Tale #131: Dieting Crash

Tale #131: Dieting Crash (Content Tags: Messy diapers, regression, weight loss, humiliation) (A sequel to the 'De Leon Diet' storyline) It could be said that Willard had an unhealthy relationship with food. Perhaps some long forgotten trauma from early childhood had provoked the hunger he'd always felt, or maybe his tastebuds were a tad too strong and food was just irresistible to him. Whatever it was, he'd gone from husky, to chubby, to overweight, to fat, to obese. All over the course of his life. It'd gotten to the point where his doctor had been frank with him about how it may be affecting his health, especially since he was both a smoker and a drinker as well. If he didn't want to end up prematurely buried in a funeral plot, then he would have to make some changes. He was forty, but the doctor said he wouldn't make it to fifty at this rate. It wasn't the first time that he'd tried putting himself on a diet. There'd been a little more success when he'd still been married to his wife, but it was a lot harder to motivate himself in his drab, lonely apartment. The divorce itself had been hard on him, and he'd ballooned out more during the proceedings; he ate away his sorrows, but that was part of why he'd gotten in that mess in the first place. The love had long disappeared from their marriage before the divorce had been finalized, and Willard didn't discount for a second that his appearance and demeanor had been a big reason for that. He'd had more energy and determination when they'd first met. He'd been big then, but he had carried the weight with a lot more dignity. It'd been over time that he'd really let himself go and that he'd become complacent with the person he was, instead of thinking about the person he could be. Him and Sheila had been divorced for about five years now and both of them had ostensibly moved on. In fact, he knew that his ex-wife had  a serious relationship with another man, while he's resigned himself to the sad life of a bachelor. They'd had a kid together, Tony, who would be about nine or ten by now. He still saw Tony and Sheila on occasion, but she had full custody, and visitation obligations were slim. Sheila wasn't stopping him from taking a more active role in their son's life, but Willard had moved away for work, and he'd never been all that great at being a father. He'd send birthday cards and call on the phone, but he'd missed all the important stuff about seeing a kid grow up. He hadn't been there for his son. And now he might not even be able to send a graduation card, if he didn't get his health sorted out. Lo and behold, a solution presented itself to him. A solution that would melt those pounds off effortlessly, without him even having to give up the food that he so loved! He had to admit that it looked like a downright scam, but the testimonials looked promising, and he figured he could at least foot the cost of doing it for a few weeks, just to see how effective it was. The product even had a money-back guarantee if the user didn't lose ten pounds in the first week! What did he have to lose? Aside from the weight, of course. It looked like ordinary water whenever it came in the mail. There was water in a glass vial, and a small container of supplements. The instructions were very clearly laid out, as to what dosage to use of everything that had been provided. Willard followed the instructions to the letter and spent the week pigging out as he normally would. After seven days on the diet, he'd get on the scale and joyfully discover that he'd lost twelve pounds! With this confirmation of the efficacy of the diet, he ordered a much, much larger supply. Enough to help him shed this blubber forever! The losses eventually began to slow, after about a month, and so he decided he must be growing a tolerance. He began to double the dosage, and the weight started to drop again. Except there was one hideous side-effect: he was shitting like crazy! It was bad enough that he actually had to buy adult diapers to deal with it. The bowel movements would just come on so suddenly, and there would be so much pressure, that he couldn't hold it long enough to make it to a toilet. The loads were frequent and massive, which should have been somewhat of a red flag. Willard had always been an accomplished pooper, but this was definitely not normal. Annoyingly, he also had to keep getting new diapers before he finished a package, because he'd become too thin for the size he was using. He had to start thinking ahead, where he'd buy multiple packages of different sizes, and he also had to get diapers that could handle his immense accidents more effectively. It was fortunate that he worked from home at his computer, because shitting his pants multiple times a day wouldn't have gone over well at the office. It was hard enough to get the courage to go out at all, with the fear that he'd soil himself in public. Willard felt he was getting close to a weight that he could be satisfied with, but then the loss again slowed to a halt. Like last time, he doubled the dose again. He'd come so far, and aside from the smelly side-effects, it'd been a completely painless process, so why not push a little harder? He reached his original 'goal weight' pretty quickly after that. With that, he should have been ready to get off the diet, right? Except, he didn't feel like he could. Somewhere along the way, he'd deluded himself into thinking it was healthy to get that number on the scale as low as he could push it. He never looked gaunt in the mirror, though he should have at the weight he was at. Instead, he still looked just a little too chubby. It would finally occur to him, while having to buy new diapers at the pharmacy, that it was no mystery why the number on the scale didn't match up with the pudge he saw in the mirror; when he had to actually buy diapers in the 'youth' department instead of the adult. He'd gotten a good deal shorter than he'd realized. He had been buying new clothes this whole time and using a belt, but he hadn't put it together that he hadn't just been shrinking in girth. His shirt draped down right above his knees and his jeans were baggy as hell on his legs; he'd had to roll them up at the bottom quite a bit. It became likely to him that there was something terribly wrong with his diet. Losing all this weight had been incredible, but what weight loss plan involved losing height as well? Not just height, but his body was seeming less and less developed as well. He'd