will do it. Though there are drugs"

"M-m-milk production?" Phillip bleated.

"Ye-es-ss," said Dr. Parmenter, sounding satisfied. "I calculate that with frequent mechanical breast pumping, we can get your current production of about 100-150 ml a day up to 600-900 ml in only a few weeks." He peered at the boy like an owl examining a plump mouse. "That's about as much as a mother produces for a baby."

Parmenter beeped and booped on his tablet while Phillip absorbed the information. "Let's say we do bilateral pumping at two-hour intervals," Parmenter resumed talking, "if we can get 60 to 90 ml per pumping, we could make that goal. That's about how much a breastfeeding child consumes. Women lactating at that rate typically increase their calorie intake a bit but still lose weight at a kilogram or two a month."

He did the owl thing at Phillip again. "Would you like to lose weight instead of gain it, Mr. DeEarly?"

"Y-y-yes," said Phillip.

The doctor beamed at him. "Actually, that amount of caloric subtraction would just about balance your current weight gain. But its a goal we may be able to expand upon." He briefly glanced at his tablet and poked in a few more numbers. "To keep you from expanding," he added with a strangely high-pitched titter.

"O-okay," Phillip agreed.

"Let's do this here in the lab," said Parmenter. "We'll set you up with an apartment here, bed, bath and breakfast table," another titter, "and someone will be here to help you with the pumpings, day and night."

*

Phillip's parents, Nathan and Yvette, readily agreed, too. And so young Mr DeEarly took up residence in the lab. It was the summer and he had no classes he had to attend but enrolled electronically in a few he could do from his new living quarters.

At first it was quite strange but his little apartment had a separate entrance from a garden that he could enjoy. His parents and friends could visit without bothering the doctors and he could go for long walks around the entire hospital complex if he wanted. Or go into town with his folks, though he had to be back in the lab at specified times for pumping.

They settled on a schedule of every 2.5 hours at night and every 2 hours in the daytime, making for eleven pumpings a day. It meant sleep interrupted about three times per night but this turned out to be tolerable. Phillip would sleep for two hours or so; get up; deal with the pumping for about twenty minutes and go right back to sleep.

At first, they were getting only about 30 ml per pumping but after only three weeks, this had expanded to 90 ml per session, making just over a quart a day. By Dr Parmenter's calculations, this was a caloric subtraction of almost 2000 calories. With other factors, including the necessity to increase Phillips intake a bit to balance nutrition, Parmenter calculated that young Mr DeEarly should be losing weight at the rate of a kilogram every two to three weeks.

Success? In those very same three weeks, Phillip had, indeed, lost weight. Slightly more than a pound, in fact. That might just be normal fluctuation, they needed to run the experiment for even longer. Phillip's milk production still seemed to be increasing, too, which could only lead to greater success, right.

In three more weeks, it could not be denied, Phillip had lost three whole kilos, or seven pounds since the experiment began. And his milk production was up to 160 ml per pumping, almost two quarts a day!

"That's--that's a lot of milk," Phillip commented. "What are you doing with all of it?"

Some of it was being used for testing but there was still a lot left over. Some of it they gave to other labs but there was more than anyone needed for reasonable experimentation. One of the outcomes of all the testing was that they now knew that Phillip's milk was normal breast milk with measures like nutritional value within or exceeding established norms. It was, in fact, high-quality stuff.

So, they were giving the excess away to Milk Bank charities in the city that provided breast milk for infants whose mothers could not furnish them enough.

"Huh," said Phillip. "I don't mind but shouldn't you have asked me? It's my milk. You're giving it away, but is it actually worth anything?" It turns out that human breast milk sells retail for as much as $130 a quart. Wholesalers would pay $30 to $50 a quart, usually expressed in ounces as $1 to $1.30 an ounce.

"Holy Mother of God," said Nathan, Phillip's father. The insurance company found out somehow and wanted the milk sold to offset the costs of Phillip's treatment. "What treatment?" asked Nathan. "Hooking up a milking machine eleven times a day? The boy does that himself, now."

"Well, his apartment," said the hospital. "And he's got cable TV in there."

"We've got cable TV at home," said the elder Mr DeEarly. "Plus Netflix and Amazon Prime."

The fallout was that Phillip was discharged from the hospital, with his treatment being self-administered from home, pumping his breasts eleven times a day. He'd go to the clinic for a weekly checkup and weigh-in and it was arranged that one of the milk wholesalers would pick up his product in a refrigerated truck that came by every twelve hours.

"Really? Twice a day?" Phillip marveled. Freshness is paramount, the wholesaler assured him. One quarter of the milk would be donated to charity, and the rest sold to the wholesaler at $1 an ounce. And they were willing to buy as much as Phillip could produce.

Which turned out to be quite a lot! By week ten, Phillip was pumping milk at the rate of 240 ml each session or 88 ounces a day. Almost enough for three average size infants. And although his calorie intake had again increased, he was still losing weight. Sixteen pounds in ten weeks. And an income of $66 a day, more than he could have made working part-time in the fast food industry.

"Pump we must," said his father. "This money goes into your college fund," he told Phillip.

"Moo," said the boy.

*