Dont Touch Comic Girl Punch Guy Belly Hugs Stomach Snacks Weight Chub Gain Funny

"Now, now, I'm sure it's nothing to worry about... although such a rapid weight loss in such a short space of time is most unusual."

— Doctor, Robotboy, "Tummy Trouble"

In western animation and anime, you can have a character whose size can moderately or drastically change for just a few minutes as the scene calls it, or even for the whole episode. Characters may either gain weight, lose weight, grow muscles, or be inflated with air or liquid according to the script. However, when the scene or episode ends, the affected character will usually be back at their regular size as if nothing ever happened.

While this can be caused by magic, superpowers or science, it can also be caused by something that can realistically change someone's size. Even if this is the case, though, it'll likely happen at an unrealistically quick pace. Seldom will a character experience health issues from either the change to or the reversion from the new size, and if this temporary size is bigger than their normal size, they'll never suffer from excess skin, even if they lose the weight in an instant.

When used over the course of an episode, it may be an element of A Weighty Aesop. Shorter-term instances may be used for sight gags or fat jokes.

Rarely used in live-action television and/or film since the actor often has to wear heavy padding and special make-up, which is expensive and makes them very uncomfortable.

Not to be confused with Your Size May Vary, where stylistic change may make someone merely seem larger or smaller without necessarily changing bulk. Contrast Sizeshifter, Incredible Shrinking Man or Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever. Compare Balloon Belly. The Heavy Voice is sometimes a side-effect of this trope.

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Examples:

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    Animation

• Happy Heroes: In Season 2 episode 10, Big M. unleashes a flying saucer that causes people to gain ten pounds every time they say something honest, effectively forcing them to lie if they don't want to become so fat. The effects of the saucer, including the victims' gained weight, are reversed by the end of the episode.
• In Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf: Joys of Seasons episode 57, Wolffy, after eating through a wall of cake that was set up by Paddi, becomes much fatter than usual. When he goes back to Wolf Castle, he exercises the weight off, and by the next scene he is back to normal.
• In Red Shoes and the Seven Dwarfs, the title female character keeps her thin, perfect hourglass figure through the use of her red, magical shoes. Once she takes them off her waistline increases significantly.

    Anime & Manga

• Ai Kora:
  • In chapter 59, Ayame overeats (over the course of a couple of weeks) due to stress from a scandal at her father's company and becomes rather obese. When she hears that the scandal was cleared and the company's stock had gone back up, she reverts back to her slim figure instantly. Meanwhile, Hachibei had been intercepting all of Ayame's food during the day and grew as bloated as Ayame had been in just a day. At the end of the chapter he throws all of it back up, and by the next chapter he's back to normal.
  • In chapter 88, this happens to some of the girls in Hachibei's dorm after Gokou Ooba, a chubby-chasing rich boy who fell for the fattened-up version of Ayame, slips a "bountiful body drug" into the dorm's water supply. The chapter ends with each member of Gokou's Maid Corps taking a dose of the drug, confessing their collective love for him, and inflicting severe bruises on their beloved master when the plumped-up maids all try to hug him at once.

    Maeda: Liking fat can be a problem...

