Chapter 4 - the weigh-in

In the weeks and months that followed, the anxiety over her rising weight had the exact opposite effect on May’s eating habits than the vague intentions of change she had made after seeing Dr Yasis. Instead of scaling back her caloric intake, she did two related things:

Firstly, she poured herself into her work. CalPERS’ Chief Investment Officer was starting a new plan to expand the pension plan’s investment in US-based advanced technology opportunities, especially aerospace and robotics, and had asked May to lead a sector-wide study to understand the space better. As one of the largest public pension plans in the world, this meant May was in a unique position to ask for almost anything of the funds and companies that her team might wish to invest in. This was both intellectually stimulating and a significant time-sink, meaning she had less and less time, and interest, to do much else than work and rest from home.

Very much relatedly, the second thing that May did was eat more. A lot more.

Late-night research reviews and early-morning company interviews from Europe threw off her circadian rhythm and meant that she nearly always had an excuse to grab a snack or stuff herself relentlessly. As the mind-numbing stream of numbers, technology overviews, and investment précis flowed into her inbox, soda, chips, candy, and pretty much everything else flowed through her mouth and down into her ever-expanding waistline.

Four months of backbreaking work later, May received a promotion for her diligence and “exemplary” investment plan for the fund that the CIO would “implement word for word.”

The promotion afforded the bloated new investment manager a few unique privileges that she was more than happy to take advantage of: a more flexible work schedule, given her unique needs to engage with international partners, and the right to continue to work fully remotely. Her team of fifteen analysts would have to call or video-chat her for their meetings. Coming from the quant side of the business, both May and her team were quite happy to embrace a no-pressure culture of cameras being off and working primarily via the internal messaging system.

Despite her preference to ignore her looks and focus on her work and pastimes, even May had to begrudgingly admit that this non-visual work culture also afforded her the helpful privilege of being able to wearing whatever she wanted at any given time.

This privilege was, in practical terms, also something of a necessity.

As she pulled her head up from the release of the investment plan and being onboarded as a new manager and considered the prospect of engaging with the outside world again, May had to take stock of the changes her body had undergone over the past few months:

Standing in the bathroom one morning, gigantic stomach fully obscuring the scale, May grimaced and, in a voice that cracked a little with anxiety, asked Macey for help reading the numbers somewhere below.

Her belly had grown so large and wide that it was impossible for her to see anything below it. Frustratingly, her breasts had only grown modestly. Despite the rapid expansion of most other parts of her body, if anything her boobs looked smaller in comparison to the rest of her, even while they’d gone up a full cup-size and pressed unhappily against the short-hemmed sports bra that she’d taken to wearing around the house most days. Slightly more generous C-cups still were outshone by her growing band-size, with her increasingly lumpy rolls of back-fat mashing to create an angry-looking red aura of skin irritation where the back straps were stretched to new limits almost every day.

Beneath her perpetually disappointing breasts, ungainly and shapeless rolls under her arms flowed from above a still-(comparably) narrow waist into heavy-set haunches and love handles. They now formed an innertube-like ring of fat that began at the “small” of her back and then rounded out into her growing ass cheeks. Both of her rounded buttocks were increasingly meaty and seemed to add more dimples and cellulite every day.

Her thighs made a mockery of the string-bean she had once been. Even at her boniest, May had always had somewhat out-of-proportion hips to her size, but this was very obviously the fundamental shape of her body and not a sign of fattness. Now, however, May’s hips had grown and grown outwards to mask any hint of the bones that had once been one of her defining features. In the place of a bony obtrusion, heavy saddlebags now hung -- and indeed they did hang -- from each hip at acute angles. From the back May still had a strangely narrow waist, if you ignored where he belly bulged outward from the front of love handles. A small rib-cage and wider bones provided the scaffolding for a tranche the saddlebags. They ran out from just above her hips and then flared out into wide, mushy parabolas on either side, tapered off through her narrow lower thighs and thin-ish calves.

