The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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My wife is getting fat. She’s not obese or anything, maybe barely overweight, idk. But she’s very clearly growing in her upper pelvis to a degree that’s very obvious if you’re married to her, and still obvious if she’s wearing tight waist-high pants while seated. She looks pregnant in certain clothing, and she’s buying new clothes at an increasing pace to replace her old clothes.
No, she is in fact very beautiful and very fashionable. But I’m worried that I’m not seeing her do anything about it. Her weight gain has been real and obvious over the last year, and I’ve been able to maintain my weight within a 5-lb. range in the same time thanks to my strange eating habits (I often tell her you should adopt normal American eating patterns when you want to look like a normal American. I haven’t convinced her yet.)
She hasn’t gotten to the “I should do something about this,” phase yet—she’s coping somehow. The bigger boobs are helping her do that. She is upset she doesn’t fit into old cute pants and dresses, but she simply jokes about getting fat and is fine because, for now, her clothes mostly still hide the weight gain.
Here’s where I come in. I am absolutely not going to sit down with my wife and tell her that she’s gaining too much weight and should slim down for my sexual gratification. I gently broached weight loss once, when she brought it up, and it didn’t go well. Now I just nod my head or otherwise remain silent when it comes up.
Observations: Couples get fat together. There is never one obese one and one skinny one. Couples get hot together. If a guy is ripped, his partner at least looks like she knows when to put the fork down.
Strategy: All I want is for my wife to have a flatter belly. Flat bellies are hot. My girl’s got hips for days—they drive me crazy, and I want them to shine without her waist getting in the way. This shouldn’t be an impossibly hard problem to solve given the realities of CICO. The mechanism? I think I need to get ripped. Right now I am solidly skinnyfat. Most of my clothes from 5+ years ago still fit comfortably, I’ve been able to avoid growing or even threatening to grow a gut, but my chest is very small and my waist is 1-2 inches bigger than it was when were were newly-weds. I must fix these things. Maybe not get jacked out of my mind, but I need to be toned and lean and look fantastic naked. To silently encourage my wife to achieve the female ideal of “be slim,” I must reach for the much higher male ideal of, “Fully develop every muscle group.”
That’s my plan for this summer I think. (If I fail you’ll never hear about this project again.) I do not want to be a gym rat or get humongous. I just want as much progress as you can possibly get with a pull-up bar and regular time set aside for a serious workout.
What could go wrong? Worst case, my wife has a hotter husband. Am I being mind-blowingly vain? Women, would you be incredibly hurt if you found your husband writing these things about you? If your husband started working out and getting hot out of nowhere, would you feel compelled to act?
What are your own experiences?
Have you tried reframing your conversations about this topic? Instead of saying focusing on her weight gain, how about taking a health angle? If your wife (and maybe you too) have unhealthy eating habits like eating too much processed foods/takeout, you could say that you're worried for your (collective) health and want to eat healthier. That way you'd be both addressing the problem of her gaining weight, but also involve yourself so that she doesn't feel she's getting attacked by you.
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I'm going to give you advice from a woman's perspective and from the perspective who's been paying attention to the latest in nutrition.
Diet will have more affect on weight gain than exercise, especially as you both age. To stop gaining weight, decrease mono-unsaturated and poly-unsaturated fat. Dairy, coconut, palm kernal oil, and tallow are good fats. Everything else is on thin ground.
To lose weight, cut protein down to around 50g/day. This is a temporary measure, but it will rev up the metabolism quite nicely.
One thing to check before all else - is your wife pregnant? Have you really ruled it out? Are you sure? Ok then, read on!
How to get your wife to join in: Tell her you are interested in contributing to Science! (TM) You are getting really interested in SMTM's Potato studies, and you would like to help provide more data on what the effect would be on someone in the healthy weight range. This would involve eating only butter and potatoes for a month straight, but most people who try it like it.
Just one problem - There's no way you'd be able to do this if you have someone eating normal meals in the house. The fridge space of preparing two meals, the mental effort to avoid eating other food, it's too much. Would she be able to try it with you? It doesn't have to be for the whole time, just long enough to get in the groove. Would she like to weigh herself with you every day so she can be a trial participant as well?