• Buccha from Air Gear can do this as it's explained that most of the fat is in fact blood pooling in his stomach from overeating. When he wishes, he can transfer it to his muscles to give himself a more impressive build.
• This clip from Assemble Insert has a woman gaining muscle mass when strenuously trying to bend a lead pipe. When the deed is done, she immediately returns to a more slender shape.
• Araki Ryuuichi from Area no Kishi lives through this trope. When we first see him, he almost looks obese and complete different from when he used to be the midfielder of the FC. By a couple of episodes, he returns to his slim handsome body within 10 days. By episode 8, however, he lets himself go again and his weight becomes a recurring joke, with comical moments towards his bulging gut and how out of shape he is.
• Bleach:
  • Kirio Hikifune is shown to be one of the fattest characters in the series. It turns out, she actually fattens herself up because her special technique drains most of her spirit energy, slimming her back down. So she basically has to be fat to survive her technique.
  • Meninas McMallon has the ability to drastically increase the size of her muscles.
• At the end of the tenth episode of Brave Beats, ten-year old Hibiki is made outrageously muscular after Santa misinterpreted his wish to become stronger. Upon realizing what happened, the poor kid immediately starts running after Santa to change him back, but he's back to normal by the next episode.
• Dragon Ball:
  • Master Roshi. He can increase his muscle mass from normal old man muscles to bodybuilder muscles within seconds, and lose it even quicker. He wasn't the only one who did things like this, but his was the most extreme.
  • Zarbon has been known to change from a skinny Bishounen to a fat, muscular, lizard monster when he fights. It should be noted that the latter form is actually his real one, but he despises its ugliness.
  • Frieza, once he's forced to draw out all his power in order to even have a chance against Super Saiyan Goku, bulks up considerably as he goes from skinny to even beefier than Goku.
  • During the Cell Saga, the Saiyan characters discover a "half-level" of Super Saiyan ^note Officially called "Super Saiyan Grade 2" or "Grade 3" that pumps up their muscles greatly; however, only the inexperienced Trunks seriously uses it, since the more savvy Goku and Vegeta realized that it slows you down too much to be really useful.
    • Movie-exclusive villain Broly is famous for this, having his own personal level of Super Saiyan (dubbed "Legendary Super Saiyan") which makes him almost double in size and become incredibly beefy but without suffering any of the drawbacks seen with SSJ Grades 2 and 3.
  • Kale, a female Universe 6 Saiyan from Dragon Ball Super, is able to temporarily transform from a meek, skinny girl into a tall, beefy powerhouse through her Super Saiyan Berserk transformation.
• Secondary character Risley from Fairy Tail appears to be fat, but she can use her gravity-modifying magic which causes her to turn into a slim, more attractive girl.
• In The Hero Who Returned Remains the Strongest in the Modern World, Daiki's Enhance Physical Ability skill multiplies his Super Strength several times over, with the side effect of increasing the size of his muscles to the point that his school uniform is forcibly unbuttoned and the sleeves are stretched taut against his biceps and shoulders.
• The title character of High School Ninja Girl, Otonashi-san puts on a lot of weight over the holiday break. She struggles between trying to lose the weight and giving in to her Big Eater nature. Getting flustered over her feelings for male lead Arima causes her to sweat the pounds away literally overnight.
• The titular Mizore from Melt Away! Mizore-chan is a snow woman who can replenish herself by eating cold foods if she starts to melt. If she overeats then she becomes incredibly fat and can stay in the summer sun for extensive amounts of time before she melts back down to her original size.
• All Might in My Hero Academia suffered a near Career-Ending Injury that prevents him from using his full strength and original Heroic Build body for long. When not actively using the power of One For All, he is an emaciated skeleton of a man. He directly compares his situation as a guy puffing up his chest to look buff.
• Naqua-Den: At one point Big Eater Taro wins a rice-eating competition against a gluttonous youkai, however the amount of food ingested is enough to break is super-metabolism and the following day he wakes up fat. Hopefully his next supernatural battle involves a sumo match, which his newly found weight qualifies him for. He later quickly returns to his normal size.
• This ability is the special technique of the Akimichi Clan in Naruto. They can change the size of their bodies by converting calories into chakra. They can choose to expand only parts of their bodies, like their fists, or turn themselves into giants. This justifies the heavy-set build of Choji and his father; without a high calorie diet, they wouldn't be able to use as much chakra.
• In Nerima Daikon Brothers, Ichiro, Pandaikon, and Hideki grow muscles thanks to Kimchi during episode 2.
• In One Piece, Luffy is able to temporarily increase the size of some of his body parts when he goes into Gear Third. He then shrinks when the effect subsides. He also overeats in several episodes and inflates. Sometimes it lasts somewhat long.
• One episode of Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt sees Stocking gain a little weight due to her sweet tooth. She brushes it off and starts exercising heavily, but not only does this not work she wakes up to find herself with a Balloon Belly. Stocking freaks out and chows down on sweets, causing her to grow until she is the size and shape of a parade float. Once she and Panty kill the ghost responsible for this, Stocking returns to her normal size.
• In episode 4 of Sabagebu!, Momoka's weight fluctuates wildly as she struggles with her snacking habits.
• When Fuu on Samurai Champloo eats a great deal of food, she temporarily swells to a massive size. In at least one episode, this renders her unrecognizable to a set of police officers when she slims back down afterward. ("Have you seen a girl around here? She was really fat.")
• In the first episode of Tamagotchi, Kuchipatchi eats too many burgers at the race's burger stand and becomes rounder in shape than usual, causing him to bounce all around Tamagotchi Town when he accidentally trips. Right as Mametchi saves him from a rough fall, he returns to his original shape.
• In Toriko, this is the result of eating the Meteor Garlic. This gave the food its other name, the Doping Garlic. For an example of its effect, it took Komatsu from this ◊ to this ◊.
• At the start of episode six of Wandaba Style, Susumu is in the middle of a slump, and without one of his experiments to liven things up, the girls have nothing to do and have gained a substantial amount of weight as a result. When they realize just how fat they've gotten, they're quick to lose most of the extra pounds.

