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And other people took notice too. Your friends, especially those who loved going to the gym and perpetually tweaking their diets, teased you for letting yourself go so badly. Your family started dropping hints — eventually not so subtle ones — about your condition. Where you saw yourself as someone who wasn’t anywhere close to the size of the superchubs you admired most, they saw a formerly skinny person who was apparently ballooning out of control. They scrutinized you every time you ate a meal, every hour you spent playing video games, every time you put on a piece of clothing that was ever so slightly too tight.

As if you weren’t self-conscious enough already. At the start, gaining was fun, and you didn’t think of it as much more than playing dress-up with your body. But eventually the extra weight, and the diet it took to gain it, started to change that. The large fry went from an indulgence to an expectation, and you craved your snacks and desserts when you couldn’t have them. Your car started feeling uncomfortable and cramped. You had to move your flab out of the way to do things, like wash your body or reach into your pockets. A short walk, a small stair, a long time standing left you winded and overheated. True, you had never been the athletic type, but attracting attention to yourself like this — being the object of side-eye and smirks over how out of shape you were — was a new, uncomfortable experience.

So you resolved to quit gaining and get your old body back. And that’s when you realized it. You can’t just do things the way you used to do them and go back to being the way you were — it doesn’t work like that. Putting on a couple hundred pounds changes who you are. You’d have to fight to get your old body back, using a body you specifically made to be as ill-adapted to that as possible. A body that exceeds its capacity just by trying to move itself. A body that demands calories, fats, and sugars constantly. A body that has such limited endurance, it’s practically designed for gaining by default.

This is not a body you could take to the gym seven days a week. You’re not giving just salad and vegetables to a subconscious screaming for pizzas and burgers. No way you’re starting an “active lifestyle” in a body that can barely lumber to the car. You may as well face facts. You’ll be lucky if you can work your way up to a walk around the block every day, and drop ten or twenty pounds to get the condescending congratulations of those around you. But “thin” is never going to be a word people use to describe you again.

You should be thankful if you can stay where you are, quite frankly. You live in a body now that wants you to get fatter anyway, and it’s not like your metabolism is going to get faster as time goes on. There’s every likelihood that, even if you’re not gaining, your weight is going to creep up on you, bit by bit, a few pounds every few months. In a few years, you might look up and realize that while you thought you were holding steady, you’d packed on a stealthy few dozen more.

I wonder what that’s going to do to you. It’s not like you’re starting at a trim 150 — you’re adding that weight to an already morbidly obese body. You’re groping blindly toward a tipping point. At what point does the creeping extra weight disrupt your equilibrium — make you that much less active, that much more tired, that much hungrier — and send you back into the habit of accelerating gains? Or worse, what happens when that ankle twists, or that knee gives out, and you’re stuck on the couch for a couple weeks? You might just come out of your “recovery” with even less endurance and an unstoppable appetite, primed to start obscenely gorging yourself and put on... well, who knows how much?

I think by now you realize just how much trouble you’re in. You’re already fatter than most people can even imagine a person being, and you’re in no position to reverse course. One slip and you’re on the road to tv-freakshow fat. And all because you thought you could eat a few burgers and get chubby and not face any consequences.

No, most people would have pumped the brakes once they got that big. It’s easy to forget how big a quarter ton is for regular people — most can’t even imagine being that size. But you blew right past it. I guess it’s probably easier when you have someone to take care of getting all your food and finding clothes to fit all the new fat that invariably follows. I was expecting that something — the heavier belly, the thickening thighs, the water-wing arms, something — would get your attention, though. But it never seemed to faze you.

Most partners probably would have sounded the alarm at some point, too. They would be worried by the warning signs of worsening morbid obesity, like when their partner got out of breath waddling from one room to another. When they got hungry again right after a big meal. When they needed help washing everywhere because their fat rolls were too heavy to lift on their own. When they got too big to fit in a standard car or in the clothes I bought, no matter what size they were.

Instead, I made all that stuff sexy. I pampered you and sympathized while you were catching your breath. I treated you with extra snacks and kissed your engorged belly while you ate them. I turned shower time into our time for a little naughty fun while I was diving into your rolls anyway. And I took care of any trips so you didn’t need to go out, and could lay around the house in your skimpy underwear looking ravishing as ever.