I don't think this is a good representation of the "latest" in nutrition.
Meta-analysis indicates that replacing saturated fat with unsaturated or even carbs results in weight loss.
Protein restriction does not "rev up the metabolism" and is bad for maintaining lean mass.
How much protein do you need?
Isoleucine and valine are specifically the Amino Acids that are problematic, but really to avoid them you need to avoid protein.
The difficulty with meta-studies on saturated fat vs unsaturated fat is that studies use lard or chicken fat as their example of saturated fat, when in reality those two fats are highly unsaturated. This leads to farces like "Learning and Memory Impairment in Rats Fed a High Saturated Fat Diet" They analyze the fatty acid composition of their lard and it is only 30% saturated. Despite this, the study uses lard as their Saturated fat intervention.
Specific to Hooper et al. (2020) that your linked article uses for it's argument, I am looking at their studies and am having trouble finding which showed a benefit from substituting polyunsaturated fat with saturated fats. At the most, I see some that show benefits from reducing fat entirely, which I would agree with. Reducing all fat will reduce the amount of total linoleic acid and a High Carb, low fat diet would be good from my understanding. (Low fat means < 15% calories from fat, most low fat studies have 30% of calories from fat, which is practically the normal amount of fat intake in a SAD, but that's another story.)
Hooper's results don't seem really indicative of anything. Your link extols the results of this figure, but outside the couple tails where they got the Saturated fat intake really low, there doesn't seem to be a clear correlation between increasing Sat Fat and disease. Under 9% of Sat fat only has data on a few risk events, which makes me think that there are only a handful of studies with that amount of sat fat. I'm trying to figure out if this data point reflects the studies that went with High carb, low fat.
However, the figure in question still shows that when dietary saturated fat reaches >12% of calories, markers improve! Risk of Stroke goes way down. CVD goes down.
Weight isn't studied in the Meta-analysis at all.
You can hardly hold this random rat study against me.
I encourage you to check the studies in the meta and see that this is not going on.
Review says:
...
Table 4 additionally shows that reducing total fat has no impact on cardiovascular events.
It would be a big surprise indeed if a moderate amount of saturated fat is bad, but a small or large amount is good. The relationship is most likely to be linear.
It was, of course.
This appears to be a study on untrained men? I agree that if you're okay with the average untrained physique, 44g is enough (and also not that far from the recommendation of 54g for a 150lb person).
Most of these are mouse studies, so let's look at the first one.
The restricted protein group in this study was eating protein at the RDA of 0.8 g/kg, which again is fine for people without aspirations to build muscle (which doesn't apply to OP).
The study doesn't seem to report if the change in weight loss between PR and CR is significant or not. However, looking at figure 1, id suspect not, especially when removing the 300 pound guy in the PR group.
As far as metabolism goes, figure 2 shows that the CR had a much lower metabolic rate at baseline vs the PR group, so the randomization seems to have failed. The PR group's variance is way bigger too, perhaps due to the aforementioned outliers.
Here's a more sophisticated metabolic ward study with three isocaloric overfeeding diets with varying protein content. They're using dexa scans, CO2 respiration rate, and doubly labeled water to measure body comp, resting energy expenditure and total energy expenditure, which are gold standard methods.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/1103993
Overall, higher protein intake is more favorable for body composition (holding calories equal), and increased metabolism more than lower protein intake.
Are we looking at the same Hooper study? It's funny how we can both look at it and zoom on different things:
...
I looked through a few of the studies they reviewed but most don't really demonstrate a low PUFA/high Sat Fat diet anywhere.
The Black Study reduced fat entirely (not substituting PUFA for Sat fat) and found that keeping fat under 20% of calories helped reduce skin cancer.
The DART Study advised men to increase ratio of PUFA to SFA, but: "The advice on fat was not associated with any difference in mortality." Men who were advised to eat fatty fish did better, but I'm open to the idea that it's the O3:O6 ratio that matters, meaning increasing O3 might be beneficial to people (especially in the context of a high O6 diet).