    Comic Books

• Several members of the X-Men have this as a power:
  • Ashley Crawford, better known as Big Bertha. In her civilian identity, she's a conventionally thin model; however, her mutant power allows her to swell her body mass immensely, transforming her into a Big Beautiful Woman with super-strength and durability.
  • Strong Guy can absorb vast amounts of kinetic energy and transfer it to his muscles, making them grow exponentially and granting him superhuman strength. However, in his case the Bulk Change must be temporary: if he doesn't expend the energy within ninety seconds, his body will be permanently warped into a grotesquely overmuscled form. This has happened once, and it causes him both physical and emotional pain.
  • Phat of X-Statix has the mutant ability to swell up parts of his body with extradimensional gunk.
• Superman:
  • Supermans Girlfriend Lois Lane #5: "The Fattest Girl in Metropolis" saw Lois Lane witnessing a murder and subsequently being tracked by the culprit. To help, Superman decided to go with the unconventional method of making her immensely fat with the help of a "growth ray," reasoning that this way, the killer won't be able to recognize her. After the criminal is captured and the growth ray reversed, Lois turns the tables by forcing Superman to take her to a fancy restaurant, where she binges on a huge amount of food — since the weight will all be gone by the next morning, it doesn't matter how much she eats that night.
  • In one Superboy 1941 story set during Clark Kent's teenage years, his family returns home from vacation to discover most of Smallville's young adults have suddenly grown obese. Clark suddenly comes down with the same affliction and it turns out it was due to the local milk supply being affected by an experimental energy ray created by a local scientist. The story was redone several years later in Adventure Comics #298, only now most of Smallville's adults become obese as well (except for Ma and Pa Kent). And this time, the milk wouldn't have initially changed Clark. Unfortunately for him, he's seen drinking it just as the cause of the obesity epidemic is revealed and uses Red Kryptonite to make himself fat to keep up appearances lest anyone suspects him of having Superboy's invulnerability. He only realizes too late he now has to hide his new fatness as Superboy.
  • In The Unknown Supergirl, exposure to Red Kryptonite makes Supergirl suddenly grow morbidly obese while she is visiting a fair. Since she cannot let anybody see her strange transformation, for it would jeopardize her secret identity, Kara ties one rope around her waist, floats up to the parade's big balloon figures and passes herself off as one of them until the Red-K's effect wears off.
• Legion of Super-Heroes:
  • Bouncing Boy's power allows him to swell up his body into a spherical, ball-like form capable of ricocheting around at deadly speeds. In one instance, after losing his power his body became slender despite that he'd already been chubby before he gained his power. In other instances where he'd lost his power his body size remained the same.
    • There were a couple of instances when another Legionnaire would briefly get Bouncing Boy's power. In one issue, Dynamo Boy (who happens to be The Mole for the Legion of Super-Villains) discreetly turns on a device that changes the power of several Legionnaires with Superboy getting Bouncing Boy's power. In another issue, a group of Legionnaires have their powers randomly switched to disorient them, with Bouncing Bow and Ultra Boy swapping powers. In both situations, the two Legionnaires turn bloated and spherical.
  • Matter-Eater Lad comes from the planet Bismoll, where all its native inhabitants are capable of consuming any form of matter and metabolizing it quickly because their bodies have metabolisms like nuclear furnaces. In one issue, M-E Lad is hit by an energy ray that unintentionally alters his metabolism by slowing it down to the same speed as a normal Earthling's. Unfortunately, this occurs after he'd eaten nearly a ton of dirt to create an escape tunnel and thus he immediately puts on weight equivalent to how much he consumed. He spends several issues overweight until a doctor manages to restore his metabolism to its previous state, making him slender again.
  • The third issue of the comic tie-in to the Legion cartoon has a bunch of Legionnaires hit by this when their powers are messed with. Legion applicant Infectious Lass accidentally unleashes a virus that causes her and several Legionnaires to swap superpowers.
    • Saturn Girl and Superman switch powers, causing Saturn Girl to become muscular as she gains Superman's strength while he gains her telepathy.
    • Bouncing Boy and Lightning Lad switch powers, so Bouncing Boy becomes slender and muscular while Lightning Lad becomes fat alongside being able to turn ball-like. Unfortunately for Lightning Lad, he's told the virus will last longer on him due to his greater mass.
• During the second volume of Titans, Raven once again undergoes a Face–Heel Turn when she learns of her six half-brothers and their connection to their father Trigon's evil influence. The seven siblings gain powers correlating with the Seven Deadly Sins, Raven representing Pride. She betrays her brothers and tries to give their powers to the other Titans (against their will). Donna Troy gets Lust and becomes noticeably skinnier while her breasts become gigantic, while Red Arrow gets Gluttony and briefly becomes obese before Raven's good side intervenes. The brother who represented Gluttony even had an attack that momentarily drained the energy from Donna and Starfire, making them horrifically emaciated until it wore off.
• This happens a few times in the comic adaption of The Simpsons:
  • "Dullards to Donuts" has this happens to Homer and all the other nuclear plant employees when Mr. Burns gets them addicted to genetically modified donuts. After offering them all the donuts they want in exchange for reduced salaries, the plant workers become morbidly obese a month into their addictions. Burns is forced to ax the plan and has the addictive qualities and fat content of the donuts reduced so his workers will lose weight and become productive again.
  • A two-fold example from "Fly Away Homer." Homer's not allowed on any airplanes because he's too fat, causing him to miss out on most of the family's cruise vacation. While Homer protests to get a flight company for heavyset people started, he's also forced to do repairs on the plane. All that hard work makes Homer slim down until he's no longer fat... just in time to get to the cruise and discover Marge and the kids have become overweight from relaxing and eating without his usual antics keeping them occupied.
  • In one issue, Nelson stops bullying the kids at Springfield Elementary for their lunch money, which allows them to buy the cafeteria's food such as Cream of Lard. After eating this on a regular basis, Bart, Milhouse and most of the other kids have gotten so fat that they can't fit in their desks.
• In the comic tie-in for The Super Hero Squad Show, the Blob gets tasked with retrieving an Infinity Fractal for Doctor Doom. As the Squaddies attempt to stop him, the Blob accidentally grabs the Fractal with his bare hands. The Fractal transfers the Blob's power to the Squaddies, making all of them obese while he becomes slender. Doctor Doom convinces an unhappy Blob to keep holding the Fractal to incapacitate the Squaddies, not realizing they've also acquired Blob's other abilities too which they use to stop the Wrecking Crew. The Blob eventually drops the Fractal after realizing staying so small and losing his powers did nothing to hinder the Squaddies.

    Comic Strips

• Peanuts: Snoopy's brother, Spike, went through this when he first came to visit. Lucy, who was taken aback by his scrawny physique, decides to fatten him up. He returns to the dessert where he slowly loses the weight he gained. By the time he visits Snoopy a second time, he's skinny again.
• Ever-shallow Curtis briefly lost his crush on Michelle when she returned from France big enough to crush him. The next time we saw her, she was as svelte as before the trip.

    Fan Works

• In Imaginary Seas, the muscles of Percy's arms briefly bulge in size while he's using his Stout Arm of Brutality skill, allowing him to easily thrash Lostbelt Chiron with brute force.

    Films — Live-Action

• In the Epic Movie, a parody of Mystique is present throughout most of the film by the thin, hourglass-figured Carmen Electra. However, during the sex scene between her and the main character Peter, she asks him what he'd like her to shapeshift into. His final request is big flabby grandma arms/bingo wings like a fat blue Britney Spears causing her to get incredibly fat and flabby, even changing into a much fatter actress. Could be a subversion as it's the last thing we see of Mystique in the film, as it fades to black soon after he pulls her down and they start to get in on while she's fat, meaning she never changes back to her normal size.
• In The Santa Clause 2, Scott Calvin gets the idea to fly with Comet back to the North Pole to defeat the Toy Santa. Comet has gorged on chocolate to the point of being unable to fly... or move for that matter. Later that night, Comet is still too bloated to help deliver the presents on Christmas Eve, so Chet takes his place.

    Literature

• Milly, Molly: In "Junior Joe", Junior Joe starts exercising, which temporarily causes him to lose weight, but for the rest of the series, he's still chubby, he's just now Acrofatic.
• The Miss Nelson/Viola Swamp books. How the heck did Miss Nelson drastically lose enough weight to play Miss Swamp and then go back to normal, again?
• In The She Hulk Diaries, everyone wearing the clothes made by designer X (in reality the pranking villain nicknamed "Super Brat") instantly becomes obese. Fortunately She Hulk is there to help removes the clothes, which immediately reverts them to normal.
• In the Federation of the Hub story "Trouble Tide", a symbiotic lifeform gives mammals the ability to survive in the deep sea. When they return to the surface, the extra structures it grows are converted to body fat. That works fine for the seal-like native lifeforms, but it leaves the story's human protagonists so dangerously obese that they need days of surgery and months of dieting to recover.
• Roys Bedoys: In "Roys Bedoys Loves Video Games", when Roys starts playing his video game too much, he becomes fatter due to lack of activity. He's back to normal size by the next story.

