Gaining

I feel the same. But since its only a kink I enjoy it when I‘m in the mood e.g. With my partner but I dont persuit it in real life. I am a very slim person and it fulfills my needs to only think and read about it.

All of my life I’ve felt exactly like that. It was as if two versions of myself lived inside me: one that wants to feel how it’s like to become morbidly obese and one that wants to be muscular and lean and athletic and that has health as his first priority. Both of them hate each other and think the other one is categorically wrong, and give me very compelling arguments about why this is true.

When I was 23 I got a golden opportunity to make it true and become obese. I moved to another country far from home and knew nobody there. I could become anyone, it was suddenly a real opportunity that that part of me that’s obese could become my reality. Sort of over through the fit one as ruler of my body. But I didn’t do it. As I started meeting people I started to feel ashamed that they would know that I had gone from fit to fat, as opposed as to meeting them already fat.

At 25 I went back home, and all my insecurities about people watching me get fat came back at their fullest. But when I started smoking weed more than just a metaphor I felt literally like when I was sober I’d identify as the fit version and when I was high I’d identify as the one who’s life motivation is to become morbidly obese.

Then during the pandemic I had another golden chance, this time it was becoming socially acceptable and expectable to see people balloon up to bariatric levels when they’d been slim or fit all their lives. If I had become obese then, it would’ve been literally the best timing to make it happen because then I could’ve stayed obese all my life and it wouldn’t be weird. But I didn’t. I became obsessed with staying fit and exercising because I didn’t want to be one of those people that allowed themselves to become obese. Seriously, so much of this fear we have to be fat is completely social, we’ve been engineered to think and feel like this, it’s not fair.

At 31 I moved countries again, and although I already knew some people here, I was yet to meet most of the people that would become my friends. So after two golden opportunities utterly and absolutely WASTED, from my leanest and most fit self in my whole life after having obsessed with exercise for years, I actively started gaining. I’m chubby now, overweight and jiggly, but people still tell me that I don’t look chubby at all. Only when someone touches my moobs or my belly then their first reflex is to squish them. So for most of the people there’s no way of telling how chubby I am, I live mostly a slim person life.

Now my objective is to become morbidly obese. I am concerned about my health as well, but the truth is that you can stay mostly healthy if you gain slowly. You can alternate times in which you actively gain with other in which you exercise more and eat healthier. Over time you will gain, but giving your body time to adapt. And you can stop at any time, and I think the point of equilibrium is around my size, in the middle between overweight and obese according to my BMI, where I get to feel fat but look slim.

So just some ideas and experience dealing with this. It feels horrible to be torn apart as if you were two people instead of one. I found it to be true for myself that accepting my desire to become fat was the healthiest option when I considered also my mental health. It’s easy to dismiss that, it was especially like that for me when I was younger. After 10 wasted years I realised that the older I get, the more vulnerable I’ll be and the more fit I’ll need to be. and of course ideally I should start getting leaner some years before an old age, so at some point I’m gonna have to stop or at least lower my being obese. So the sooner I start, the more time of life I’ve got to be obese. These are just my feelings and my ideas, but I thought they might interest you or others in the same situation.

I don't know how common this is, but I can relate a lot. Don't even know when it started exactly, but I am torn between getting as fat as possible and working out/ eating healthy for years now.
During times that I allow myself to gain I go all in and gorge on all kinds of high-calories stuff. After a while, when the weightgain REALLY kicks in and I manage to gain ~20lbs/month I tend to chicken out and get back to eating healthy/ work out etc.

I'm going back and forth for years now and am still not sure how to deal with it.

Is it normal or not? I don't know. That might be something everyone has to figure out for themselves. How far are you willing to go?
At the moment I am at a phase again where I tend to ask these questions myself.
I can't deny that I have a kink. Do I knwo how to deal with it? No, not yet.
Until then, I think I may just explore what it is all about, test my limits and enjoy whatever happens on this journey.

In some variation or other, it is really common.

A couple of quick notes:
- fat is not always unhealthy (although possibly the way you'd like to be fat would be unhealthy)
- what aspects of your slim body do you like so much? the social approval? being able to fit small places? Just how you are used to it? Some factors can be more easily dealt with than others if you ever did gain.

As for me, I always liked be active and athletic, but also had gaining desires. That was an easier one that yours, because over the years I gradually let myself gain (gain ten pounds, lose it, gain 15 and only lose ten of it, etc, slowly going up overall), because I could still be active even while chubby and eventually somewhat fat and as I got older the athletics I was still interested in were more forgiving of me being heavier.