Then we get to the Houtsmuller study, which look like it's going to actually address the PUFA thesis. Two groups of people fed a controlled diet, one diet has 4x as much Linoleic acid as the other. Sounds good. He doesn't give a lot of details about what is in each diets how he assessed the Linoleic acid quantity in the study. But let's take him for his word. There are a couple details that stand out to me:
First is, "The linolcic acid content of diet II was 4 times that of diet I, being 20.4 gr/1000 kcal for group II and 5.3 gr/1000 Kcal for group I."
According to the PUFA hypothesis, it's more like a cliff than a gradient. Humans naturally eat around 4-5 gr a day of PUFA without seed-oil or mono-gastric animal sources. This study has the Sat Fat group get twice that.
The other detail is they mention one of the sources of Sat Fat, "except for 4 patients of group I who preferred butter over saturated margarines." The Sat Fat group's intervention included getting fed partially-hydrogenated margarine. Which means lots of transfats. The negative effect this study found can possibly be explained by the amount of transfats in the Sat Fat arm of the study.
I'll admit I didn't check every study, but the ones I checked aren't really applicable to anything I'm concerned about. The only one I saw that clearly substituted Linoleic Acid for actual Sat Fat was the Sydney Study, which showed that substituting Margarine for Butter actually increased risk of Cardiovascular disease.
That said, the Sydney study Margarine probably had transfats. I'm not going to state that the Sydney study proves Sat Fat is the best, but it does support my primary point, which is that nutritional studies on fats are Terrible, do not account for common confounders, and a meta-analysis of a bunch of terrible studies does not make for good data.
I'm talking about OP's wife. OP seems to want his wife to become slimmer, not a body builder. I'm indicating that to lose weight might require cutting protein down to the bare minimum (around 50g), something that is left out of a lot of advice. Losing lean mass when losing weight can actually be quite good, as you don't want a lot of extra skin hanging around.
Yeah, the meta shows no effect on all cause mortality - but that's not the question we're discussing. I only brought it up since you responded to the graph of mortality outcomes rather than weight outcomes.
In fact, the meta shows that substituting unsaturated for saturated fats reduces weight and there's no association If the studies were actually controlled metabolic ward studies, they'd probably show no effect with isocaloric diets.
This seems like an extremely specific and unusual claim, perhaps a result of undeniable studies chipping away at the upper limits of what people can defend. We definitely shouldn't privilege weird rat studies over human ones to defend this claim. Linear relationships should be the default assumption.
The lean mass lost is not skin, it's internal organs, muscle mass, water weight, etc. The amount of skin remaining after weight loss does not depend on the diet.
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If you could wave a magic wand that would make you attracted to your wife regardless of her weight, would you? You could still be concerned about the health side of things, just the attractiveness wouldn't be an issue.
It's important to the hypothetical to know that the magic wand has a resale value of $3500 and you can sell it whether you use it or not.
Edit: also don't do any hint dropping. Don't be direct either. The most you can do is go on walks with her and organize healthy meals. But there has to be plausible deniability. Not just plausible deniability, probable deniability.
Women don't like to be told! Chapter 87 of HPMOR, Harry and Hermione.
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Ozempic. If you can afford it. Nothing easier and simpler, or trendier.
There's nothing wrong with wanting your wife/husband to take care of themselves. Like, sure, being eye candy and a good lay aren't everything in a marriage, but goddamn if someone's letting themselves go, there are polite ways of telling them it's not making you happier.
Getting buff yourself? Not the ideal way, IMO. Sure, that's worth it for its own sake, but you're better off whispering to her that you think you're gaining weight and need to diet, and hoping she takes the hint. But I while I don't know her, or you, my experience is that when a woman self-conscious about her own looks sees her husband working his ass off at the gym all of a sudden, she's more likely to think he's trying to look better so leaving her is easier. Ignore if you guys are so happily married that this isn't a concern, but I would not recommend this route myself, unless you make it a point of hitting the gym and then do your level best to convince her to tag along, so she knows it's not like that.
So, what's the deal with Ozempic? My doctor suggested that it might be worth thinking about at some point because I'm diabetic, and the nice side effect is it would help me lose weight. But the thing I struggle with is that... well, food is delicious. Is the drug really going to help lower my desire to eat tasty things?
