Kinktober Day 3: Gym/Diet Failure (Patreon)

Prompt fill for day 3 of Kinktober: Gym/Diet Failure! This is always a fun trope to read, and something that's made it into my work before. I think this is also the first story I've written that acknowledged the pandemic?? I have somehow managed to studiously avoid including it any fiction for *checks notes* almost exactly a year and a half since my city went into lockdown! But it felt perfect for this theme. Enjoy!

***

Maybe it was silly, but she’d really bought into the whole “New Year, new me!” propaganda that year. It was 2020, the start of a new decade, and she was sure everything would be different. She’d signed up for her gym membership, spent weeks collecting healthy recipes, and written in her journal all about her hopes and dreams for the next year. She was sure she’d be able to lose the ten pounds that had crept on since she’d broken up with her ex, and the fifteen she’d put on after they moved in together. She would finally move out of the “overweight” BMI category and into the “healthy weight” class. She was going to be fit and fabulous and everything in her life would fall into place.

She skipped the gym on the 1st. It was a Wednesday, and she knew the gyms would be packed with all the other people who had also decided to turn a new leaf. She wound up skipping Thursday, too, since she had to work late and just couldn’t find the time, and Friday, too, because who was going to the gym on the first Friday of the year?

She also sort of fudged her diet those first few days. After all, if she hadn’t even started to work out, it was fine to be a little relaxed about food for a bit. Once she actually went to the gym, though, she would be on her best behavior.

That Saturday, she finally made it to the gym. She got into her workout gear as soon as she woke up, grabbed her new reusable water bottle, and drove straight there, hoping to beat the crowds. A whole bunch of other people had clearly had the same idea. Every treadmill, stationary bike, and elliptical was full. Even the half of the gym that was all weight machines and dumbbells was packed. She was too nervous to even attempt to head over there, so she wandered around, awkwardly sipping from her water bottle and looking for an open machine.

She finally found one, and grimaced at the thought of using it. It was a Stairmaster at the very back of the room. She’d used one once or twice, during past attempts to get fit, and she absolutely hated them. She knew that even at the slowest setting, her thighs would be burning within minutes.

But she was there to work out, and if the Stairmaster was all that was available, it would have to do.

Five minutes later, she was already panting. Am I really this out of shape? she thought as she watched the counter on the machine tick slowly upward, indicating she’d climbed another flight of the revolving stairs. She’d set the machine up for a thirty-minute workout, but as the seconds crawled past, she was almost certain she would pass out if she went for that long. It had been a while since she’d exercised like this, but she felt like she really should’ve been doing better. She was a young, mostly healthy person! There was no reason for her to be conquered by a stair machine!

Around minute seven, she was sweating and gulping down air. She looked around to see if anyone was paying attention to her, worried she was looking too obviously out of shape. Everyone had their headphones in and was focused on their own workouts, but she still felt self-conscious. She kept climbing, the flight counter ticking up by one more. She thought about increasing the speed, but the burning in her underutilized calf and thigh muscles made her decide against it.

At minute ten, she gave up. She stopped the machine and leaned heavily against the bars on either side, trying to catch her breath. Any onlooker would’ve thought she’d just finished a brutal one-hour workout at high intensity. She wiped down the machine with her complimentary towel and dabbed at her hot, sweaty face and neck. Her workout t-shirt and the sports bra beneath it were both drenched. When her feet hit the ground, she felt wobbly, like her legs might not hold her up.

She took a moment to look around. Maybe there was another, less punishing machine she could use to get at least a full thirty minutes of cardio in? But nope—the gym was even more full now than when she’d arrived. For every person on a machine, there was at least one person waiting behind them, if not two. She sighed and decided to give up for the day. She could always come back later. And wasn’t the most important thing that she’d even shown up at all?

She tried to beat back her shame as she rinsed off in the locker room shower. She had come and done the best she could, and that was what really mattered! (Even though she’d only managed to work out for ten minutes…) She was showing up for herself and getting it done! (Ten minutes on the Stairmaster at the slowest setting? How embarrassing. There were other people running 10Ks on the treadmill as a warmup.) If she just kept coming back and stayed consistent, she’d be fit in no time! (If this was the best she could do, what was even the point?)

She treated herself to a mango smoothie at a smoothie shop next door to the gym, figuring she deserved a healthy treat after all her hard work. Or at least as a reward for getting there. Nevermind that the smoothie had more than four times the calories in it than what she’d just burned during her workout.

She took careful notes about her food intake that day and, aside from the smoothie and just a little bit of ice cream (okay, a whole pint, but she deserved it after her workout!), she stuck to her diet.

Wanting to keep her good habits going, she went again on Sunday. This time, she was actually able to snag a treadmill. She tried to jog for a bit, but then stopped when she realized her tummy pudge kept jiggling. She did her very best fast-walk and managed a whole twenty-five minutes, with a few breaks here and there to catch her breath. She was still building up her stamina, after all.

She skipped the smoothie that day, feeling good about herself and flush with endorphins. The rest of Sunday ended up being a decent day, and she stuck to her diet all the way up until the evening. She couldn’t resist baking herself a batch of brownies when her stomach rumbled just as she was about to head to bed. She stayed up later than she should have waiting for them to finish baking. She had told herself she would get up early to go for a run on the treadmill before work. She also planned to just have one brownie and save the rest for later, but found herself eating half the batch. They were just so good! And who would even know besides her, anyway?

