There was a similar sort of question before but I don’t mind revisiting questions, sometimes my headcanons have changed, sometimes I consider a different angle on things, as I’m doing now ;]

Short answer: for Ricean vampires, in my opinion, a fat person would not lose their weight and become a thin person. Vampirism might tighten them up a little, but they will have the same body they had before. For ETERNITY.

There are non-Ricean fat vampires, tho! Here’s Deacon from What We Do in the Shadows, and while I wouldn’t call him FAT, I wouldn’t call him SLIM either. Nor is he attractive to everyone even tho he thinks he is. 

So the factors involved with making *~chubby~* vampires are:

1. Who the maker chooses. This is based on different factors, but Beauty is typically one of them. In some societies, bigger is beautiful! An “unhealthy” weight by one society’s standards during one time period is desirable in others: [X]

^Personally, I prefer Tiziano’s “Venere di Urbino” in its original form, which is clearly the point Italian artist/actress Anna Utopia Giordano was making when she ‘shopped a whole bunch of these classical paintings ;D

Hit the jump for moar.

2. The vampiric parasite’s prime directive is to make its host into an efficient and attractive killing machine for the sake of its own survival. The parasite doesn’t know what society’s current ideal weight is, but it learns everything about the host body it goes into, and tries to enhance that body to suit its own goal (*1).

• It’s hard to explain why Gabrielle and Mona’s bodies were inflated up to a “healthy” weight (so to speak). I’d say it’s bc the vampiric parasite transforms the insides of its host to more of a spongey material to increase the liquid capacity (*2). That spongey material could end up slightly inflating areas that had withered due to age or malnutrition.

3. Post-turning, the vampire body cannot exercise off any poundage, or gain any weight in the manner that mortals do. They CAN overfeed, and there is one example of that in canon. I can’t think of anywhere that post-turning weight gain is mentioned. Overfeeding will still not create fat as we understand it:

“Glutted with the feast he was, plump and heated with it as she had seldom ever seen an immortal become.” Pandora describing Azim, Queen of the Damned

*1. I think the vampiric parasite (Amel) analyzes the blueprint of the host’s body when it’s installed and it then immediately uninstalls the features it doesn’t need (e.g. internal reproductive organs). It then starts converting all the organic matter of the host body into its own substance to “perfect it” into the pure supernatural killing machine that it wants to be. In that sense, that initial blueprint probably indicates length of hair, beard growth, muscle shape and position, etc., at time of death, and those are elements that the vampiric parasite program respects and wants to maintain as it continues to “update” its host body. The external appearance of the host body will affect its ability to hunt, and thus, preserve itself. It’s in the parasite’s interest for the host to continue to survive so that it can, too.

*2. The human body can only hold a limited amount of liquid, and the volume of blood they drink as fledglings (according to Lestat’s math, and I’m working on another post about that) would far exceed that limit. The fact is that there would be a lot of blood (like at least 2 gallons) that would have nowhere to go unless the insides of the body were more like a sponge and could store more of it than a mortal body can.