Yes. Yes it will.
It won't make food taste worse. But it will reduce your craving for it and make you feel full earlier.
It just seems too good to be true, haha. I also feel like it's a moral failing if I have to resort to drugs to solve my willpower issues... but maybe I'm just being irrational and I should look at it as "this will significantly improve my health if it works".
I'm all for better living through medicine. Or medication.
And to the best of my knowledge, Ozempic is true, or I wouldn't go to such immense pains to start my mom on it.
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That's how it's supposed to work, though I heard somewhere that chronic nausea is a common side effect (yay, even more weight loss!).
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I don't think it's unfair to want your wife to stay reasonably slim if you are also making effort to stay reasonably slim. If there is some genuine medical reason for her being unable to maintain her weight (eg hormonal/depression) then that should be addressed first.
Not a bad plan, but consider getting into proper weightlifting. 3 x 30-45 minute sessions per week can do wonders without needing to radically change your diet.
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No offense meant, but it sounds like something is going on with her if she's gaining weight but doesn't want to talk about it. You should be able to talk about it, even if the conclusion you reach together is that she likes food more than being thin. That might be all that it is (and there is definitely a lot of shame in our society around excessive weight gain), but she might also be communicating some other difficulty. It's worth asking if there's been any emotional trouble recently, whether from family or work.
I don't think there's much to be gained in trying to psyop her this way. Of course, having a better body is it's own reward, but it might shift the dynamic in other ways. She might feel ashamed or insecure, and those feelings might cause resentment. That's the worst case scenario. I think it's unlikely that she'll be inspired to join in.
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Don't worry about this, you don't accidentally get humongous.
The low risk move is to say you're worried that neither of you is getting enough exercise and push to go to some Pilates classes together to live a healthier lifestyle.
I said that so I wouldn't get powerlifting advice, not because I thought I would accidentally become a bodybuilder.
Right, but the reason you don't want powerlifting advice is... Because you don't want to be humongous. Which is totally fair, but if you eat like a normal person and lift weights, you'll just look "toned".
Regardless, it's entirely possible to effect great changes in your physique just through calisthenics. I know some people who do calisthenics with incredibly impressive physiques.
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Hyperpalatable cheap food means staying fit often requires active decision.
There are people to stay fit to be hot to the opposite sex, and there are people who do it to stunt on them hoes (ie primarily for status among the same sex).
Generally people in the former category are much more likely to get fat after marriage, because they’ve got their person. Of course some people think that staying hot for your partner is an important part of marriage, but that’s not a universal position. While some people are more vain than others, our vanity tends to vary across a lifetime and often declines with age.
By contrast, someone whose primary objective in staying fit is status within largely same-sex platonic communities and relationships (your gym bros, your group of girlfriends) is more likely to stay fit. The people with the best bodies at 50 usually aren’t doing it to get laid.
Middle aged women who take the best care of themselves are typically more status-conscious in my opinion. Your wife is probably more likely to lose weight for status with other women for her own reasons than she is for you.
Women are generally fearful of men’s vanity, and as ever that fear can lead to resentment. I stay skinny because I like the way people treat me better when I am. I don’t know if there’s a way to make someone more self-conscious, care more about what others think.
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Unfortunately I think she's not likely to pick up on your message and if she does it might just annoy her. And it might make you resentful if you're doing all this work and she's not getting the message and keeps putting on weight. As tough as it will be I think the only thing that has a chance of working is if you find some way to make your feelings clear to her. Maybe suggest couples counseling? Many women put a lot of stock in therapists so bringing it up in a quasi medical setting might take the sting out.
That said it can never hurt to look good.
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I feel doubtful about this strategy, though of course it depends on specifics.
My husband is both taller and more hyper than me. Sometimes, he would cook a pound of bacon, and suggest that he should eat it all himself, since it doesn't really affect his weight. I was not happy about that, and did in fact eat the bacon. If he were to suddenly start doing a bunch of pull ups, then making extra food for himself, I don't think the aesthetics of a better looking chest would make up for the annoyance of eating meals together with him consuming twice as much food as me.
