Hi, I've been married for 5 years and since the time we got married, my wife has gained about 80 pounds. she is just 33.
As a result of the weight gain,
- she cannot get pregnant
- she gets tired if we just go out for a movie, forget any physical activity
- she is very conscious and has no confidence
- it has messed up her system and she has excess hair growth.
The additional problem is that she has PCOS. The doctor said that in order for her to have a child, she has to diet, exercise and take medication.
here is the problem, she is too immature. she doesn't exercise regularly. I have invested in all sorts of stuff, from dvd's to a Nintendo Wii and even paid extra rent to get a condo with a gym in the area. she may go to the gym once or twice a week but that is if we fight and i really push her to go. in the gym, she stays for about 40 mins and really works out for about 20.
Her diet is terrible. she keeps having coke and ice cream and unhealthy stuff.
The frustrating part is that she doesn't even drink water. she literally drinks about 2 glasses of water a day and i keep nagging her about it. but NOTHING!!!
If I tell her go to work out, she says, "Don't nag me. I will become rebellious and won't go". If I don't tell her, she doesn't go. I can't win either way.
This has affected our social lives as well. She doesn't want to go out because she is embarrassed that she can't climb stairs fast and of the weight.
To motivate her, I have started going to the gym everyday. I try to be sensitive to her and encourage her to go. When she goes, I tell her how proud I am of her. But it is not enough.
I am not sexually attracted to her any more. partially physically and partially because of her attitude.
Hmmm.... One thing I would do is stop talking/nagging about her weight immediately. You will completely bury her and her self esteem underground. Be supportive of her. Make her feel good about herself. Compliment her everyday!!! Make her feel good. Surprise her and buy her flowers.
It's up to her to lose the weight and she needs to do it on her own.
I NEVER nag my husband and he NEVER nags me.... Ever!!! I'm homebound due to severe chronic pain from breaking my neck. It's tough, but my husband supports me 1000%. I've gained weight since my injury and my husband never once said a word. I lost 20 of the 30 pounds I gained only through counting calories. I spend most my day in bed or on the couch. I use to run 36 miles a week, so this was a huge change. I do this for myself, not anyone else. I'd be lost without my husband as he supports me through everything. We have been married 12 wonderful years.
Good luck. I bet if you stop nagging your wife and start complementing her, she will turn around to lose the weight. It doesn't hurt to try. Posted via Mobile Device
Unfortunately you can't make other people do things. It's good that you encourage her when she does take those steps. You may want to insist on marriage counseling. It sounds as if she could use individual counseling as well, but that's not something you can decide for her.
You can have a conversation and tell her you are most unhappy.
That you hate the way the marriage is right now. That you dread it continuing this way and need her to hear what you are saying and to come up with a plan to get her health turned around for the better.
That you will do all you can, with her involvement in actually getting things rolling the right way
or
the marriage will not thrive or survive.
Give her clear, concise, honest fair warning that
you need change to be her husband. It isn't a threat. It is a fact and she needs to listen.
She will be hurt and defensive but hopefully will hear the statement behind that
you love her and want to love her and she needs to change for the marriage to work for you both.
My wife has struggled with yo-yo weight gains/losses for years. As the others have said, negativity and criticising just plain doesn't help. Since she will not go out much, she probably already wishes that she could gain control over this. The best appoach, in my opinion, is to just talk to her in a supportive way. Try to understand how she really feels about it. Does she have any ideas as to what might motivate her? Will she respond to offers for even casual activities, like walking, at first?
Maybe there are approaches that seemed interesting to her, but just seemed like they were too expensive, like meal services.
Also, are there friends who may join an exercise, weight loss plan with her?
Would she be willing to join in with small challenges, like drinking more water? Successes can build. Some women want it all off so badly that the thought of slow, methodical improvements just seems too unacceptable. Work on this approach with her.
I'll admit that the thing that worked best for us in the past was just to assure her that she is still the woman I love, accept, and desire. I tried to help her see it as a mutual effort.
In recent years, additional psychological issues really changed my wife's coping mechanisms and her outlook, but before this, we were always able to reach a place where she wanted to work towards a healthier lifestyle.