    Live-Action TV

• In the first 3 episodes of season 2 of ThirtyRock, Jenna, because of her eating 4 slices of pizza during all of her performances of Mystic Pizza: The Musical, Jenna has gained a pot belly that only lasts until episode 4.
• Big Wolf on Campus:
  • One episode has Merton go from thin to morbidly obese in a matter of days after befriending a group of black-clad teenagers. It turns out they're actually Spider People who are intentionally fattening him up to eat.
  • The season one episode "The Wolf Is Out There" focused on Tommy noticeably gaining weight as a result of his appetite going out of control thanks to his wolf-side. While he doesn't balloon up to the same size as Merton, his weight's noticeable that people start making fun of him for it (specifically Tim and Travis, even though they're both much bigger than Tommy) and he splits his pants.
• In an episode of Good Luck Charlie Amy bloats up (making her look mordibly obese) after suffering an allergic reaction.
• In the puppet show, Between the Lions:
  • The pigeons Walter and Clay got extremely fat after eating all of the popcorn in order to clean up the roof garden in The Popcorn Popper. Instead of flying, due to their heavy weight, they roll away instead. Luckily, they return back to normal by the next episode.
  • In another episode, this time being The Good Seed, the pigeons eat an entire bag of seeds, only to get fat again. They, of course, return to normal by the next episode.
• In "The Rough Patch," an episode of How I Met Your Mother, Barney develops a small Balloon Belly due to being in a comfortable relationship with Robin; the characters call the weight gain "relationship gut." However, both he and Robin are actually miserable together, which manifests in different ways. Robin grows extremely stressed and becomes haggard and exhausted, while Barney can't stop eating and eventually becomes so huge that he needs to sit down and rest while walking to a table in the gang's favorite pub. Interestingly, Ted admits to being an Unreliable Narrator in this case—he explains that Robin and Barney didn't really change that drastically, but from his perspective, they became totally different people. When Barney and Robin break up at the end of the episode, they instantly revert to their previous selves.
• In the Married... with Children episode "Live Nude Peggy", Kelly was trying to gain weight for a weight loss commercial, but the weight all went to her butt, and she didn't get the role in the commercial. She did lose the weight before the next episode.
• At the end of the Phil of the Future episode "Unification Day", the whole Diffy Family was eating meatloaf for the last 3 months, because Pim tried using spray meatloaf to cheat in cooking class, and the only one who gained weight was the father, Lloyd, but he gained it all in his behind. Before the next episode, and the rest of the series, he lost that extra weight.
• That's So Raven has "Food for Thought," an episode which points out that too much junk food leads to terrible health. Raven's high school cafeteria is bought out by a fast food corporation which slowly introduces more and more insane amounts of unbelievably fatty foods until even the halls are full of freebie hot snack machines to keep them hooked. Obviously, almost every student is said to be getting noticeably fatter, even though no actual change is visible. However, Raven does have a vision of a Big, Fat Future in which everyone in the school grows a gigantic behind because of the unhealthy cooking.
• In Zyuden Sentai Kyoryuger, Ramirez is a Big Fun type of guy, during his transformation into Kyoryu Cyan his belly shrinks to a more normal size, resembling an inverse Balloon Belly (complete with a Wacky Sound Effect).
• During Lois's fifth pregnancy in Malcolm in the Middle, Hal starts Gaslighting her by tricking her into eating high-calorie food despite her doctor's orders specifically because he's trying to keep her big and sexy. He gets caught by the end and Lois eventually loses her pregnancy weight when Jamie's born.
• In the Wings episode "When A Man Loves a Donut", Brian has put on a large amount of weight from over eating, but loses the weight completely in the next episode.
• In the Desperate Housewives episode "If...", Susan's relationship with her her husband, Karl, is straining, so she drowns her sorrows in baked goods, putting on weight in the next scene, but loses the weight in the next scene 6-7 minutes later.

    Tabletop Games

• The enlarge person and reduce person spells from Dungeons & Dragons and Pathfinder.

    Toys

• BIONICLE:
  • When Brutaka is infused with gaseous antidermis, it causes his muscles to grow, but the effect wears off after a short while. Later on, he absorbed liquid antidermis, and the effect became permanent.
  • In the Karda Nui arc, the light-energy emanating from the area boosted Takanuva's natural light-powers, causing him to grow considerably larger than his fellow heroes (to a $30 price-point titan-sized set, as opposed to the regular $13 canister sets). When he left Karda Nui, he shrunk back to his original size.

    Video Games

• Similar to Roshi (as he's a Expy of him), Tung Fu Rue in Fatal Fury hulks out after losing a fourth of his health and becomes radically larger and more muscular. After getting knocked to one-fourth of his health, he shrinks back to normal. In later games, the trope is discarded, and Tung Fu Rue's "muscle" self is actually his Battle Aura.
• Queen Oren in The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds goes from a svelte fish woman to a giant Brawn Hilda when the Shady Guy steals the Smooth Stone from her fountain. At one point, she is shown immediately getting bigger upon gulping down a fish, and the other Zoras maintain that Link must get the stone back before she gets even bigger.
• Whenever Wario eats the cake thrown by the Cook enemy in Wario Land II (or also the apples in 3), he turns into Fat Wario and is able to KO enemies by walking into them, break through certain blocks by jumping on them, and weigh down floating platforms.
• In the Metal Slug series, getting too many food items in a row will fatten your character (with an appropriate "Uh-oh, big!" from the announcer), slowing them down, but making their shots more powerful (because the guns and bullets somehow get fatter as well). They will lose the bulk after a while, but there are two ways of slimming back down faster: by getting the "diet" item, or dying.
• Fat Princess: 'Rotund' may be how the titular princess(es) are depicted, but unless you keep that cake coming they'll slim down very quickly, making it all the easier for the opposing team to carry her off.
• In Street Fighter V, Seth can temporarily bulk themselves up when doing a move they've copied from certain opponents (Zangief, Abigail, Birdie and Balrog all come to mind) via their first V-Skill, presumably out of animation consistency.
• ARMS has two characters who can do this: Max Brass, who can bulk up his muscles via charging up his ARMS to give himself armour for tanking weak attacks, and Lola Pop, who can inflate her whole body to block and parry attacks.
• Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story:
  • The plot is kickstarted by Toads contracting the Blorbs; an ailment that causes them to swell up into a large spherical shape.
  • Bowser is fed a ton of high-calorie food until he gains so much weight he gets stuck in the floor.
  • Peforming the Snack Basket Bros. Attack has Luigi chow down on a series of desserts, bloat to a massive size, and slam into the ground, creating a shockwave.
• In Yume Nikki, one of the Effects that can be found is the "Fat" effect, which causes Madotsuki to gain weight. Selecting it again in the effects menu will turn it off, turning her back to normal.

