27F, 5'11, CW:403lbs GW: 250lbs (or just not feel like shit lbs) Sedentary job.
Throwaway for obvious reasons. The story I'm about to tell, to me, feels gross and embarrassing, but I have no one in my life I can honestly talk to about this.
So, to give you a bit of background, I'm a woman in my late 20's and I'm kind of going through a very difficult time. Ive had a very... interesting life, with my father's severe alcoholism and my mother being younger than I am now and working 2-3 jobs to support him and me, in addition to being diagnosed with autism and ADHD as a child, I found it very difficult to cope with my father's mood swings.
My mother is a bigger woman, she's not as big as she used to be but still not skinny by any stretch of the imagination. I loved her and still do love her very much, she was essentially my best and only friend for the first 14 years of my life. She was very busy trying to provide for me and my deadbeat dad so we didn't get to spend that much time together. One of the ways we would try and find excuses to get away from my dad from a very young age was to go out to eat.
I believe (in an armchair sense) it is these factors in combination with other things that resulted in me developing my deepest, darkest, and most depraved secret: a weight gain/fat fetish. I know I will be judged for this and I understand it. It is not socially acceptable to openly desire to be 400 lbs. To explain without getting into too much detail, one night when I was about 4 or 5 years old, I fell asleep and had a dream about becoming larger and softer at a very rapid pace. I woke up and felt a torrent of different emotions, ranging from excitement to embarrassment to shame to confusion and everything else in between. I've dealt with it every day of my life since. Nowadays, ive found myself in a hole I feel like I can't get out of. I have no energy, I'm miserable and moody, and have lost interest in pretty much all my hobbies aside from doomscrolling. I don't like having this fetish anymore.
During my life, I weight cycled a lot. Gained, lost, gained due to life circumstances, changing jobs, changing environments, all the while my desire to become larger and my desire to maintain a smaller, healthier body go to war in my head. One of the worst things to happen to Team Health, so to speak, was online fetish content. I suddenly found an entire community of people who felt like I did, at least partially.
Ive gone through phases of abstinence, but for the past few years, ive basically nosedived into it. One of the reasons is the trauma and chronic back pain that was given to me while I was suffering workplace abuse working as a line cook (yes, I was the only woman in the back, I hated being front of house so I did back of house work). Adding this onto my ADHD, autism, trauma, and depression and anxiety from the former, I find myself unable to cook or clean. When I cook, I find that everything I make tastes wrong somehow, and I feel ashamed that I have to waste food because the texture of the food or how it tastes leftover makes my sensory problems flare up. I also can't stand in place long enough to do dishes, so I don't even bother cooking in my house out of respect for my roommates' sanity. If I only eat frozen meals and fast food, all I have to do is throw the packaging out when I'm done.
This is becoming a problem because I'm realizing I haven't cooked a single meal in an entire year. My breakfast is Dunkin donuts, my lunch is burger king, my dinner is McDonalds. I do not eat at these places because they serve enjoyable, yummy food that I just can't wait to get back to, nor am I even going there for my fetish. I do this because these are some of the cheapest options I can get without getting out of my car and I psychologically cannot get myself to cook food anymore. I have lost basically all the cooking skills I had due to the decay of my body and the decay of my own mental health.
Im 5'10, 400lbs. My joints hurt, every flight of stairs is an ordeal, I can barely make a short grocery trip without being wiped out for the whole rest of the day. I spend $200 a week on fast food and I am not having fun. In fact I feel guilty and ashamed I'm being so wasteful when other people have to make do with so much less. I'm losing damn near half my pay check eating the same shitty food every day, shifting it around constantly to "which fast food would make my sensory issues act up the least today".
This is no way to live a life. I look in the mirror and I can't even fetishize myself anymore to try and escape. I'm 400lbs but I feel like I'm 800, and it is not worth it. I do nothing but come home after my sedentary office job and eat/look at my phone/sleep/do it all over again.
Currently here is what I've done/currently do for my mental/physical health issues:
-multiple psychiatric medications, have cycled through many in the past before coming up with a stable regimen -years of talk therapy, 5 different therapists, 3 different psychiatrists -EMDR -physical therapy -yoga -1 mile walk/day (this has declined to about a quarter mile due to pain)
Ive talked a lot to doctors about how i feel physically, but the only thing they tell me is that my levels look decent and that the x ray only shows "mild arthritis" in my lower back. Sure doesn't feel like mild arthritis!! The one thing I haven't actually done is talk to a professional about my fetish. I feel like it's somehow key to understanding what's wrong with me, but just the thought of bringing it up to another human in real life makes me feel like I have hot coals in my throat. I have no idea what kind of specialist would specialize in or even consider treating someone like me who is obviously going to have an extra self-destructive force getting in the way of any lifestyle changes/weight loss treatments.
In short, I'm lost, and so I'm shouting into the void of the internet anonymously because I just have nowhere else to articulate these feelings to other people and most of the spaces I'm usually in don't take too kindly to IWL talk. I know the answer is probably "fix your mental health" but I have no idea how to do that when my body feels so miserable and I feel like I have no agency to change it other than trying (and failing, again) to measure and cut calories.
And thank you, for reading my story.
