DOES LIVING with SOMEONE MAKE it IMPOSSIBLE to KEEP WEIGHT OFF?

At 27 years old, I was at my all-time heaviest weight. If I was a professional wrestler then my announcement would have been: The Human Beach Ball, who stands 5 feet 5 inches weighing in at 263 pounds My doctor even classified me as "morbidly obese." He also suggested the possibility that I should consider Gastric Bypass surgery.

Gastric what? You're going to do what to my stomach? I can't ever enjoy pizza and a few cold beers anymore? Thanks, but no thanks. I'd rather listen to Richard Simmons Deal-A-Meal infomercials until my ears bleed before I'd subject myself to that kind of voluntary mutilation. I know the majority of obese people who have the gastric bypass or lap band surgery have no other options, and I'm not knocking them, but I wanted to try losing weight the old-fashioned way before I resorted to permanently altering my intestinal tract.

In addition to my fear of surgery, I also had the motivation of having reached the point in life where being single wasn't fun anymore. Believe me, being gay is difficult enough when you've only got roughly ten percent of the population to choose from, but being young, gay, and FAT is a special kind of misery that only people who've lived through it can truly understand. Society is largely superficial to begin with, but most of the gay bar crowd is ten times worse than that. Being the shy fat guy in a room full of rail-thin Aberzombies and creepy middle-aged men always left me feeling more depressed than when I'd decided to go out in the first place. The few men I did meet usually fell into the categories of: Mr. Desperate, Mr. Obsessive-Compulsive, Mr. Personality Impaired, Mr. Boring or Mr. Downright Psychotic. My last boyfriend before settling down was actually all of the above plus one more: Mr. Verbally Abusive. The lower my self-esteem sank, the more weight I gained.

Fear of the scalpel, and living the rest of my life alone, were enough to finally get me off my corpulent backside. Over the course of the next two years, I ate, slept, and breathed the Atkins diet. I also went to the gym at least 5 times a week, sometimes more. In that time span, I lost nearly 110 pounds of unwanted fat and had two different plastic surgeries to correct problems resulting from being overweight for such a large period of my life. By the time I was finished and down to 155 pounds, my 34-inch waist size was the smallest it had been since I was fourteen years old. That's no exaggeration.

One week before Christmas in 2004, I received the best gift of my life. I met the man who's been my best friend, partner and soul mate ever since. Seven months after that, we moved into our first apartment together. During our first year "honeymoon" period, my weight slowly crept back up to 175 pounds. I knew it was inevitable that I'd re-gain a little weight because I was getting tired of constantly watching what I ate and I couldn't go to the same gym anymore after we moved. It was also a lot more difficult to maintain my weight at 155 pounds once I had a whole new life that finally included someone to share it with. At that point, I was content to enjoy our home cooked dinners and live with being a little on the chunky side again.

Over the course of the second year though, things got a lot worse. I don't know if it was apathy, depression when we started having financial trouble hitting those snags couples hit once they REALLY get used to living together, or just sheer laziness, but over the course of the last year my weight has skyrocketed back up to 215 pounds. I've gone up two waist sizes and I'm uncomfortably close to hitting a third. I'm starting to look like a beach ball again. Lord knows I certainly feel like one. My partner is very sympathetic and understanding about my weight gain because he's gained a good thirty to forty pounds him since we moved in together.

The fact that we've both gained weight says to me that it's more than just coming off my diet that's the problem. Does contentment breed obesity? What is it about living with someone that causes many of us to "let ourselves go" and gain weight? Is the old cliché true that once we find somebody we no longer worry as much about being attractive? Or, maybe it's as simple as once you've been "morbidly obese," you have to keep working the rest of your life to maintain a healthy weight.