Temporary Bulk Change / 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.
  • After the death of his wife Lisa, Tuttle became so morbidly obese that he was immobile. This change actually lasted for several seasons, but he eventually returned to his original weight.
• Beavis And Butthead: In the episode "Supersize Me", the titular characters become morbidly obese after eating nothing but fast food for 30 days straight in order to become famous like Morgan Spurlock of Super Size Me. Of course, they did this without knowing the actual message of the documentary.
  Beavis: I don't even understand what the problem is with teen obesity. This is great!
  Butt-Head: Yeah. Teen obesity kicks ass!
• 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.
    Eustace: What happened to you, woman? You look like a house!
    Muriel: Well, look who's calling the kettle black!
• 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."
  • The opening story in "Treehouse of Horror IV" has Homer selling his soul to the Devil (Ned Flanders) for a donut. When Lisa contests the bargain, Flanders agrees to a trial but keeps Homer trapped in Hell for a day wherein he's subjected to an ironic punishment of being force-fed all the donuts in the world. Homer manages to eat the whole supply, growing massively obese and still hungry for more.
    Demon: I don't understand. James Coco went mad in 15 minutes!
• 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.
• 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...
  • In "Timmy's Secret Wish!", after undoing Poof due to Timmy making a secret wish that costed him all his wishes, it caused Jorgen so much grief that he becomes morbidly obese from eating frosting, and remains that way for the rest of the special.
• 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.