You thought you'd worked it out. You'd spent your early 20s managing to balance studying, partying, working, and regular gym sessions. You'd been smart with your limited funds, making sure you cooked small meals from scratch to keep that price low enough to keep a healthy budget for alcohol. But now, with your degree completed, you're ready for your first full time job. 40 hours should be easy compared to the hours you put in with lectures and studying. And you'd finally have money to treat yourself properly. No more living on the cheapest food you could batch cook.
You thought you'd be able to fill your days with plenty of fresh fruit, vegetables, and lean proteins. And you did, at first. Your muscles showing through more as your body fat dropped. You continued to go out and party over the weekends but kept to that strict gym routine you'd built up.
But then the work deadlines started to hit, and you stopped having time to fit your gym sessions in. You reasoned it would be fine, only a few weeks where you'd cut down on the exercise. But as the deadlines kept piling up, you quickly lost the habit or working out.
Your sleep started to suffer and you found yourself craving sweet caffeinated drinks in the morning , with a pastry on the side to help get you through.
You'd skip the canteen in favour of working lunches, finding the most convenient things to mindlessly eat whilst desperately trying to get your work done. Eventually the snacking sessions grew longer and longer before it was more of a constant snacking than a working lunch. Soon, the only exercise you were getting was walking to the work vending machine for more snacks to munch on.
And when you got home you were too exhausted and unmotivated to make food, so you opted instead of takeaways and food delivery apps for your meals and groceries. Ordering an obscene amount of convenience snacks next to your fast food order that got gradually larger each passing week.
And you stopped going out as much over the weekends, but you still wanted to treat yourself. So you'd spend your Saturday evenings beached out on the couch surrounded by beer and food wrappers instead. You catch glimpses of yourself in the mirror and barely recognise yourself any more. You'd been so determined to stay fit and lean, but now?
Now you could feel your body slowing down and growing larger. You could feel the jiggle in your hips and lower belly as you walked to your desk, large sweet coffee and a bag of cinnamon rolls in hand. You can hear your own breathing, heavy and laborious as you carry around the extra flesh. You could feel your waistband cutting into soft flesh when you sat down in your chair, hear the weak groan from it as it struggles to hold your weight. You can feel your belly sitting gently on thickened thighs. You can feel the tightness of your shirt straining against your belly, chest ,and softened arms as you lean forward to log in to your computer. You sigh, you already gave up and sized up clothing recently, how can it be that you are outgrowing clothes already? You thought had it all worked out.
But now you have no idea how to stop yourself falling further into obesity. All you really worked out was how to unintentionally become unrecognizably and irreversibly fat.