Looking back, maybe I did too good a job. I could have scolded you about your health, told you to watch your diet and exercise a little more. I wonder what would have happened if I’d pointed out how much more of the loveseat you were filling up, or how much more you were having to struggle to haul all your flab around. Maybe it would have kept you from becoming a physical wreck quite so soon; maybe you were already out of control and it would have just made it that much more apparent. We’ll never know, will we?

But I do know what I see in bed with me. A huge, wobbling belly hanging from your torso and spilling into your lap like a giant water balloon. Two bloated, distended legs pushed outward by a protruding fat pad between them. Biceps (if you can call them that) wider than your head, bulging out as your body has struggled to find places to store more fat, leading down to that dimpled elbow roll and an almost equally chubby forearm. And that gorgeous face — always so cute, no matter how many chins you get, how much your cheeks puff out, or how much you give me that indignant, horrified look I see right now.

So no, sweetheart, I’m not helping you up. You should have realized this day was coming a long time ago. But doesn’t it seem like a nice morning for breakfast in bed, anyway? And you must be hungry. Fortunately there’s a dozen eggs, a dozen doughnuts, and a couple pounds of bacon in the kitchen with your name on them.

As much as you love eating out, though, the real magic happens when you’re at home. Where nobody really gets to see. This is where you get to work your way through a stock pot filled to the top with mac and cheese over the course of an evening. Or put away an entire three-layer chocolate cake, slice by slice, bite by relentless bite disappearing into your implacable maw. Or polish off a couple family-size boxes of sugar cereal as a midnight snack. Your snacking is epic too, of course. You’re never without a bag of chips, a box of candy, and a two-liter of soda or something similar within arm’s reach. You go through corn dogs, chicken nuggets, Hot Pockets, pizza bites — all the frozen and fried snacks you can manage — at a rate that would send most people to the hospital. That kind of endurance and consistency is what it takes for someone to have a 20,000 calorie day. Every. Single. Day.

And that singleness of purpose must have been your way for a long time. You’ve been so focused on using food to pleasure yourself for so long that you’ve completely ignored what it’s done — is doing — to you. You’ve missed how your body has expanded, as if to make room; and you keep eating more and more, trying to fill it. You’re somehow oblivious to the pound after pound after pound of fat that packs on your frame as you follow this disaster diet. Arms, legs, butt, belly, all ballooning outward in a grotesque display of how many calories a single person can put into their body. It would almost be inspiring, if it weren’t so horrifying to watch someone utterly wreck themselves.

Because as much as you’re ignoring the changes happening to you, you still feel some of the effects. All that blubber, though soft and plush from the outside, presses relentlessly on your organs and bones. Even planted on the couch, it takes active effort, pressing against the ever-increasing pressure of the weight, for you to breathe and take in enough oxygen to sustain your tremendous bulk. The extra weight and volume in so many different places on your body contorts your frame as you walk, or sit, or lay down, and it stretches and twists your joints. As a result, your fat is basically inflicting low-level torture on you 24/7. And the hundreds of pounds of excess flab covering every inch of you — which any motion requires you to hoist, lower, stabilize, or simply carry with you — means that even the simplest movement becomes a cardio workout. You’d think it would weigh you down more, but it hasn’t (at least so far) stopped you from that next meal.

Just where do you think a habit — an addiction — like that ends? A human can’t just eat the calorie intake of ten people every day and expect it never to catch up with them. And your day of reckoning is fast approaching, my friend. Can you feel it catching up with you as the growing weight of your prodigious blubber slows you down? A creeping sense of dread that soon, you’ll have to pay the price for your obscene indulgence? Maybe somewhere, in the part of your mind not occupied with what you’re consuming next, there’s that little nagging worry about what’s coming. Maybe it’s the fear, knowing how tenuous your grasp on your health and your mobility is, that’s making you ignore the problem and, perversely, driving you to destruction.

You know it’s a matter of when, not whether, you’ll be too fat to keep going as you are. You may not admit it to yourself, but you know. Even with a van big enough to get you there and chairs strong enough to hold you, eventually a porker just gets too heavy to manage the waddle up to a restaurant and too bloated to fit through the door. Your last trip to the buffet might be the one that ends with an embarrassing collapse in front of a shocked wait staff, sickened at seeing your mass of glistening chubby flesh sprawled on the floor, after finally getting exhausted by trying to carry your near half ton of fat back to a table. Or you might take the wiser course and decide, at some point, not to test it anymore. Either way, it will happen sooner or later.