A marriage is much more than the 'here and now'. Recognize that she can develop a healthy outlook, and the two of you can have many years of happiness if it each of you are willing to help the other get back up when one stumbles.
Thanks for the advice. However, her weight gain is not due to any injury. She has PCOS. If she doesn't exercise, she will put on weight. She went to a doc and he told her to diet, exercise and take certain medicine. The only thing she did was to take the medicine.
We've been married 5 years. I was completely patient throughout, but recently, her weight has gotten worse.
I was away on business and she was at her mothers for a month and a half. In that time, her mom nagged her and she started to go to the gym regularly. In fact, she'd never skip. When she wanted to join me, I told her that she needed to grow up and go to the gym on her own and not have me nag her like her mom did. she agreed and joined me. in the last 30 days, she's been to the gym 5 times.
I then told her to drink more water, but i'm lucky if she has 3 glasses of water a day. I told her to eat healthy, that didn't last long. She then makes excuses that she needs treatment to get better and wants to move closer to home. However, i've met the doctor. He said that unless she loses weight, no treatment will work to help her conceive. So the gym is the only solution.
IN the past, she said that if I got her a Wii, she'd work out at home and lose the weight, that lasted a month. Then the Wii was put away. She makes excuses to postpone going to the gym.
Now, I've started going to the gym regularly, hoping to motivate her. That hasn't worked. She went a couple of days and stopped. Yesterday, she said that she was "feeling blah" so she won't go to the gym.
If i tell her, she gets defensive, if i don't tell her, she doesn't go. It is really frustrating. She is just 33 and cannot climb a flight of stairs. She doesn't want to meet my friends because she is embarrassed but if I go out, then she calls every half an hour for me to come home. I really don't know what to do. I love her so much and have done so much for her, but I also regret marrying her. She was so different before we got married. Really don't know what to do.
She is just 33 and cannot climb a flight of stairs. She doesn't want to meet my friends because she is embarrassed but if I go out, then she calls every half an hour for me to come home. I really don't know what to do. I love her so much and have done so much for her, but I also regret marrying her. She was so different before we got married. Really don't know what to do.
Given there are no children yet in this marriage, and she has, in my opinion, pretty much abandoned the marriage with her weight gain, I, for one, would seriously consider divorce.
This sounds very similar to my first marriage. My first wife and I met in college while she was just 21 and I was 23 and while she was a little chunky at about 5'3" 160 pounds, she made up for it with her personality, intelligence and pretty face. At the time, I was in great shape and I not only encouraged her to work out but I acted as her personal trainer. In that first year together, she went from 160 to 120 pounds and was a total knockout.
She would keep the weight below 130 for a couple years but by the time we were finally engaged, 5+ years later, her weight had ballooned all the way to 175 pounds as she grew way too comfortable in the relationship. Also, my weight shot up from the time we met as her will and bad habits seemed to win out over my will and former good habits.
She would get down to about 150 for the wedding and because she was very pretty and busty she was able to get away with carrying 150 pounds on her 5'3" frame for our wedding day, but it was just a facade and even on our honeymoon we would fight as she was more out of shape than the 60-70 year old people that shared our Medittaranean honeymoon cruise and she could not go more than a few minutes without sitting down and taking a break.
About a year into the marriage, unhappy with my own weight, I began training for a marathon and would drop about 30 pounds during the 9 months or so that I trained but she had zero interest in working out and, instead, every so often, would go on a special diet, drop 10 or 15 pounds quickly but then gain them back once she was off the diet.
I would run not only the one marathon but two more marathons that same year, although I was only in good shape for the first one. By the third one, one we had traveled to South America for that was at the start of a three week holiday, she did not even bother getting out of bed to see me at the finish line at Noon! Imagine my disappointment when I had just suffered for 5 hours running/walking/crawling 26.2 miles and my wife is not even at the finish line to cheer for me and make sure I am okay! Worse, when I got back to the hotel room a half hour later at 12:30pm, there she was, with her fat ass still asleep in bed. By then, she was up to about 200 pounds, and on that same trip she would end up getting very sick as she developed an abcess on her inner thigh from the little bit of hiking that we had done (we literally hiked for just three or four hours one day but with her thighs rubbing together, it caused an abcess that went septic and by the time our vacation was over she was very sick and had to be rushed to the hospital the moment we returned home to have the abcess treated and to be put on an IV). This was in December 2002, just 18 months into our marriage.