You might get farther by taking over dinner more and cooking things that are hard to overeat. I lost a decent amount of weight before by just living with people who would eat beans or lentils for dinner instead or burgers or piles of pasta. Inconveniently, my husband lost too much weight doing that, and making two different meals is annoying enough that I've mostly given up on it. Or taking up an outdoor hobby together that involves fairly basic packed foods.
The way we solve this is that we just schedule different snacks. My wife and I have the same meals, with calories planned so that they make sense for her, and then I have more significant and more calorie-dense snacks to fill out my requirements. I work from home, and she goes in about half the time, so I may even just have basically a "fourth meal"; e.g., if the plan for lunch is just a 200-300 calorie soup or salad, I'll just eat that at like 10:30 and then make myself another quick meal around 1-2.
She helps in this by making sure that I have plenty of prepared snacks available. She'll make tasty and protein-full snacks like chicken bites with various seasonings that are easy and don't lend themselves to overeating, like potato chips.
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If you like food (and I do) it is easy to get resentful of someone eating 50% more than you for every meal. It doesn’t make sense but I know how you feel. I do reframe it as just an unfortunate reality, if I happened to be ultra short like 4’10 or something I wouldn’t accept getting fat just because I wanted to eat the same 2,000 calories a day as much taller people.
Another thing that helps is intermittent fasting, I’ve partially stopped eating lunch and eat no breakfast, so I can eat a large dinner and it’s chill from a caloric perspective.
I used to do intermittent fasting and part time veganism for Orthodox fasts, and generally liked it. Their feasts are more fun after fasting as well. At some point when I'm not pregnant/with small children, I'd like to get back into it.
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Of note on this front - the equivalent isn't actually fully developing every muscle group, it's just developing biceps, triceps, pectoral muscles, and lats. Sure, the ideal is higher than that, but the equivalent to "be slim" isn't being a Greek statue, it's just being lean and lifting enough to have noticeable upper body definition.
Absolutely not. Maintaining your body and expecting the same from your wife is perfectly reasonable, particularly if you entered your relationship with that as a shared understanding and it's just degraded over time. I genuinely don't know how I would handle it if my wife just decided to let herself go. I would be thoroughly annoyed and looking for solutions - I think it's great that your starting point is focusing on what you can do directly.
You really just gonna skip delts like that, damn.
Thinking about it, I don't know if I've ever looked in a mirror and thought I wanted bigger pecs. But I've definitely wanted bigger shoulders. A guy could go quite a ways with just supine-grip chins (on a fat bar, for forearms) and ohp variants.
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I like this idea because you actually do see a lot of scrawny guy-fat chick couples (every meme about "polycules" features them), but rarely muscular guy-fat chick.
But imo the most important thing for women is having a friend group of healthy women. The deep fried crab bucket effect is real, and a circle of fat friends will actively undermine a woman trying to stay fit.
Idk I think you do see this at least sometimes. A larger proportion of black couples are like this, but some white and Hispanic ones are too.
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I wouldn't put too much stake on 'the realities of CICO'. No matter how much the public hears 'calories in, calories out' the obesity epidemic continues unabated. If it was as simple as choosing to eat less, we'd see far fewer fat people than we do. Nobody wants to be fat.
Maybe your wife will be able to reverse her expanding waistline, but if she does, it might be because she's started taking ozempic rather than through sheer force of will. Hoping that the latter will work has a good chance of disappointing both of you.
As @Walterodim said, you're confusing "simple" with "easy". Eating less to lose weight is indeed very simple, but it's not at all easy.
Does it matter whether you use "easy" or "simple"? The question in my eyes is: "Is it probable"? And statistically speaking, CICO is not likely to result in success.
This is basically useless evidence. Statistically speaking, most people don't get jacked. It doesn't mean that weightlifting doesn't build muscle. It's a pretty "simple" biophysical phenomenon, but it's not particularly "easy" to dedicate time and effort to doing it.
