Denier Comes Clean

[Guest dish-with-a-spoon]

This is the true story of my weight gain.

Ever since I was a teenager I'd always been "skinny fat." Somebody who looked slim when wearing clothes, but who was secretly soft all over underneath. As a result, I'd developed the habit of sucking in my soft tummy at all times - tightening my abs whenever I took my shirt off in front of anyone. It became such a subconscious reaction that I did it whenever I was alone as well, and I'd often check myself out in the mirror whenever I was getting dressed, ignoring the ugly truth around my midsection.

Still, I'd never been overweight. Just an average guy with a layer of puppyfat.

Until one summer that suddenly started to change. I was working a stressful job and living in a little apartment with my girlfriend at the time. Like any relationship, we'd started to slack off with our diet and fitness. The pounds had definitely piled up around my gf's hips and arms over the previous year. I wasn't complaining though, and neither was she, simply shrugging it off and blaming it on the pill. Lucky for me, however, the nightly pizzas and milkshakes hadn't made a dent on my lean figure. I looked in the mirror and didn't notice any difference to my midsection (though I was maybe a little red in the face from the strain of holding in my gut.) And anyway, who can afford a $20 scale in this economy? That's money you could be spending on a night out.

So I didn't notice any changes to my belly. I never weighed myself. The only hint that the nightly binges weren't being counteracted by my "really fast metabolism" were the little things. I began to get out of breath carrying groceries up the stairs. My jeans were getting tight around the thighs. My belts were running out of holes. I'd began finding extra belly-button lint when I showered. But I still looked good, right?

Well, actually . . . no. I began to notice some strange behaviors from friends and family around that time. Eyes glancing down at my stomach. My mom asked if "I'd been eating lots of candy." My friend asked if I was bulking up, and I smiled and said I had been working on doing more push-ups lately. I didn't realize that I was in complete denial about gaining weight, and things were about to get a lot worse.

One night, when i was getting into bed with my gf and we were fooling around I noticed her hands spending some extra time around my hips. (My lovehandles, actually, though i wasn't thinking of them that way yet.) Suddenly she broke away from our kiss and began looking at me. I could tell something was wrong, but was trying to come up with any excuse for it outside of some extra fat pooling around my middle.

"Are those stretch-marks?" she suddenly asked.

"WHAT?" I asked. She was looking at the dimple of fat poking over the back of my waistband, one part of my body I couldn't suck in, no matter how hard I tried. "It must just be a rash," I tried to explain.

"No, get up. They look like stretchmarks." She began inspecting my other side. "You have them the same place on the other side."

My heart began to race (an uncomfortable feeling for my newly unfit body, to be sure.) "Go look in the mirror," she said, and she got up to lead me into the bathroom. Now, at this point I'd reflexively spent a lot less time in front of the mirror, and suddenly I was afraid of being confronted with the truth of my shirtless body under the florescent lights. My girlfriend made me stand to the side and lift my arms though. Despite holding my gut in as tight as possible, I could see I'd gotten thicker. The soft flesh on my stomach was quivering with the effort. "Lift up your arms," she said.

I obeyed, and there I saw several red parellel lines striped along my sides. My pants looked uncomfortably tight, and fat was bulging out along the back of my waistband. I even had the beginnings of a backroll forming beneath my shoulder. What the hell, I thought.

To go from your average, slim but soft guy to somebody with stretchmarks scoring their lovehandles and rolls creasing their back in, what to my denying mind seemed like mere moments, was a real shock. To have my girlfriend make this discovery with me at the same time was even more embarrassing. "Those are stretchmarks!" she said, seeming equally surprised, disgusted, and gleeful that she wasn't the only one packing on some pounds.

I didn't know what to say. I couldn't stop staring, mortified, at myself in the mirror. Suddenly all those little warning signs I'd been choosing to ignore for the past six weeks flooded back into my head, and I realized that things had gone much further than I ever thought they could. I'd been stuffing myself nonstop and thought I'd never pay the price. 

"You do look like you've gained some weight," she said. I could see her eyes in the mirror moving up and down my body before resting on my shaking belly. "Are you sucking in your stomach?" she asked, realization finally dawning on her.

"No," I said instantly, but deep down i knew my secret was up.

She put her small hand over my deep belly-button and felt my quivering skin, sticky in a cold sweat. "Yes you are!" she said, sure now. "Stop it."

I didn't know what to do. Showing her was bad enough, but what I was really afraid of was seeing it for myself.

 

I plan on updating this with at least two more chapters soon. Stay tuned to find out how much damage I'd done to my body, including some hard numbers like my highest weight and bmi.