Finally, and from any angle, May’s belly truly dominated, one might even say conquered, her form. It had now grown so large that no only could she no longer see her feet, but no longer see all parts of her belly. It’s rounded horizon was so large that angles below the widest point of her belly on all sides were completely invisible to her. In some ways that was perhaps for the best, because the ever-increasing number of white and red stretchmarks that splayed dendritically across all of the lower areas of her belly.

When Macey finally made it into the room, having extracted herself from a particularly smutty Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure fic , she was, yet again, struck by the vastness of her roommate.

[i]How the fuck does she keep gaining weight like this? Doesn’t she see just how huge she is getting?[/i]

Although she didn’t think of the tums incident as the “beginning” of this weight gain, she could reflect vaguely back to that time last year and again was washed over just by how much she had grown -- and how quickly.

It was abundantly clear to Macey, and, she suspected even May, that their unique lifestyles created a glide path for this kind of change; remote work, comparably high incomes, and rather narrow, inward-looking social lives all created little outside feedback on her friend’s changes and, therefore, effectively no pressure for her to change.

And it wasn’t only her body changing now: there was some sort of bizarre inverse relationship to her weight gain and her productivity at work. In some strange way, her endless justifications around “brain food” might have been true. Her physical lethargy only seemed to grow more pronounced over time, bringing larger and larger piles of snacks to her desk to avoid having to make multiple trips (perversely, this led to a vicious cycle of needing ever-larger snack hauls). And yet she worked longer hours, and, occasional food naps aside, seemed more engaged and focused than ever.

These perverse forces at work only confused her friend, but, true to her original intention, she refrained from intervention.

Macey walked around the edge of May’s bulbous hips and ducked around the edge of her bulging belly to see, with some craning, the number flashing on the scale. She looked, looked again, grimaced, and then stood up to face her friend.

“Three-hundred and thirty-six pounds.”

May’s face sank and a pause settled in that was nine months pregnant with triplets.

“That…. That can’t be right.”

Macey, simultaneously shocked and unmoved by her friend’s predicament, tried not to shake her head too visibly.

“I double-checked before I read it out.”

“It can’t be right,” May protested, “You go on and see if it works for you.”

Rolling her eyes, Macey silently motioned for her lumbering friend to move, and quickly jumped onto the scale herself.

While her breasts were large enough to obscure some of her vision, it only took a slightly craning of her neck to see familiar numbers staring back up at her: 172.

She stepped on and off twice, and got the same result within a pound or two.

She looked back at her friend gravely: “It seems pretty accurate to me.”

What little colour remained in May’s face drained quickly. Memories of every recent binge and moment of over-indulgence washed across her mind, the guilt and shame of each instance weighing her down almost as much as her fluff.

“I can’t believe it. Last year I was almost half this weight.”

Lost in her spiral was also the fact that last year, as her weight finally really started to take off, she’d still been five or possibly ten pounds heavier than her friend. Now was nearly double.

It took every muscle in her body and every spiritual iota of her being, for Macey not to scream “I told you so!” at the top of her lungs at her friend. Maybe it was the utter shock and horror on May’s face, or the disbelief that ventured on delusion, but in that moment the friend formerly known as “the chubby one” lost even more sympathy for the naive chubster in front of her. A decade of May’s thick-headed inability to recognise the forthcoming disaster of her diet (or lack thereof) sapped her friend of any willingness to help.

Macey debated for a moment what she would say next -- and later came to question just how much of an inflection point this might have been for what May became -- but settled, with some moral consternation, on something… less than helpful.

“I’m sure some of it’s just bloating. You had a big meal today and you have been working a lot. Maybe you’re retaining some water or something.”

She concluded her statement with what she hoped was a warm, if somewhat distant, supportive-looking face.

The comment seemed to soothe May somewhat, who began, following her friend’s lead, generating a list of other excuses that, while not entirely explaining away her obvious weight gain, at least softened the blow.

Sagely, she concluded her soliloquy with another vague recognition of the need to “eat better” and “be more active.”

Unintentionally pushing her friend against the wall as she lumbered out of the bathroom, May’s obliviousness continued and cemented her roommate’s indifference to helping her any further.