Moreover, we have good evidence for why CICO is not likely to result in success, because we can see a stark difference between studies of in-patients, where the researchers have complete control and ability to strictly account for calories consumed, and self-report studies, where they don't. The conclusion is that it's unquestionable that CICO absolutely completely works; it's that people do all sorts of shit to convince themselves of little lies here and there rather than wholeheartedly embrace truth and reality and take agency for their choices.
Two examples I've talked about here are my wife and a friend of ours. When I convinced my wife to just count the calories and see what the deal is, she still mentally rebelled against it. She would see the line tracking her weight (weekly average) not always dropping immediately, and be all, "MAYBE IT'S NOT WORKING ANYMORE!" I had to say, "Shut up and just keep doing it," more times than I can remember, and sure enough, it always kept going down. I don't know how many times it took for her to mentally "get it". At some point, she was like, "Yeah, I 'knew' that it worked like this, but I didn't 'know know'." Because society has been lying to her for decades.
Our friend literally went to her doctor and basically begged for advice on how to plan diet/exercise, but doctors hate to tell people to diet/exercise, because they know that most people have been lied to for decades and simply won't believe it enough to do it, so what did her doctor say to help her? "Ya know, you're just getting older." Even the fucking doctors contribute to the constant lying that people experience. It's no wonder that the statistics are what the statistics are, even if it works 100% of the time when you do it.
WaPo just had an article a couple weeks ago detailing one of the industries that are literally dedicated to lying to people about how the world works. These are the bootleggers. The baptists are the lying gyms and diet people who say shit on big signs like, "LOSE 30LBS IN 20 DAYS!" Everyone is constantly lying to people, and we shouldn't be surprised that, statistically, people get confused by those lies rather than doing the simple, but not easy, things that are necessary to lose weight.
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I don't know that this is a conclusion we can draw based on our observation that most overweight people in the west have failed at losing weight, though. First of all, because even though CICO is widely known, there's still also an incredible amount of other misinformation about stuff like "healthy foods" and various diets. There's also the fact that many people receive this very type of message along the lines of "CICO is trivially true from a physics standpoint, but the hard part is actually keeping to it due to self control and hunger" and as such, when they do diet, they pursue strategies for tricking themselves through other diets instead of literally just counting calories in and calories out.
All this means that the overall population of "overweight people who try to lose weight" does not necessarily look like the population of "overweight people who try to follow a CICO protocol for weight loss." I'd actually wager that overweight people who follow a CICO diet strategy while having a genuine belief in CICO and their ability to succeed by using it have higher success rates than overweight people who follow the strategy while being terrified by the prospect of failure due to their inability to control themselves in the face of hunger pangs. And as such, spreading the message that CICO is trivially true but ineffective actually harms people's ability to lose weight.
In any case, this particular comment was about manipulating the commenter's wife to following CICO via mechanisms other than just telling her CICO (i.e. the commenter getting ripped). This seems likely to fail for plenty of reasons, but those are different issues to whether or not [following as a diet strategy] CICO is likely to result in success.
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That's fine, but that's not the implicit claim that was being made. The implicit claim was not "CICO isn't likely to work", it was "CICO is not simple". As such, the distinction between simple and easy is relevant.
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Lots of things are both simple and psychologically difficult. There really isn't any good reason for a couple making six figures to be broke, they literally just need to elect to spend less than they make, and presto, they won't be broke. And yet! Really though, for any individual, it actually is that simple and straightforward if they're capable of recognizing their own impulses and acting to break the autopilot actions that are causing them to be broke and fat.
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I think that (monogamous) couples have an obligation to maintain their attractiveness, within reason***. When you entered the relationship, you gave up the ability to have sex with anyone else on the pretense that that you will get your sexual satisfaction from your partner, and part of that satisfaction comes from their physical attractiveness. If they choose to erode their attractiveness, they are hurting you and violating their relationship obligations. IMO, like sexual fidelity, this should be made explicit at the start of relationships, but should otherwise be considered implicit unless the obligation is explicitly waved,
***"Within reason" = within the ordinary bounds of aging, illness, and unexpected events. Obviously people are not going to be as hot at 50 as at 25, and obviously we can't completely control the course of our aging.
