Have you had bloodwork done recently, OP?
We’re all going through some shit, that’s for sure. I know this is one of the requisite answers for unexplained weight gain but given your mental and physical signs, you should get your thyroid checked— especially before you gain more weight.
15 years ago I started gaining weight and my face grew puffy (so did my ankles and the tops of my feet).
A vicious cycle began where I didn’t want to go to the doctor to get checked out until I could get back down to my normal weight. Actually the swelling came a little later, after the weight gain had started. I just figured it was because I was getting so fat. I’ve always had low decibel anxiety but that got a lot louder, and I became (naturally) super self-conscious about what I looked like, and mentally I was getting more panicked about what was going on with my health that all this was happening— I was in my mid-late 20s.
Everything just started ramping up, a true spiral. I stopped going anywhere other than work, and when I went grocery shopping I only went very late at night so ‘no one’ would see me. I thought I was literally dying. Meanwhile, my weight kept creeping up and my anxiety was off the charts.
By that time, I was absolutely too afraid to go to the doctor— the weight gain was bad enough, but I just knew he would tell me I had some fatal or progressive, debilitating disease. I couldn’t take it anymore (EIGHTEEN months after it all started) so I made an appointment with a psychiatrist to run all this by a medical professional— because he was a doctor but I felt he would be less likely to get me on the scale (I didn’t even want to know) and also running tests that would reveal my fate. I thought it was my best bet.
Anyway, saw this guy, he said the unexplained weight gain, swelling (a tell-tale symptom they call ‘moon face’), and increasing anxiety/depression/exhaustion and other symptoms sounded like thyroid disease, and he told me I didn’t look like I was dying.
I was moving out of state two weeks later, so I never went back to him, but his opinion gave me the confidence to get my bloodwork done, and sure enough, I had hypothyroidism. I started feeling better very quickly after starting treatment (a cheap or free daily pill, forever). The swelling went away and the anxiety went back to its baseline within six weeks, max.
The weight gain stopped but did not reverse. I eat like a regular person (not more than 1,800 calories a day on average), but I seem to be stuck here. I can diet really hard at around 800 calories a day and lose about 10lbs a month, but I can only keep it at such a low level for two or three months max, so it comes right back.
My point is, get it checked before you gain any more weight, because if it’s your thyroid, the medication can make the weight gain stop, but you may not be able to take off what you gained without a lifetime commitment to extreme sacrifice. So better to get checked out before you gain more. Some people don’t gain with thyroid disease, but many do, and it’s very hard to lose with hypothyroidism.
Good luck.