    Web Animation

• Happens frequently on Mighty Magiswords courtesy of the Muscly Arm Magisword, one of the most common Magiswords used on the show. When used, one or both arms of either the holder or the target becomes extremely muscular as the name implies. The rest of the body, however, doesn't usually gain any muscle. However, as shown in the episode "Warts and All", accidentally throwing in the Muscly Arm Magisword into a volatile potion will make anyone caught in the blast radius very muscular all over, not just in the arms. Prohyas and Witchy Simone got back to normal seconds later, the fly that the temporarily frogified Vambre was going to have for a snack, not so much.
• Nora in RWBY Chibi at one point gains a Balloon Belly mere seconds after swallowing an entire cake whole, and returns to normal in less than a second after a single belch. (An observing Yang, meanwhile, has just finished a rigorous Training Montage to lose weight, and is less than amused.) In a later skit, she balloons a second time from eating an entire stack of pancakes (and the Geist Grimm possessing them), again in one bite, and asks for one more afterwards.

    Web Comics

• El Goonish Shive:
• In The Fox Sister, the dog Soot Bull gorges himself on Alex's gift of leftover bulgogi, and for the rest of the day is much tubbier than usual. Yun Hee even comments on it.
• The Petri Dish:
  • When Thaddeus and (possibly) Bob get superpowers, they grow muscles. When the powers go, so do the muscles.
  • Downplayed in one strip where Thaddeus gets a slight belly and it takes a few strips for him to lose it.
• One story arc in Sequential Art had Art being temporarily fattened up thanks to a prank pulled by Scarlet and her sisters. After struggling to lose weight for several strips, he's returned to normal size after alien robots who want to eliminate him because he's Walking Techbane shoot him with a disintegrator ray, but only manage to burn off the excess bulk.
• This is a power (well more of a curse) of Aisha from Slimy Thief. When she touches water she adsorbs it and gets fatter but losing the water slims her down.
• In Star Impact, Lily's special glove power is to temporarily buff up whatever part of her body that she wants. This is shown to have more applications beyond a mere Right Hand of Doom Enhanced Punch, however, as she can also use it to buff up her leg muscles to dart in and out of her opponent's range and perform withering hit-and-runs, and can also buff up her abdomen to better soak up body blows. Even without using it, she can be zippy and nimble while still being able to hit like a truck at any moment, and Stryker points out that, on paper, she has no real weaknesses.
• The fox in Tally Ho! learned too late not to eat the gravy meant for Sigfried. He became an immobile furry ball, but it lasted only two strips. Not to say he was fortunate, because the end of his digestion felt horribly thorough.
• Rak Wraithraiser from Tower of God once got shrunk to half a man's height (he was initially 4 m tall) because he accidentally bumped into Yu Hansung and didn't apologize, instead he made comments about how small and unnoticeable he was. So Yu Hansung kept bumping into the chibified Rak over and over, saying how he was so small he didn't notice him. Justified in that Compression is an often used supernatural technique in this series.