And what happens then, when your last reason to leave the house and get some meager physical activity goes away? What happens when all you do is stay home and gorge yourself nonstop? And you and I both know, that’s exactly what you’ll do. You’ll lounge on the couch or snooze in bed and stuff yourself like an engorged tick. If you have any room to pack any more food in your distended gut, you almost certainly will. And with nowhere to go and nothing to do, except maybe to make more food, just about every bite you eat will get turned by your crashing metabolism into brand new fat. You’ll get fatter and heavier faster than ever before — and maybe you’ll even get big enough fast enough to scare you. But at that point, you probably have to resign yourself to living like this, to having ever more fat enveloping your body and weighing you down.

No, the issue is more functional than that. The fact is, even you’re not in control of your weight any more. I guess I was able to ignore how drastically you were changing until recently, but things have started to pile up. Like we can’t take my car anywhere because your love handles have started knocking the shifter in the center console out of gear. We had to ask for that belt extender on the flight back from New York last winter. I can’t find you clothes that fit literally anywhere, even at the XL stores. And your old clothes are... more revealing, I guess, than they used to be.

And it’s not just me that’s noticed. Your dad called me the other day after we had dinner over there just to talk about it. He asked me why I let you leave the house, even in your favorite outfit, when it stopped fitting about 50 pounds ago. He and your mom were both shocked that you were able to finish off a spiral-cut ham that they expected to get several days’ leftovers out of. And neither one of them was impressed that you were an out-of-breath wreck from just walking out to the patio and back. He had some... not particularly kind words for how he thought you looked, but I’ll just leave it at that. Basically he wants me to make you find a personal trainer, or at least start going to the gym regularly, as if I can make you do anything you don’t want to.

So I wouldn’t try demanding anything like that, even if I wanted to. But he’s not wrong that working on your stamina, and maybe trying to get a little weight off, wouldn’t be a bad idea. I just hate to see you in the situation you’re in, as much as anything. You used to enjoy traveling, going off on adventures and exploring new places. Now it’s a pleasant surprise if we can heave you off the couch and get you to dinner somewhere without incident.

I don’t mean to be critical; I just want to confront things the way they are. Whenever we do go out, you can barely manage to get around, no matter how little walking or moving it requires. We can’t help but be conspicuous whenever we get seated or get ready to leave — restaurants just aren’t made for people like you, and other diners can’t help but stare when you waddle across the dining room. And your portion sizes don’t help that, either. You’ve always been willing to indulge, sure, but when your plates take up almost your entire half of the table — after a couple appetizers to yourself, soup and salad course, mains with a couple extra sides, and at least one dessert — people take notice of that, too. I have to believe you must feel so embarrassed to have everyone watching you so closely while you polish off a meal, some of them probably being pretty disgusted at how much a chub like you is putting away. You don’t ever really show it, but I have to believe you wish you could go back to having a more... conventional life.

I also have to wonder, if you don’t start paying a little more attention to your health, where things will go from here. I know being fat doesn’t mean someone isn’t healthy, but in your case at least... well, you’re not. The doctor’s told you that in every one of your last few annual checkups. More weight’s come with higher blood pressure, higher cholesterol, higher A1C, more trouble breathing, worse circulation, you name it.

What’s she going to say after a couple more years of weight gains like you’ve been having? Or worse? How long before she says you’re diabetic, and have to start on medication that’s only going to make the weight pile on faster? How long before she has to report the irreversible damage your weight is doing to your back and joints? Huh? How long until she has to break the news that your heart has been working beyond its limit for so long that it’s starting to fail you? And what will we do if you get too big to exercise, to do anything about it? That’s not the life I want for you, one where food is the only thing you still get to enjoy.

But I’m worried that’s where things are headed if we can’t get a handle on your weight very, very soon. That if we don’t, it’ll be totally out of control before we know it, and too late to do anything. Doesn’t that worry you at all? Aren’t you the least bit concerned about what’s going to happen if you carry on like this?