shaved down below early on, whenever the constant diaper-filling had become a problem, but he hadn't considered why none of it had ever grown back. He'd lost any facial hair too. His wrinkles were gone, the color of his hair had regained luster, his skin was clearer than it had been in years. No bones about it, Willard's body had been flung back in time. He'd been so focused on the scale, that he'd just ignored all the strangeness that had been following. The most obvious choice should have been to call his doctor first, but he had no earthly idea how to approach the subject. How could he explain this? By all accounts, he would have had to guess that he was somewhere between ten and twelve now, and nobody was going to take his story seriously. He tried calling the company that had sold him the diet, but he just kept getting put on hold. Alone in his miserable apartment, wearing nothing but a youth diaper that was full of his own excrement, Willard had to turn to the only person he thought he could convince. Sheila and him might not have been in love like they once were, but he knew that she would know him better than anyone else. If he could convince one person that he was still Willard Wallace, then it would be her. He ordered some clothes online that would fit and he made arrangements to travel. Trying to explain this over the phone would have been difficult; he needed her to see him. Two busses, a train, and a taxi. A suitcase full of new clothes and old effects, and a backpack stuffed to the gills with diapers. The last of his 'dietary beverage' jarred and ready to present as his proof. When he rung the doorbell, his ex-wife had answered and immediately mentioned that 'Tony is at a baseball game with his stepfather'. Unsurprisingly, the woman thought that Willard was a friend of their son; a classmate from school. Willard was around that size now, so it was a logical assumption to make. He hadn't let that be the end of it. Willard had named himself as the lousy husband she'd once been married to; he pulled out his driver's license and his wedding ring to prove it. Whenever that didn't work, he started to give details of their marriage that only he could know. Intimate details that she probably thought Willard had long forgotten, let alone trained a kid to spout. The thing that did it was the pictures he had brought. Willard had been digging deep to find them, but he'd come with photographs of him as a child. There was no denying that he now looked exactly like the child in those pictures. Then had come the part where he had to explain how this had happened, at least to the best of his knowledge. He talked about the diet he'd been on and the immense losses that he'd seen; he pulled out the small jar of what remained to show her exactly what he'd been ingesting. He had left out the part about his newfound incontinence, but that wasn't something he'd needed words to convey. During the course of his explanation, he'd suddenly let loose a horrible series of farts, and it was during that flatulent frenzy that he started to drop heavy ploppers right into the infantile undergarments that he'd become so accustomed to. There was no hiding what was happening, not when the pantload was as noisy and immense as what he was pushing out. So then he'd had to explain, with a sheepish look and pink cheeks, that diapers had been a cost of his diet from the beginning. In taking the easy way out, he'd been content to shit himself every day like an infant. Unzipping his backpack would reveal the many diapers that he'd packed for his journey, and that would lead to him getting a change from a woman who was still having difficulties in grasping the situation in front of her. The shift in their dynamic would have been more fascinating if Willard wasn't so ashamed. His ideas about traditional masculinity and what a man was supposed to be, those were what made this so hard for him. That toxic part of him had been yet another checkbox on a lengthy litany of the grievances that'd cost him his marriage; acting as if his wife was somehow less capable than him, based purely on something as arbitrary as gender. Now here she was, untaping his poopy diaper and wiping down his mucky bottom with baby wipes. Powdering him and putting on a tidy diapee for him. There couldn't be any doubt of who was and who wasn't capable. The discussion had then moved to the kitchen, where she had agreed to fix him something to eat, as if he was really the same age as their son. While a grilled cheese sandwich toasted on the stove, his cell phone had started to ring. It was the company he'd been trying to hard to get a hold of for the last couple of days. His call was finally being returned, and he put it on speaker to have a witness to what they would say. First he was thanked for his patience and for buying their product, and then he was given some very bad news. The little 'side-effect' he'd had happen to him wasn't an outlier. There were a lot of other men, just like him, who had suffered the same regression. Willard was assured that this wasn't something that could happen with proper use of the diet, but that it was showing in cases of abuse. It was mentioned no less than three times during that call that the company wasn't liable for what had happened, since it was a matter of not following instructions, but that they were willing to offer a refund for what Willard had bought. No cure, no way to fix it. On the contrary, he was warned that the effects may continue for a couple more weeks, if he still had a large enough amount in his body. Willard of course got very upset, as was probably justified in this case. He began to shout and swear, which no longer had the same bite, since he was squeaking like a prepubescent boy now. He got so red-faced and furious that he once again shit his pants while standing there in the kitchen. They hung up on him. His diaper sagged with the weight of yet another pound of steaming hot droppings. Sheila, besieged by maternal instinct, sighed and grabbed him by the hand to lead him back to the towel where she'd changed him before. Diapers weren't the only things that would be changing in the near future. Tony and his new father would be coming back home soon, Willard couldn't very well live a normal adult life like this (especially if the regression hadn't finished), and there was still a large dose of the water left. He may have been a crummy husband and father, but perhaps there was room for him to be a good son and little brother.