    Western Animation

• In The Amazing Spiez!, a character mutates to have a set very wide hips and bottom, but returns to her usual form by the end of the episode.
• American Dad!:
  • In the episode "Shallow Vows", Francine gets very fat after she stops trying to look pretty for Stan as a test of love to see if he would still love her even if she was fat and ugly.
  • When Stan develops anorexia, from his point of view he thinks he's become morbidly obese when he's actually lost so much weight his skin's clinging to his skeleton.
  • In "Camp Refoogee," Hayley spends her time at the buffet in a UN aid camp and ends up gaining the "African 20" by the end of the episode.
  • When Steve is raised solely by Francine, her Hands-Off Parenting results in him becoming an obnoxious Fat Slob who spends all his time demanding junk food, playing video games, and masturbating.
  • In the episode "One Woman Swole", Francine becomes obsessed with bodybuilding, leading Stan and Roger to bulk up themselves as part of a scheme to get her to quit.
• One Betty Boop cartoon has the title character working out while singing a song about how keeping her girlish figure while her friend Little Jimmy sings the verse: "If you're thin, don't worry over that. Just begin to laugh and you'll grow fat!" Betty proceeds to get into belt exercise machine that ends getting stuck at full power. By the time Jimmy can get it turned off Betty has grown so thin that she looks ridiculous. Both Betty and Jimmy laugh so much at her appearance that they both grow huge.
• In The Boondocks episode "The Itis", Robert Freeman starts his own restaurant called The Itis, which serves ridiculously unhealthy, highly fattening 'soul food' (African-American cuisine). Robert soon discovers the negative effects of his food when he meets a woman named Janet for the second time; when they first met, she looked very skinny and attractive, but since then she gained a massive amount of weight and turned morbidly obese. Though later in the end, she reverts back to being thin again by going through liposuction surgeries.
• Catdog: In "Sumo Enchanted Evening", Cat and Dog get fat after stuffing their faces at Rancid Rabbit's all-you-can-eat buffet. When they get presented with a Shockingly Expensive Bill, they end up having to face Rancid in a sumo-wrestling match to get out of the debt.
• Chowder:
  • The title character often overeats himself into a huge ball, then deflates back to normal with one burp.
  • There's also occasions where he's only slightly fatter than normal and in dire need of his emergency big boy shirt for one scene.
• Happens in a few episodes of Courage the Cowardly Dog:
  • In "The Transplant", after Eustace and Courage are turned into giant prehistoric kangaroos and Courage chases Eustace up the Eiffel Tower, Courage gets Eustace down by feeding him pastries until he's too fat to keep his balance.
  • At the end of "Dome of Doom", this happens to Eustace after he pigs out on the produce grown in the bio-dome.
  • In "King of Flan", Eustace and Muriel are hypnotized into craving the eponymous villain's product, and stuff themselves into enormity with "Fantasy Flan". Courage manages to resist the hypnotism until the end of the episode when the bad guy's been beat, then he stuffs himself into a massive pink doughball.
• This was the plot point of the Doug episode, "Doug Tips the Scales". The episode begins with Doug pigging out on junk food at his grandma's over the weekend, only for him to return home pretty chubby. After getting invited to a pool party, he works hard to lose all his weight, which he succeeds in doing. Though after going back to his original weight, he still complains about being fat, when all he really has is a slightly pudgy belly.
• Family Guy has several cases of this trope:
  • In "He's Too Sexy For His Fat", Peter gets liposuction to lose weight. He later gets additional plastic surgery to buff up in muscle, and becomes a complete Jerkass to everyone and his family since he considers himself as a beautiful person. At the end of the episode, he crashes his car and gets tossed out, rolls down a hill, falls off a cliff, hits a cactus and a plane on the way down, and then finally crashes into a seemingly randomly placed lard factory. He eats the lard around him to get out. As he's recovering in the hospital, he's shown to gain back all the weight he dropped.
    • In a subplot, Stewie temporarily gains weight when he attempts to mock Chris' obesity by gorging himself continuously right in front of Chris. By the end of the episode he is normal size again.
  • In "A Fish Out Of Water", Peter is depressed that he lost his job and has gained so much weight that he's an immobile blob on the couch. As he's getting his bath, Peter decides to drop the weight and do something with his life. Within the next scene, he's back at his usual size without anyone ever mentioning about his former weight problem.
  • Lois gets this in "Sibling Rivalry". Peter gets a vasectomy and won't have sex with Lois. The lack of sex causes Lois to start overeating, getting slowly fatter until she is the same size as Peter. Then, while Lois tries to lean across Peter to turn off his lamp, she has to wrestle with him to get to it. They realize that it is starting to feel good and only then realize that they are having sex. They agree that fat sex is the best sex they have ever had. Lois lets Peter fatten her up, literally shoving the food in. At the end of the episode, she has a heart attack and begrudgingly agrees to get all her fat lipped out of her. The plastic bag full of her fat nearly fills the bathroom of her hospital room. Peter tries having sex with it.
  • The Y2K episode where Peter eats an entire year's supply of dehydrated food, and looks no different. Then he complains that he's still hungry and drinks a glass of water, and immediately balloons out to fill half the room.

    Peter: Everybody leave, I have to poop... NOW!

