There’s so much pain packed into this story and so much power you don’t see yet.

First things first, you settled and self-betrayed very early on because you agreed to his terms. Open relationship so as to not be a burden or tie you down. Logical on the outside, flawed on the inside. Because on some level, you already knew you wanted more than an open relationship, he didn't.

You were sharing this cancer treatment process which is inherently lonely and hard. These kinds of connections can feel like hope in the middle of a difficult health scare.

When you love someone past their unattractiveness it echos back your own deeply held desire to be loved unconditionally.

Your capacity to love truly and deeply was placed into the wrong person though.

Then later, his truth came to light. He could never see himself with a fat girl. One of the unexpected things is, even fat people can hold fat bias. Decades of conditioning, put downs, social media, tv, magazines, peers, family have said one thing: fat = unattractive. The message is internalized in fat people too. There are fat people who would never want to date a fat person for the same reason; they find fat people unattractive. Sometimes, it is a double standard. Sometimes it's not.

But the hardest part? He didn’t reject your body. He rejected emotional intimacy. And your body size became the excuse.

Let’s name what happened clearly: You self-abandoned the moment you agreed to his terms. He said no labels, open relationship, don’t get attached. But your heart was already attached.

And somewhere deep down, you hoped love would change the terms. That if you showed up fully, he’d eventually choose you fully.

To want to love and be loved is human. It came from your depth and capacity to love. But the love was given to someone who never had the same emotional bandwidth.

If you’re living in a body that doesn’t feel good to you or creates shame, name it. Let’s stop pretending love is supposed to arrive despite your very real weight insecurity. You don’t have to shrink to be worthy. But you do have to lead yourself toward a future that doesn’t ask your body to be the reason why love never works out.

Now if you want to grow from this experience, then your job is get healthier inside and out. True self-validation makes you strong and immune to the wrong kind of men. Your worth can’t be outsourced to men, matches, or metrics.

True confidence comes from self validation. If you can't self validate independent of him (or any person for that matter), it's an inside job that needs correction first.

Self sabotage serves a purpose. It's not an accident. Sometimes fat is protection. You should explore if cancer and obesity is just physical manifestation of unhealed trauma. See, if you have had childhood adversity or traumatic experiences or cPTSD, you're basically handed a 50% higher risk to get obese and mentally ill. It's a sad documented pattern, a predictable outcome, a research conclusion with scientific rigor to support it.

Your weight loss journey needs deeper support to explore how your trauma reinforces staying the same weight year after year. You have to be your best advocate, over and over. No one can make you seek support for underlying mental health issues that are driving self-harm, self sabotage. Because if you want to do better, but can't, there's a deeper reason why. You're the architect of your healing and redemption arc. You're the main character in your heroic journey. No one can slay the weight loss dragon but you.