I was reading something the other day, and it hit me harder than I expected. It said that when the body feels like there’s no way out—when life becomes too overwhelming for too long—it activates its final emergency system. Everything slows down. Metabolism drops. The heart sinks. Breathing turns shallow. The gut shuts off. The whole body collapses inward and freezes.
And suddenly, weight gain is no longer a mystery. It becomes a survival story.
For the first time, I understood my own body in a language that felt honest. I’ve gained a lot of weight over the past few years, and trust me, I’ve tried everything—diets, routines, strict rules, all the usual things people swear by. None of them worked, and for a long time I blamed myself. But now I see why nothing changed. My body wasn’t being stubborn; it was overwhelmed. It was protecting me in the only way it knew how.
Weight gain is often treated like a moral issue, like it reveals something about your discipline or your character. But the truth is, people walking around with extra weight are often carrying far more than fat. They’re carrying stress. They’re carrying heartbreak. They’re carrying trauma that hasn’t had a chance to be released.
And that’s why those casual comments people make—“You’ve added weight,” “You’re getting bigger”—are so damaging. You don’t know what that person’s nervous system has been fighting. You don’t know how many nights they’ve cried silently. You don’t know the exhaustion that lives inside their bones. You don’t know the freeze their body went into just to keep them functioning.
You don’t know their story.
We see bodies, but we don’t see the battles they’ve survived.
Reading that passage forced me to rethink everything I thought I knew about weight. It made me softer with myself. It made me understand that no diet on earth can undo what the nervous system hasn’t healed. You cannot bully or shame a body out of protection mode.
The body lets go only when it feels safe again.
So here’s the truth I’m learning: weight is never just weight. It’s the story of what your body had to hold together when your world was falling apart. And the last thing any of us needs is someone pointing at the symptom without understanding the cause.
If anything, we all need more gentleness—with others, and with ourselves. Because sometimes the heaviest thing we carry isn’t our body. It’s the life that pushed it into survival.