Should husband tell wife to lose weight?

[Creative]

Lets say the husband and wife have a child and is now one. Subsequently 1 year after the child is born, the wife gained 50 pounds. What would be the most appropriate step to take as a husband to help her with her weight issue?


What are your thoughts?

[NEVEAH]

Offer to watch the baby if/when she goes to the gym ...and offer to buy her a membership ...

[Keyman]

While I think you'd be setting yourself up for world war 3, I think if it is a concern, then it should be at least raised.

[annie24]

10 lbs is understandable, 50 pounds is very excessive and not healthy. it is not good for her health or her longevity or your marriage for that much weight to be suddenly on. as her husband, i think you need to step up around the house and taking care of the baby so that she has time to go to the gym. suggest family activities like going for a walk together. start cooking healthy foods - lean meats and salads. i would tell her in a loving way that you are concerned about her heatlh and want to help her out to get back to her previous weight.

by the way, how long since the delivery? you can't expect the 50 lbs to disappear overnight.

[Lusif]

Uh, maybe take over on the grocery shopping while she looks after the baby, and buy healthy stuff - nice, healthy stuff anyway. And look after the baby while she does household chores/gardening? Perhaps use an excuse like you don't want rubbish eating habits to be passed down onto your child? (A little far-fetched maybe but hey!)

Maybe take up some sort of exercise together, long walks with the baby, or something more strenuous when someone else is looking after your child... cycling, gym, running.

[Crazyaboutdogs]

Go grocery shopping with her and turn eating healthy into something you can do together.

[diabolik]

This is a minefield. If I were you, I'd only really be interested in advice from men who were successful in raising this topic or their partners. The rest of us are just guessing at what seems sensible, but as we all know, womens' sensitivity about weight often renders them anything but sensible or receptive to reason.

[melrich]

Subsequently after the child is born, the wife gained 50 pounds.

Why? What has changed about her diet or daily activities?

[Creative]

Bare with me on this long post, but you'll understand where I come from by the end of the post.

I think I might have come across as asking for advice, but I'm mainly curious about what strategy people here recommend on how the husband should approach telling her to lose weight. Seeing that you guys are advocate counselors, I think this issue will be interesting to you guys too given that most of you here spends your time giving free advice on a daily basis. As for me, I'm interested in some psychological issues that co-exist - and have just as great an influence - when a person decide to go on a diet.

Here's the background.
I happen to have landed on a topic created by amazon's customer on "how do you get your wife to lose weight?".

[Only registered and activated users can see links. ]

What astound me there were a large number of female (in the hundreds) recommending that the husband should never even mention/hint about her weight. And that the husband should encourage and make her confident without expressing any concern over the wife's weight. Their ultimate conclusion was that it is then the wife would have the confident and courage to self improve and thus lose weight on her own terms.


I can definitely see how this can play out to her losing weight. I am not suggesting that this solution won't play out because it does.

So in what circumstance should this increase confident approach to solving issue be best served? In the case of a wife dieting, there's an extremely high chance that the wife would fail at dieting. Meanwhile, the husband could not hint to the wife that he's unsatisfied with her weight gain. So, shouldn't there be a better approach contrary to these hundreds of female's recommendations?

The main issue I see from this solution that you should increase your wife's confident is that the wife may grow complacent with her weight or won't deal with the issue. I've seen numerous enotalone people priding themselves on being chubby almost to an extent that there's a chubby pride group that gets formed every time someone says something against overweight/obesity. But this phenomena is no coincidence. The majority of female here would protect other female's confidence, so they intuitively understand how important it is to retain a certain level of confidence in order to help them take action at the end of the day.

But there's this complacency issue also happening at the same time when confident is encouraged. So how should we, as male OR as female - in attempt to give non destructive advice - tackle this issue?

This is not just happening on enotalone or on a cultural level, but various governments are also tolerating obese group through giving them special 'rights', which really sends a huge message to the people that there's nothing wrong with being obese.

Obese have right to 2 airline seats --Canada court
[Only registered and activated users can see links. ]

[ay0_x]

I hate this stupid debate.

If you're going to marry someone, you have to strap on a pair, man up && tell them to lose weight. Letting someone let themselves go isn't being compassionate.. it's being cowardly and cruel.

50 lbs is not normal. That's the weight of a 5 year old child. If there's no health problems, that's a lot of krispy kremes and big macs.

She's an adult. She should be more mature and accepting. And it's not like she can't see it. She probably knows she's fat. Not saying anything will make her think it's okay and it just enables her.