But you didn’t. And so, you waddled across the stage at graduation and into a young adulthood that freed you from even the limited structure of university life. You landed some regular freelance work that paid the bills and let you work entirely from home. And you kept gorging yourself on whatever delicious food you wanted, whenever you wanted it. There was nobody to tell you what time meals were supposed to be, nobody to question your incessant snacking. While other people your age were going out with their friends, traveling to exotic places, partying, and living their lives, you were home by yourself most of the time. Craving. Consuming. Expanding.

With total freedom from a schedule and your last reason for even limited physical activity gone, the creeping tide of weight gain over the past few years turned into a flood. The snacking, meals, grocery deliveries, and takeout orders became constant. You would look like a completely different person to someone who had gone a couple months without seeing you, packing on fifty pounds or more from season to season. Eventually, your friends and family gave up on trying to save you from what was increasingly looking like an unstoppable force, propelling you faster and faster toward destroying yourself.

I suppose for normal people, there’s never an age where it’s expected someone will be too fat to leave the house. But it’s your mid-20s, and here you are. You spend eighteen hours a day on the couch, pinned beneath a flowing belly the size of a bean bag chair and two bulbous titties connecting to the massive rolls of fat under your arms. Laptop perched atop your wobbling stomach, you try to type with sausage fingers you’re even starting to have trouble bending, taking breaks every few minutes to rest your bloated arms.

As they fall to your sides, the fat on your biceps — bigger around than a healthy adult’s waist — puckers, flowing over the layers of rolls bulging from your abdomen. Your forearm fat shifts down toward your hands, making an impressive roll around your pudgy wrist. You try and shift a little to get more comfortable, wiggling your tremendous butt and shapeless legs around to try and resettle yourself. As you take up most of the couch now, there’s not much room to change positions. Instead, you stretch, wiggling the toes peeking out from the distended blobs of fat, now hundreds of pounds in their own right, that pass for your legs.

Shocking as those legs are, they can still support you during your labored, stumbling trips to the front door a couple times a day. Here, you collect the tens of thousands of calories you have to put away to keep you in this lard prison you’ve built for yourself. But you don’t think of it that way. You see it as a treat. After all, you just did a full-body workout lumbering to the door and back; why shouldn’t you reward yourself for keeping up with your fitness?

Except that nobody’s fooled by what’s going on here — not even you, on those rare occasions when the delusion lifts and you get a lucid look at your situation. There’s nothing normal about a twentysomething eating themself to the size of a California king mattress. There’s no excuse for being too heavy to waddle out your front door, ignoring whether you could even still squeeze your outrageous bulk through it. And all those admirers on the internet — talking about how sexy you look, how much they want to feed you, how they’d love to see you even bigger — are all really thinking the same thing.

They would push you to your limit if they had half a chance. Forget being able to waddle to the door; they want you so blown up with lard and full of food that you’re not rolling over without help. They want you a wheezing, blubbery mess with so many rolls, folds, blobs, and bulges covering your body that you’re almost unrecognizable as a person. They want to see you reaching pathetically across your expanse of fat, trying to get the feeding tube that’s slipped away from you, and looking at them pleadingly for help to restore the sickening flow of calories into your ruined body. They want you to end your twenties as a fat cow, insatiably feeding and alarmingly obese, eating yourself to death.

And they’d probably tease you by telling you about their day out of the house, and all the things that they got to do that a half-ton bariatric patient like you can never hope to do again. Fit in a car. Go shopping, mobility scooter or not. Literally just be outside without having countless amazed stares and snarky comments from all the people, shocked at seeing someone in their twenties who already weighs as much as five or six people. Shame those are off the table for you, they’d say; guess you better eat some more to make yourself feel better.

You’re not quite that big — not yet, at least. Your weight may be wildly out of control compared to most people your age, but even so it takes some time for those bad eating habits to reach critical mass. Give it a few years, though. Even if you manage to get a handle on your rapid expansion, there’s no chance you’re losing any weight. You’re too used to living this way to give it up. That number on the scale will keep creeping up, slowly but surely. You’ll be reminded of your inevitable fate by how your clothes feel like they’re slowly constricting, squeezing your belly and rolls tighter and tighter; how it feels like someone’s turning up gravity on you a little every day. But you can’t pin this on your clothes or the laws of physics. You only have yourself, and your gluttony, to blame.