I spent years trying to get smaller. Until I decided to get bigger

Published 24 July 2026 · india

I had been casually lifting weights for a few years when several things changed in quick succession. First, my boyfriend proposed. This wasn’t a surprise

I had been casually lifting weights for a few years when several things changed in quick succession. First, my boyfriend proposed. This wasn’t a surprise – he had already told me he wanted to get married, and I had told him exactly how I wanted him to propose: somewhere public but not crowded, not in a restaurant. Since I spend most of my waking hours hunched over my computer looking like an extra from The Walking Dead, I also wanted to be nicely dressed for the occasion. He gamely followed instructions and got down on one knee in a quiet gallery of my favorite museum. My cute outfit – an orange wrap dress coupled with dainty purple heels – was only slightly undermined by the fact I cried so hard that my eyes puffed up and snot dripped from my nose. Then came the unexpected part. Planning our wedding sent me into a body-loathing spiral I hadn’t experienced since middle school. double quotation mark Over the years I had constructed an image of the bride I wanted to be, and that woman was skinny After years of not stepping on a scale, I started weighing myself every morning. I tracked calories and counted steps. I ate as little as possible, and when I couldn’t take it any more, I binged until my stomach ached. Part of me knew I had crossed into unhealthy territory, but I was determined to keep trying to lose weight. When my fiance gently expressed concern, I listened, nodded, then ignored him and continued to unravel. It took me a while to figure out what had prompted this change of behavior. I thought my crash diet days were behind me, and I didn’t care that much about weddings. Ours was always going to be lowkey: a small courthouse ceremony followed by two parties at our respective parents’ homes. Eventually, I realized what was driving it. Without consciously doing so, over the years I had constructed an image of the bride I wanted to be, and that woman was skinny. She was all long, twiggy limbs – think nepo baby supermodel, or a newborn foal. I had internalized a noxious idea: that was the kind of woman who was successful and loved. Despite – or more likely because of – the emotional and physical turmoil I put it through, my body didn’t change. The only thing that did was how I felt about it. Each day, I liked it a little less. In a matter of weeks, my body would be captured in hundreds of wedding photos. There I would be, looking exactly like myself – not a supermodel. That felt like a crisis, as if my failure to make myself a certain kind of beautiful would undermine the sanctity and magnitude of the day, and disappoint everyone involved. Never mind that I would never think about other people’s weddings in these ugly, vicious terms. I was my only, and favorite, punching bag. Then, a month before we said “I do,” my fiance and I moved into a new apartment building with a really nice gym. For years, I had been making do with a set of stackable dumbbells bought during lockdown. I had used them for about an hour, three to four times a week, and aside from vaguely trying to eat enough protein, I didn’t monitor what I ate. This routine had served me well, but now I had access to heavier weights, barbells, a Smith machine, a functional trainer and big mirrors in which I could check my form. Walking around the gym, I felt like a little country mouse gawping at the bright lights and heavy equipment of the big fitness city. It was exciting. I wanted to see what I could do! Almost immediately, I lifted heavier than I ever had before – and then even heavier than that. My bingeing and restricting had not abated, and my workout performance was mixed. Some days, I moved weights like they were nothing. Others, I could barely budge them. When my wedding day arrived, I didn’t think much about my body. We were married in the courthouse’s basement room with terrible lighting, purple carpet and plastic flowers, and it was perfect. I had a wobble when I saw a picture of myself, where I thought I looked lumpy and ghoulish. But then my husband put his arm around me and smiled, and I felt so happy that I thought I might explode. On the way out, I saw other brides filing into the courthouse: none of them were nepo baby supermodels, all of them beautiful and perfect. Afterwards, discouraged and exhausted by the process of trying and failing to shrink, I decided I would take the opposite approach. Instead of trying to lose weight, I would try to gain weight. I was going to bulk. In lifting parlance, a “bulk” has two parts. The first is eating in a caloric surplus, or eating more calories than your body burns in a day to maintain its current weight.