In the fall of 2017, I made a major life change, moving from a major Albertan city to a small coastal community northwest of Vancouver, BC, Canada. While I had been interested in nudism/naturism and had taken small opportunities to go and get naked in nature when and where I could in Alberta, it was in BC that I really began to embrace nudism and taking every opportunity to get naked I could. It also set in motion a bunch of other changes and events, some positive, others not so much.
Moving to the coast, while at the time I felt was the right decision and was immediately necessary for a number of reasons, still resulted in about a year of uncertainty, financial insecurity and rough emotional patches. When I moved, I was promised a place to stay until I could get myself on my feet, but due to the partner of the person that promised me this, I decided to move on sooner than I had expected to, and this put me in a rather rough place. So for about 6 months, I was paying almost $2000 a month in rent for myself, my mom who was still in Alberta waiting for surgery, and storage for our stuff. That cost left me without the ability to eat much of the time, and I spent much of that winter rather sick and wondering just what I had done. It was a particularly wet and dark winter as well, so that didn’t help.
Fast forward to September of 2018. I was finally on more stable footing. I had found a place for my mom and I that June, work was going well (I had a couple of surprise raises that put me in a much better financial footing), and the spring and summer proved to be warm, pleasant and enjoyable. I was able to afford to get out, I found a semi-permanent local beach spot to hang out naked on, and I had many wonderful visits to Wreck Beach, the local official clothing-optional area. Things were beginning to get good.
But sir, I can hear many of you ask, what does this have to do with body changes? Well, look at the drawing above. A winter of malnutrition, hard physical work at my job, and more outdoor physical activity than I was generally used to saw me drop weight like I had never before. I’ve never been a very petite person. My family genetics are such that males in our family have a high chance of putting on body fat as we age. Our metabolisms slow down quite fast after the age of 30, and my diet and lifestyle aren’t always conducive of countering this. Yet in the summer and fall of 2018 I had slimmed down more than I think I had been since my teens. I frequently weighed myself in around 195 – 200 lbs, where for most of my 30s I averaged 210-220.
You can see this in my body in the drawing. While I’m not fit, or trim, there’s a decided lack of belly fat, my breasts are relatively flattened, and my mons pubis isn’t bulgy. My face and neck are also rather slim compared to past me, and, as you’ll see, future me.
With better and more stable finances comes better and more stable sources of food. With better and more stable sources of food, comes increasing body weight. Especially considering that the general diet I consume tends to be extremely high in carbs and sugars. Yes, I’m aware of this. No, I still do not make much attempt to change it. By the late spring of 2019, even though I was still pretty physically active, the signs that I was back to being my old regular self were there. I was once again weighing in at 200-210 lbs regularly, although I fluctuated quite a lot depending on just how active I was in a given month. Yet the weight I was gaining wasn’t negatively affecting me. I was still very able to move freely, hike anywhere, climb hills and giant stair-cases (Hello Wreck Beach!) with not so much as a wasted breath, and work for 8 hours a day without too much pain and suffering. Yet the signs that I probably needed to start doing more to curb *continuing* weight gain that might actually lead to more negative consequences was there.
In the drawing above, you can see that my stomach and ‘love handles’ were beginning to gain more fat. The mons pubis was a little more cushiony, and my breasts had begun to get more prominent. I was still a little more thin in the face and neck, but it was clear that I was no longer what I was the summer before, but I wasn’t too worried. After all, this was regular me. I’m just a larger bodied boy, no worries. I had years ahead of me of traipsing the coast, running up and down the Wreck Beach stairs, and being able to, if not slim down, at least stabilize into that 210 lb body that I had pretty much enjoyed most of my life.
Or so I thought.
Of course, in the winter of 2019/2020 something happened that, well, changed everything. We all know it. We all lived it (unless you’re under 5 years old), and we were all affected by it. Some of us more than others. Some deeply and devastatingly. What Covid meant for me was that the inroads I had been making into being active and social were basically cut out from under me. Covid restrictions meant far fewer visits to Wreck Beach, they meant far fewer opportunities to join with friends and be active that way, and it meant a steady decent into depression that cut out most of my desire and energy to be active even on my own. Work became a nightmare, society showed signs of unravelling completely, and any work I had been looking forward to be more active in social nudity came to a screeching and utter halt.
With all of that came that continuing weight gain that I mentioned previously I was hoping to avoid. It happened most prominently in my gut, in my breasts, in my groin, in my face and in my bum. I began to have to abandon clothes I had worn for years as they no longer fit. I went from a size 34 jean to a size 36. I went from L hoodies to XL. I was stress eating, I was sitting in front of gaming systems for hours, and I generally began to lose a lust for life.