Flash forward to 2004 and not only was there the weight gain but she really stopped taking care of her appearance altogether, so much that her own mom and aunts actually staged an intervention on her and bought her new clothes and makeup. She had turned into one of these fat women who chose to wear stretchy clothes and she was only getting dressed up and made up for either family events or when she had an important work function. The sad part was that we were doing really well financially, she was cruising around in a beautiful new top of the line Jaguar, each special occasion (birthday, anniversary, Valentine's Day) I would buy her nice jewelery, we even had a live in housekeeper, but her appearance did not improve and she made no effort to get in shape. I would beg her to go with me to walk our dogs but she refused each and every time. Her gym membership went unused for years, it seemed.
Finally, in 2005, with both of us at all time high weights (again, her will had pushed mine out the door), on September 01st (I remember the date vividly), she came home from a first time visit to an Overeaters Anonymous meeting and feeling suddenly empowered she announced right as she walked in the door, "First I am going to lose my extra weight and then I am going to divorce you!"
All I could think in my mind, at the moment, was "F*** this s***) and that was the last straw for me. From that moment, I went on an immediate diet and started working out like I hadn't in years. Within a couple months, I had dropped 20 pounds, and, at the time, in addition to my regular career, I had a specialty travel agency/tour operation on the side, and I had planned an amazing monthlong trip for us to South Africa and Botswana for a luxury safari staying at many different very high end properties (many of which would have cost the normal travelers $1,500+ per night for a room). It was really the trip of a lifetime but she was spoiled and we had already taken big trips like this before and in an effort to both hurt me and my standing with these properties, just a week before the trip, she announced that she was not going on the trip and that I needed to choose between the trip and the marriage.
I chose the trip and the sad part was that she even packed for me, drove me to the airport and I think she really thought that there was going to be some scene out of a movie with a happy ending where I changed my mind at the last second, didn't get on the plane and instead went home with her. Hell to the no! I was on that plane, I spent the next four weeks alone with nothing but time to consider my life and future (I was 35 at the time) and on the trip I met and confided in many fellow travelers, most who it seemed were on their second (or even third marriages) but seemingly a lot happier than I was.
During that month away, not only did I drop another 5-10 pounds, but I became more determined than ever to file for divorce and within a month after returning home, that is exactly what I would do. Just so I would not be able to justify staying in the marriage any longer in my mind, I found myself an apartment and was sure to move out by the end of the year. So, there I was on December 30th, moving into a new apartment back in the city I loved, and just a block away from a very trendy part of town with restaurants/bars/nightlife, and, suddenly down 25-30 pounds, I took very little of my stuff, no furniture and started life all over again.
I wasted no time, had a dating profile up on Match.com immediately, and within 3 weeks, despite it having drilled in my head by my then 230 pound wife that I would never do better than her, suddenly I was in a rebound relationship with a woman 9 years younger than my wife and 100 pounds less than my wife and who took care of herself.
While that relationship would only last a couple months, it gave me the confidence I needed and the next woman I dated was even better, 5'8" 130 pounds, worked out 5x a week, educated, sophisticated, recently divorced (but still just 28 years old to my 36 years old) and I would be with this woman for 15 months all the way until my divorce was finally done.
After this woman, I met my now wife, 7 years my junior, who seemed to be a good combination of my ex-gf and my ex-wife. My ex-wife had her good qualities, as well, but, bottom line, I just could not stay married to someone who had abandoned the marriage and didn't take care of herself.