Which is to say that I think you should consider yourself in the moral right here. You have a moral right to be dismayed by your wife's fading attractiveness. This doesn't make your wife a horrible person or anything, but you shouldn't feel bad for wanting to nudge her back in your preferred direction.
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I think that this is a tough one. On the one hand, one should love their spouse without regard to physical appearance. But on the other hand, there reaches a point where you just don't find your spouse attractive any more, even if you still love them. And that's not good. These two things are obviously in tension, and it's really hard to say what the right balance is.
I don't think that there's a good answer for you here as far as the situation with your wife goes. I think you have seen already that the impetus for change must come from within her if it's going to work. So you're kind of stuck waiting for her to realize "hey I need to change". Right now it sounds like she's ok with the situation, or at least dislikes the idea of changing her lifestyle more. The problem is that everyone has a different trigger that causes them to change their mind, and it's hard to know in advance what hers will be.
If you do decide to hit the gym, I would focus on doing it for your sake rather than to inspire your wife. You might inspire her, it definitely happens! But I think that if you start working out with the explicit goal to inspire your wife to do better, she might pick up on that and resist it. Plus, you might start to feel resentful if you put in the work to get ripped and she doesn't care to join you. So I would say that you should focus on doing fitness for your own sake, and if your wife decides to join you that's a nice bonus.
I have trouble with this sentiment, not because I disagree with it across all parameters, but because someone's physical appearance reflects real elements of someone's personality and character, it's not just something completely exogenous to who you love. The woman I love is fit, she was fit when I met her, she got more fit during our time together, and we like doing physical things together. Her fitness is reflected in her appearance - she's toned, slender, tanned deeply in the summers, carries herself with the posture of an athletic woman, and so on. You can see this at a glance, the same way that you can see that someone is sedentary from their chubbiness, lack of musculature, slumping posture, and uncoordinated gait.
Contrary to the saying, there's a lot you can tell about a book from its cover.
Sure. But on the other hand that's not always the case. Sometimes people get disfigured in an accident, and I think most would agree it's immoral to leave your wife because she's not attractive any more after a tragic accident. And of course, we all get old and ugly in the end (or die young I suppose), and your relationship needs to be able to withstand that inevitable change. I think that age in particular makes it worth emphasizing the idea that you should love your spouse regardless of what they look like.
Sure, those stipulations make sense, but they don't lead to agreeing with the statement that "one should love their spouse without regard to physical appearance"; evaluating what caused that degradation of appearance is showing regard for their physical appearance. Ailments and disfigurement are tragic and it is obviously the morally correct thing to maintain your love for your partner through them. Aging is not only acceptable, but something that we should do our best to look on with some degree of dignity and appreciation. Neither of these is similar to having a spouse that just decides to stop dressing nicely, stop eating reasonably, or otherwise shows disregard for their own appearance.
Thinking over the examples you provided and the ones I provided, it seems like the key distinction is the underlying cause. In the case of gaining weight it seems like what is a problem is not the physical appearance per se, but rather the fact that your spouse isn't taking care of him/herself any more. In that light it seems fair to say physical appearance isn't important except insofar as it is the symptom of a problem one considers to be a character flaw. What do you think?
I think that's the majority of it, yeah. Falling out of love with someone because they've lost some physical luster is something that has been known to happen but should be vigorously resisted. Falling out of love with someone who has changed their behavior and character is a much deeper challenge.
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It would be a tragic irony if I try to induce internal motivation in my wife if I had none for myself.
Thanks for the warning.
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I’m surprised at this assertion, as I personally know several mismatched pairings, and I’ve witnessed quite a few more. I know a few fat man/skinny woman couples, but, perhaps unfortunately for you, I see far more fit man/fat woman couples.
This is bad news.
Hmm you’re right that men get away with rounding out in a way that keeps them still within socially accepted bounds even if their wives are thin.
I guess I see some men with fat women, but in my experience these men are still kinda husky, even if they manage to keep anything from draping over or being tucked behind their belts. Otherwise I can’t say I can think of real-life examples of what you describe.
Either way, hopefully being indisputably in shape can partly counteract any effects that cause natural mismatches.
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