  • In "Connie's Celica", Lois bulked up a good deal while in prison and again in "Mister Act" when Peter buys her an exercise bike.
• Futurama:
  • Amy used to be fat as a kid, so when the entire crew become younger in "Teenage Mutant Leela's Hurdles", she regresses to her childhood weight as well.
  • In "The Prisoner of Benda", the cast goes through a series of Body Swaps, and when Amy ends up on Leela's body, she starts overeating again, resulting in a fat Leela. Hermes offers to swap minds with her, claiming that Amy's overeating couldn't make his body any worse. When everyone's minds are back in their proper bodies at the end of the episode, Leela is back to normal, and Hermes has become thinner as well, after both saw Fry and Leela making out in Farnsworth's and Zoidberg's bodies and lost their appetites.
  • In "The Butterjunk Effect", Leela and Amy become very muscular after they start competing in an extreme sport and get addicted to performance-enhancing hormones.
• In the Hero: 108 episode "Lion Castle", Mystique Sonia ate too many of her strength buns, which were suppose to make her muscular, but instead made her very fat. Thanks to the King of Lion Castle, he let Sonia use his golden ring as a hula hoop and lost that extra weight before the episode ended.
• Henry and June on KaBlam! in a season four episode, where they gain weight from overeating and have to lose weight for an upcoming physical fitness test, and if they fail, they lose their jobs as hosts of the show. So who do they call in to help them? Richard Simmons. However, the two of them don't lose any weight and are prepared to get fired, only to discover the physical was to test them on surviving cartoon physics. The test literally involved dumping two anvils on them, which they walked away from without a scratch.
• The Life and Times of Juniper Lee: In a comic story a mishap with a potion Ray Ray was randomly mixing up causes Monroe to expand with blubber. Growing out of the house, a quick antidote mixed up by Juniper restores him to normal, but caused him to burp up the excess mass as a cloud of smog that blankets Orchid Bay.
• In the Lilo & Stitch: The Series episode "Frenchfry", Lilo, Stitch, and Pleakley all get fattened up to spherical proportions after getting hooked on the Impossibly Delicious Food whipped up by the Monster of the Week.
• Looney Tunes:
  • In Wabbit Twouble from 1941, Elmer Fudd, in a case of Early Installment Weirdness, is more obese than in more modern portrayals (he's only like this in four cartoons, including this one). At one point Elmer barricades Bugs Bunny's rabbit hole and laughs, and later Bugs pops out from under the barricade and mocks him, morphing into Elmer's overweight shape.
  • The Looney Tunes Show: In "Bobcats on Three", Bugs puts on a lot of weight after he gets addicted to Porky's grandmother's family recipes. Porky eventually cuts him off, saying "No one should eat that much butter!", and an incident at the public pool convinces Bugs to shed the excess pounds.
• Martha Speaks: In "Too Much Martha", Martha eats too much and her face and belly have become fat. At the end of the episode, she is inexplicably back to her normal size.
• My Dad The Rockstar: In "Rock Bottom", Rock Zilla starts to sport a pot belly due to him feeling older on his birthday, but only at the beginning of the episode. Rock is thinner for the rest of the episode and the series.
• Happens in the Direct to Video finale to Recess, Recess: Taking the Fifth Grade with Gus in the "Fifth and Sixth Graders Club" segment. Shortly after visiting the club for a week, the gang start to notice that Gus had been getting a little fat recently, as a result of eating too much. He remains this way until the next segement.
• In the Rick and Morty episode "Something Ricked This Way Comes", after Summer's boss the Devil, reinvents his company as an online business and intentionally left Summer out of reaping the profits, she and Rick decide to work out to gain insanely muscular bodies and proceed to beat the crap out of him as revenge. The post-credits scene shows a montage of them beating up a Neo-Nazi, a bully, a Westboro Baptist Church member and a man abusing his dog.
• Rocko's Modern Life:
  • In the episode "Tickled Pinky", after Heffer gets an emergency liposuction, he shrinks down to wire-thin size, but is back to normal next episode.
  • Another episode when Spunky after eating too much grows steadily fatter until eventually his feet don't even touch the ground. At the end, he's given liposuction becoming slightly slimmer than usual. This episode focused more on Bloaty and Squirmy.
• In Scooby-Doo! and the Witch's Ghost Scooby and Shaggy overeat and as usual swell up their bellies. This time, however, they happened to meet three attractive girls and manage to suck in their stomachs to transform into bodybuilder physiques. The girls turn out to be the scary Hex Girls who frighten the two back into normal form in a matter of seconds.
• A much more extreme example of this trope occurs in Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated during "The Devouring." Shaggy and Scooby get tasked with eating all the gluten-retaining food in Crystal Cove to stage a trap for the destructive Gluten Demon. Instead of only getting swollen bellies, Shaggy and Scooby become huge and are "too full to be scared" when the monster shows up. However, their morbidly obese bodies are strong and durable enough to take on the rampaging and equally large Gluten Demon and defeat it.
• Shaun the Sheep: In "Shape Up With Shaun", Shirley gets put on a weight loss program and becomes as skinny as Shaun, but then she falls into a pie truck, eats the pies and goes back to normal size.
• The Simpsons also has a few cases of size changes:
  • Pretty much any episode where Homer or another character pigs out and gets bloated from overeating.
  • In "King-Size Homer", Homer gains weight (up to 300 lbs) on purpose in order to claim disability and work from home. When there was a fatal problem at the power plant, he literally plugs the problem (unintentionally) with his fat ass. The episode's end averts the trope somewhat by showing Mr. Burns deciding to give Homer liposuction (originally he planned to have Homer work himself back into shape, but got so annoyed by his slow progress that he decided to just pay for the liposuction).
  • In "The Heartbroke Kid", Bart's school gets a soda/candy machine. Bart eats and drinks from it every single day until he gains a lot of weight. The episode parodies this by actually redoing the whole opening scene with Bart's bigger bulk, which ends with him suffering a heart attack as he gets to the Simpson family couch.
  • In "Husband and Knives", Homer once got his stomach stapled to slim himself down after Marge becomes a successful business woman and was afraid she would leave him. The rapid weight loss he underwent left him with extra skin which he had to clip up from the back.
  • In "Strong Arms of the Ma", when Marge suffered from agoraphobia after being attacked by a mugger. Marge, living in the basement, starts working out with the equipment Homer bought and later becomes a bodybuilder and starts abusing steroids.
  • In an episode of "The Itchy & Scratchy Show" Scratchy joins a gym and builds huge muscles by doing just three presses of a loaded weight bar.
  • In "Homer the Whopper", where Homer plays Everyman, he has to lose a lot of weight for the role, which he does easily, and ends up gaining all the weight back in what's probably just a few weeks.
  • In "Guess Who's Coming To Criticize Dinner," Homer gets a job as a food critic but requires Lisa to ghostwrite for him since his writing skills are horrid. Homer's love of food mixed with Lisa's eloquent descriptions sees many Springfielders gaining a large amount of weight due to Homer's glowing recommendations. Near the end of the episode, some are suddenly skinny again while others remain overweight.
  • After getting humiliated at a church picnic in "King of the Hill," Homer becomes determined to lose weight and joins a gym where he briefly gets coached by Rainier Wolfcastle. A few weeks later and Homer gains a significant amount of musculature in his arms.