While I miss the very nice lifestyle that my ex-wife and I enjoyed together (she does pretty well with her own small business), I do not miss being lonely, I do not miss having to sneak around to have my sexual needs met which I did during my first marriage after my wife gave up, and I do not miss living an unhealthy lifestyle myself. My second wife and I have run many marathons together, I have run nearly 60 marathons myself, all but three of them in the last 3 years) and my second wife, while not perfect, at least takes care of herself and makes half an effort.
If you are anywhere near your wife's age of 33 years old (just a year younger than my wife was before I filed for divorce), you should really consider whether the marriage is worth saving or not. You have a long life ahead of you and, take it from someone whose wife gained 80 pounds following the wedding and gained 110 pounds from when she was at her best, it is very unlikely that she is going to change. More likely, you will get exhausted of this and she will end up dragging you down, as well, as my ex wife did for a few years before I finally was woken up by her announcement that she was going to lose weight and then divorce me.
At this point, with no children involved, you need to take a long hard look at this marriage and ask yourself if this is how you want to live the rest of your life. At only 33, the likelihood is that she will just continue to gain weight, particularly if she gets pregnant and, before you know it, instead of having gained 80 pounds, it can soon be 100 or even 150 pounds with her sedentary lifestyle and bad dietary choices (my first wife "hated" how water tasted and instead would drink juice and smoothies like they were water).
Best of luck to you. You are only powerless here if you choose to be. Divorce is difficult but sometimes the best and only option.
Unfortunately you can't make other people do things. It's good that you encourage her when she does take those steps. You may want to insist on marriage counseling. It sounds as if she could use individual counseling as well, but that's not something you can decide for her.
I agree completely that you can't make other people do things, and that also includes going to maritial counseling. The last thing I ever wanted was for my first marriage to end up in divorce, because despite a stormy marriage, she really was my best friend and soulmate (as well as worst enemy).
I begged her to go to counseling but she put up every roadblock known to man and then when she finally agreed, she was a no show and refused to reschedule.
Ultimately, I felt I was left with no other option but to file for divorce and move on with my life. Not only was the marriage badly broken but she was refusing to do anything (from losing weight to marital counseling) to help repair the marriage.
Although it led me to greater happiness, I still think it is tragic that she was paralyzed by fear or whatever the reason for not wanting to save the marriage. Not all marriages are worth saving and this may be one of them, unfortunately, if the OP is anywhere near as distraught over the situation as I was in my first marriage.
Thanks for the advice. However, her weight gain is not due to any injury. She has PCOS. If she doesn't exercise, she will put on weight. She went to a doc and he told her to diet, exercise and take certain medicine. The only thing she did was to take the medicine.
We've been married 5 years. I was completely patient throughout, but recently, her weight has gotten worse.
I was away on business and she was at her mothers for a month and a half. In that time, her mom nagged her and she started to go to the gym regularly. In fact, she'd never skip. When she wanted to join me, I told her that she needed to grow up and go to the gym on her own and not have me nag her like her mom did. she agreed and joined me. in the last 30 days, she's been to the gym 5 times.
I then told her to drink more water, but i'm lucky if she has 3 glasses of water a day. I told her to eat healthy, that didn't last long. She then makes excuses that she needs treatment to get better and wants to move closer to home. However, i've met the doctor. He said that unless she loses weight, no treatment will work to help her conceive. So the gym is the only solution.
IN the past, she said that if I got her a Wii, she'd work out at home and lose the weight, that lasted a month. Then the Wii was put away. She makes excuses to postpone going to the gym.
Now, I've started going to the gym regularly, hoping to motivate her. That hasn't worked. She went a couple of days and stopped. Yesterday, she said that she was "feeling blah" so she won't go to the gym.
If i tell her, she gets defensive, if i don't tell her, she doesn't go. It is really frustrating. She is just 33 and cannot climb a flight of stairs. She doesn't want to meet my friends because she is embarrassed but if I go out, then she calls every half an hour for me to come home. I really don't know what to do. I love her so much and have done so much for her, but I also regret marrying her. She was so different before we got married. Really don't know what to do.
No offense, but I think you messed up. She asked you to go to the gym with her, and you turned her down, only to start going on your own later. You should have been her support person then, and helped keep up her exercise habit. It's much easier to maintain a habit than to build one. And for many couples, finding something that they enjoy doing together is a great way to build intimacy .