That first year of Covid was an honestly terrible time. I managed to avoid actually getting it, but it took its toll in other ways, and some wouldn’t be felt for a couple of years yet.
It wasn’t all a loss however. Despite all the negativity, things did begin to improve by the second summer of Covid. I did manage to get down to my local beach spot, which was secluded and I didn’t have to worry about Covid and restrictions and all of that, quite frequently. So while I wasn’t active enough for weight loss, my weight gain more or less stabilized again for some time, albeit it at 210-220 lbs instead of 200-210 as in the previous year. The most noticeable was my face and neck, which were getting stout and round. The mons pubis also continued to be one of the major places the fat kept going, 2021 also saw some restrictions finally being lifted and I was able to get out and socialize a little bit more, although with the idea of trying to stay and keep as safe as possible.
To be honest though, it was a pretty uneventful year. It came and went without much thought, although work was still and increasing nightmare, as our head office put more and more pressure on us as general workers to become everything when it came to Covid policies. We were expected to do security (anti-maskers were becoming arrogant, entitled and violent), become cleaning specialists, be door guards, and be experts in disease control. By the spring of the next year, 2022, I had had enough.
Enter March, 2022. Work was too much to bear, and I had voiced frequently that I wanted out. When an opportunity came up unexpectedly to get a new job, I jumped on it. Problem is, I jumped on it mostly using emotion, and not too much logic and critical thinking. So in one fell swoop, I went from a rather physically demanding job to one that had me sitting at a desk for 8 hours a day, and making far, far less money.
Yet this time around, that financial worry didn’t mean I ate less. As a month passed and I realized I had probably made a major mistake, I was once again stress eating quite badly, and the food I was eating was worse than ever. Almost always junk from fast food places near where I worked. Combine that with the sitting at a desk and you had a recipe for disaster when it came to what was happening to my body.
Not only was I gaining weight almost like I never had before (I went from 215 to 235 in a month and a half), but that sitting took its toll on me in other physical ways. I exacerbated a sciatic condition, put too much pressure on an old internal hip injury, and fucked my back up, all in the time between March and June of 2022. My tummy, mons pubis, ass and chest exploded, and I felt extremely uncomfortable, often times exhausted, and generally miserable. I began to feel ashamed about how I looked, and despite the nudist/naturist philosophy of body acceptance, I didn’t like where I was going. This had less to do with how I actually *looked* however, and more to do with how it made me feel, especially physically. I knew I was in a no win situation, and by early July I went back to my former place of employment and basically begged to have them take me back.
So here we are almost 2 years later. Getting out of that desk job and back to my old physical job, being more financially stable and eating better worked miracles. Right? Well, not so much. It’s true that getting back to my old job probably meant I didn’t continue down a path of going straight to obesity, but it certainly wasn’t a miracle cure, and a number of things happened in late 2022 that sent me down yet another path of negativity.
In quick succession in the winter of 2022 two major events happened that would set a course for 2023 that would be long and hard. The first was that my mom badly broke her ankle, which caused her to become bed-ridden for months, and the second was that I finally got Covid. The broken ankle was bad. I was basically unable to leave her alone for any extended periods of time for a very long time, and the associated stress of that, for both of us, is something that is still affecting us. To get covid on top of that was almost just too much.
Not only was the initial sickness very difficult to deal with, but to this day, a year and a half later, I still don’t feel right. Physical activity takes its toll on my far more quickly than it ever has, I struggle at work, I struggle to go to the beach, and sometimes I struggle to even walk around the house. I don’t talk about it much, because our health care system is brutally broken and even mentioning long covid to a doctor gets you looks of ‘here we go again’ or outright derision. So I suffer mostly in silence and hope that eventually, if I try harder to get more active, I can work back to being more healthy.
But that hasn’t happened yet. I’m still crawling out of depression. My body is still far too overweight for my liking and physical well-being, and as I age I understand that it’ll be harder and harder to work it back to something I can be more happy with. Yet work on it I must, because such things don’t happen by magic or magic pill. I have to put effort in, and I am determined this spring and summer to put that effort in. You will probably begin reading about it here.
So here’s to saying goodbye to that prominent tummy. Here’s to saying goodbye to that puffy mons pubis that is threatening to swallow my penis whole. Here’s to saying goodbye to my man boobs that make wearing shirts uncomfortable. Most of all, here’s to saying goodbye to an ass and lower back that resembles a hound dog.
Nobody needs THAT.