  • "Sunday, Cruddy Sunday" has a brief gag where Homer's all-male entourage for the Super Bowl are relieved to see no women in the group, so they can let themselves go. The men proceed to let their bellies hang out, revealing Homer and several already heavyset guys are fatter than they look, while slender characters like Ned Flanders and Reverend Lovejoy turn out to be fat too. Once the bus driver's revealed to be a woman, they men pull themselves back together (and are annoyed they have to do so).
  • The subplot of "Days of Wine and D'oh'ses" features Bart and Lisa trying to take a prize winning photograph. When Bart states people only care about photos of celebrities looking horrible, Rainier Wolfcastle walks out of the Kwik-E-Mart looking fatter than usual and gorging on junk food. He claims he's preparing for a fat secret agent role. Several seasons later, he's obese again and stuck at the same fat camp as Bart in "The Heartbroke Kid."
  • A more subdued and realistic version occurs in "Lisa's Belly" when Bart and Lisa are forced to take steroids after suffering a nasty infection from exposure to polluted water. One of the side effects is a mild and temporary weight gain which results in both spending the episode looking slightly chubbier than normal. The plot's driven by Marge accidentally insulting Lisa by playfully stating she's "chunky."
• South Park:
  • Eric Cartman once tried to bulk up with Weight Gain 4000, thinking it would make him more muscular. He just ends up getting fatter still, until he is a thousand-pound blob of immobile fat being interviewed by Geraldo Rivera.
  • "BEEFCAKE!"
  • There's also the episode "Spontaneous Combustion", where due to a misunderstanding Cartman ends up tied to a cross and forgotten about. By the time the boys arrive to retrieve him, he's been reduced to an emaciated twig, having survived for three weeks off his body fat. He's back to normal by the next episode, though.
  • In "Jared Has Aides", the boys fatten up Butters with food from the local Chinese restaurant trying to follow Jared Fogle's fame. Butters gained enough weight to make a deal with the restaurant owner. Butters couldn't lose any weight, so the boys perform liposuction themselves.
  • In an episode about World of Warcraft, the boys are grinding (leveling up through repeating easy tasks) by killing boars. As their characters spend lots of time being active and get more and more athletic and awesome, they spend all their time sat down eating junk and drinking soft drinks, getting fatter and fatter.
  • And in "Tsst!" Cartman actually loses a lot of weight until he is only very slightly bigger than the other kids.
  • Subverted in "Fat Camp" when it turns out the skinny kid that comes back from a weight loss camp is not really Cartman. He is very convincing, though, you'd guess that's exactly how Cartman would look if he really slimmed down that much.
  • "Terrence and Phillip: Behind the Blow" shows that Terrence gained some weight after splitting from Phillip.
  • Subverted in "Man Bear Pig" where Cartman stuffs himself on what he thinks is treasure (actually prop coins and jewels as part of a tourist attraction in the cave the boys are trapped in) so he can smuggle it out and keep it all to himself. He spends the rest of the episode realistically bloated from having eaten the fake coins, and heavier than usual (which proves a detriment when he demands Stan, Kyle and Kenny carry him to safety).
• SpongeBob SquarePants
  • In the episode "Suds", SpongeBob gets the sponge equivalent of a cold, which causes bubbles to come out of his pores every time he sneezes. In an attempt to keep him from going to the doctor, Patrick plugs up SpongeBob's pores, causing him to swell up with every sneeze.
  • Sandy gains an enormous amount of weight in order to hibernate in "Survival of the Idiots".
  • In "Naughty Nautical Neighbors", SpongeBob and Patrick get bloated from drinking too much soda. They are back to normal once they burp it all out.
• In the Tiny Toon Adventures short "Superbabs", Superbabs is rendered helpless by "Wex Wuthor" feeding her into enormity with carrot cake.
• In the Total Drama episode "The Big Sleep", Heather's belly gets bloated after stuffing herself for a buffet challenge. She doesn't look pleased but spends much of the scene cradling her stomach as though she were pregnant.
• Totally Spies!
  • On two separate occasions did Clover and Alex bulk up due to artificial methods (nanomachines and a serum, respectively).
  • In the episode "Passion Patties", both Clover and Jerry and a large number of other people got hooked on a mad scientist's super-addictive, super-fattening cookies, and wound up pretty big before getting turned back to normal.
    • In a case of Laser-Guided Karma, the woman who created the serum that fattened everyone up and got them hooked on the treats is forced to (literally) take a taste of her own medicine. A few drops is all it takes for her to balloon to the size of her victims and go on a cookie-eating binge.
  • In "Matchmaker," Clover discovers all the girls at Beverly Hills High are dating the same guy. The guy, Eugene, was using a hologram device to change his appearance and planned to dump all the girls at once as payback for how his ex dumped him on Valentine's Day (instead of getting revenge directly on said ex). Eugene briefly uses the device to make himself look like a sumo wrestler to fight Clover. Apparently, the holograms are Hard Light projections since Eugene's now strong enough to put his fist through floorboards... and also heavy enough Clover can send him crashing through the boards.
• The 1960s Popeye short Weight for Me has Popeye and Brutus returning from a 6-month voyage to find that Olive has ate herself fat while they were gone. Popeye tries to get Olive to shed the extra weight, but Brutus likes her this way and tries to get her fatter. She gets thin again when Popeye eats some spinach and becomes a one-man vibration machine.
• Mickey Mouse (2013): The short "Doggone Biscuits" has Pluto becoming a massive yellow blob when Minnie feeds him too many treats, and she tries to get him slimmed down before Mickey gets back. By the end of the short, he's ripped, due to employing his Heroic Willpower to save Mickey and Minnie from a pack of angry dogs.
• Happens at least twice on The Fairly Oddparents:
  • In "Just Desserts!", Timmy gets tired of eating healthy, and wishes that all the food in the world (or possibly just Dimmsdale) could be dessert all the time. After a month, everyone in town—including Cosmo and Wanda—has bloated into a massively round ball, to the point where the only way to travel is rolling. This becomes a problem when the sudden shift in weight causes the Earth to nearly fall into the Sun, and neither Cosmo or Wanda can undo the wish: the former has lost his wand in his rolls of fat, while the latter doesn't have enough energy to even lift her arm to cast the spell.
  • In "Beach Bummed," Timmy wishes to be the strongest guy on the beach, and gains a good deal of muscle. As always, the wish ends up backfiring: whenever someone currently stronger than he is steps onto the sand itself, Timmy grows even more muscular so that he can continue to be the "strongest guy on the beach." Things get really bad when a whale washes ashore...
• Played for Drama in the Hey Arnold! episode "Weighing Harold". After a few people make fat jokes about him, Harold becomes self-conscious about his body and decides to go on a fitness cruise for kids in order to lose weight. But due to the stress of the cruise, he continues to overeat and comes back about twice as big as before he left; even his former tormentors realize how depressed he is and stop making jokes. After a pep talk from Arnold about focusing on how he feels about his body, Harold dedicates himself to an intense fitness regimen and restores himself to his original size by the episode's end.
• Wacky Races (2017): In "Mambo Itali Go-Go", the racers stop at an Italian village where the locals insist on offering them feasts every day. By the time they're finally allowed to leave, they're too fat to fit in their cars and have to ride on scooters for the rest of the episode's race.
• In the Xiaolin Showdown episode "Dreamscape," the final showdown is a sumo wrestling match. When the showdown officially begins, the Xiaolin warriors and their opponents are magically fattened for the duration of the match. After winning, their bodies slim down to their previous sizes.

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Source: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TemporaryBulkChange

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