She didn’t record the brownies in her food journal and went to sleep around midnight, her belly glorping as it digested more calories from the brownies than she’d managed to eat the entire rest of the day.

Inevitably, this meant that she woke up late and groggy. She barely had time to get ready for work, much less hit the gym. And of course she forgot her gym bag! By the time she made it home, she didn’t feel like leaving again. She considered finding a workout on YouTube and following along, but she just felt so tired. So Monday was a wash. And that feeling cascaded into Tuesday, and then into the rest of the week.

Soon enough, it was Saturday again. She forced herself into her workout clothes, feeling grumpy. She didn’t want to go to the stinky, sweaty gym and waste her whole morning. It was just going to be super crowded anyway. She did manage to get there, but after fifteen minutes on a stationary bike, she called it quits and decided to just sit in the sauna for a while. This, of course, meant she had to replenish her fluids with another “fruit” smoothie that was more sugary sorbet than fruit.

As the weeks passed, she managed to get to the gym maybe once a week, and stuck to her diet about as well as she had the first few weeks (which is to say, as soon as it was dark and she was alone with her thoughts, she managed to eat somewhere in the neighborhood of 1,500 calories “as a snack”). The complete lack of results she was seeing was demotivating in the extreme. She was sure that her once-a-week(ish) fifteen-minute(ish) walks on the treadmill would have given her something to show for all her effort! But no, her stomach was still not flat, her arms still had a little jiggle to them, and her butt was nowhere near as firm and perky as she wanted it to be.

As February melted into March, she kept her gym membership, but her visits became more infrequent. By the second week of March, she wasn’t even trying to psych herself up to go anymore. And, right around that same time, the pandemic lockdowns happened. Work gave instructions that she and everyone else in her department was going to be working from home “until it’s safe.” Everyone seemed to expect the pandemic to have wound down in a couple weeks, or maybe a month at a stretch.

Filled with anxiety and with nothing much else to do, she worked in her pajamas and baked and cooked, trying to take her mind off of things. She made her own sourdough starter. Along with a bunch of different kinds of bread, she tried sourdough pancakes, sourdough doughnuts and waffles, sourdough pie crust and pizza crust and biscuits. By the time April was over, she’d consumed more butter in the space of a few weeks than she normally did over six months.

She tried a few home workouts, but she just couldn’t find the motivation to do them regularly. The world outside was so scary, and it was a whole lot easier to queue up something on Netflix and eat some comforting homemade bread than it was to do pushups on her yoga mat.

Since she didn’t have to get dressed for work and her pajamas were extremely forgiving, she didn’t realize how much weight she was putting on, or how fast. Her appetite had started to gradually increase, and without someone to notice that her portions were increasing by the week and point it out to her, she simply ate until she was full, and then a little more. Most nights, she went to bed so full she was forced to sleep on her side, letting the mattress support her stuffed gut as she digested.

It wasn’t until things started to open up again that she realized what all her anxious baking and feasting had done. Her friend invited her to a birthday party. She’d been reluctant, but her friend had assured her everyone would be masked. She’d put on a bra for once. The band pinched deep into back fat that had not been there before the lockdowns, and the front of the cups dug into her plush upper belly. Were bras always this uncomfortable? She wondered how she had managed to wear such an uncomfortable garment every day, not realizing that her old band size was now too small by several inches, and that her old cup size was now woefully inadequate for the job of containing her larger chest.

Next, she put on her most forgiving pair of jeans. They had elastic woven into the denim, and they’d always been her go-to when she was feeling particularly bloated but wanted to wear something more substantial than yoga pants. She tugged and wiggled, but the jeans wouldn’t even make it to her butt. The waistband dug into the fat that had accumulated on her thighs, taunting her. “Nope, nope, nope, these have to fit.” She laid down on her bed and pulled and pulled and pulled, but the jeans wouldn’t move an inch. She kicked them off, frustrated.

Okay, so maybe she’d gained a little weight. Taking advantage of the fact that she was already in her underwear, she decided to step on the scale. She’d been avoiding it for months. At the back of her mind, she knew she’d gotten fatter, but before now she had felt no desire to know just how fat.

The number on the scale was about twice as bad as her worst-case estimate, and worst of all, she had to crane over her fat gut and press it down with her hand to even read the number.

She did the math in her head. Eighty pounds. It was August, eight months after she’d made a whole bunch of resolutions about “eating clean” and “exercising every day,” and she had eighty extra pounds of pure fat to show for it.

She looked at herself in the mirror. It was the first time she’d really looked at herself since January, and definitely the first time she’d been anywhere close to naked while she did it. Her belly hung low enough that it mostly covered her underwear, and her fat thighs were eating what was left. She grabbed the lowest part of her belly and gave it a jiggle, letting out a cry as she watched her entire body jiggle with it.

She had no idea what to do with the knowledge that she had graduated from “maybe a little too chubby” to “fat.” She had never actually been fat before. She’d always been so scared of being this size (hell, she’d been scared of being forty pounds lighter than she currently was), and yet here she was. Still alive. Feeling pretty okay. Just… fat.

A notification pinged on her phone, letting her know she had thirty minutes to make it to her friend’s party. She tabled her introspection for a moment and pulled on a pair of leggings that only just barely fit, and a long, flowy top that she hoped would hide how thinly the leggings were stretched across her fat ass. She grabbed the pie she’d made for the party and went out the door.

Maybe 2021 would be the year she finally got fit.