No offense, but I think you messed up. She asked you to go to the gym with her, and you turned her down, only to start going on your own later. You should have been her support person then, and helped keep up her exercise habit. It's much easier to maintain a habit than to build one. And for many couples, finding something that they enjoy doing together is a great way to build intimacy .
Just my $0.02...
C Posted via Mobile Device
Pear, i think you misunderstood. We were in different cities and she wanted to join me instead of staying with her mother. She never asked me to join her for the gym.
UPDATE: This weekend we went for my office retreat. When we got to the airport, we had to take a van to our hotel. The van was pretty high. My wife couldn't get up the first step. 2 of us had to help her. my coworkers were watching and my wife got really embarrassed. Throughout the weekend, we were restricted because of her. In fact, we even took a cab to the airport on our way back. Hopefully this embarrassment will motivate her. I just don't think it will motivate her long term. Any ideas on how I can do that? i have looked online for advice. I have found solutions like be loving and go to the gym yourself. I have tried that. Not sure what to do next.
At this point, Divorce is not an option. We are in love and I am sure that I can motivate her to become more fit.
At this point, Divorce is not an option. We are in love and I am sure that I can motivate her to become more fit.
To say divorce is not an option is most admirable, it truly is. But ... have you considered the very real possibility that what you see today is what you will always see the rest of your life? Are you prepared to live with that to the end of your days? Think hard on this one. For a woman like this, it will never get better unless she wants it to and is willing to put in the work. So far we have many indications of embarrassment, but no indications that she really wants to address it. Are you OK with that? Are you OK with that never changing? Try this one on: she reduces enough to conceive, but then puts it back on immediately, never to take it off again. But now you are hooked good. Do you really want to bring up a child in an environment in which his/her mother can't keep up with her 'cuz it's too much work? You will have to ponder these things. Good luck.
Pear, i think you misunderstood. We were in different cities and she wanted to join me instead of staying with her mother. She never asked me to join her for the gym.
UPDATE: This weekend we went for my office retreat. When we got to the airport, we had to take a van to our hotel. The van was pretty high. My wife couldn't get up the first step. 2 of us had to help her. my coworkers were watching and my wife got really embarrassed. Throughout the weekend, we were restricted because of her. In fact, we even took a cab to the airport on our way back. Hopefully this embarrassment will motivate her. I just don't think it will motivate her long term. Any ideas on how I can do that? i have looked online for advice. I have found solutions like be loving and go to the gym yourself. I have tried that. Not sure what to do next.
At this point, Divorce is not an option. We are in love and I am sure that I can motivate her to become more fit.
My apologies for the misunderstanding. But... Have you offered to go to the gym with her? To set up a healthy routine? How about taking over the grocery shopping, and making sure there's healthy food in the house?
Oh, and I do understand where you're coming from. My wife's weight and her unhappiness with her body had a significant impact on my decision to leave my marriage. Not because I felt she was overweight and unattractive, but because she felt that way, yet refused to do anything about it. If she would have been willing to take any steps on her own to deal with it, I'd still be at home. But I refused to be dragged down into her unhappiness, and I couldn't save her if she didn't want to be saved.
The comment by the previous poster is very relevant. Sometimes, what you see really IS what you get.
PCOS sucks. It is such a horrible disease. I have friends who have it and it's just horrible.
I had female issues that caused me to gain about 30 pounds in a few months! I have since lost it...but during that time with all I had going on inside me, nothing would take the weight off.
Is she taking BCP? How is she coping with the PCOS?
I think you're confused about your role in her life. You are her husband, not her father. If you were her father it would be fine that you were telling her what to do. Clearly your demands aren't working, but even if they eventually strike a chord and she becomes thin, her attraction to you will likely wane. I wouldn't be surprised if her apparent lack of will power is a actually a power struggle.
I think MC would be beneficial. Posted via Mobile Device
Wife's weight gain 
I have since lost it...but during that time with all I had going on inside me, nothing would take the weight off.
