Are husbands to blame for their wives becoming fat?

WorldNetDaily.com ^ | Thursday, December 4, 2003 | Shmuley Boteach

[Egon]

About four years after we got married, my wife started ballooning too. About nine months later, she rapidly lost the weight. I blame myself.

[Twinkie]

Yes, ah but the gym is SO delightful it makes one
just want to pitch a tent and live there where there
are only thin, muscled bodies under 40 and there are
mirrors all around in which to admire one's self. -
Over 50, women especially have spent about 30 years
camping out in the kitchen cooking & scrubbing pots
and pans. Add to that menopause, life's stresses &
prescription drugs that have weight gain side effects,
hubby's affairs with the ladies at the gym who lounge
poolside like lizards and there you have it. Oh, I
know, the gym campers are SO irresistable, until they
get over 50 that is - unless they can afford plastic
surgery in order to hold it back a little while longer.

[uncbob]

Well I noticed the first thing women/men at work did after a divorce was start taking off the pounds and joining a health club and the contact lenses made a comeback

[jatfla]

My niece brought that doll over to the house on Thanksgiving. Us women were laughing our heads off! She said she was going to put it under her husband*s pillow so she could squeeze it at night and hear those nice things coming from his side of the bed.

It*s a hoot!

[goldstategop]

I'd have to say it sounds like pop psych advice. But there's truth to it. When a couple started dating and then getting hooked up they took price in each other appearance and noticed their partner and that made a guy feel handsome and a woman feel beautiful. Marriage can make you stop trying to bring out the best in each other and then the people in it started taking each other for granted. Before husbands fault their wives for being fat, they should ask what made their wives stop being sexually attractive to them. A few kind words will do wonders indifference and hostile comments won't. Treat your wife like your greatest blessing and reflect on how hard it was to win her in the first place. That will make guys want to keep the Fat Lady jokes in the closet.

[Nataku X]

Western culture puts more emphasis on money and schooling than on good health--when it should be the other way around.

If you do not have good health, all the honor rolls and luxury furniture and parties in the world will not make up for it...

[syriacus]

This article makes a lot of sense.

I have to admit, I thought the article was going to say that women would not gain so much weight if their husbands had greater appetites for healthier foods.

Men seem to like foods with more fat than women do. If a woman prepares meals her husband likes, she, too, will probably eat more like a man would eat.

I'm not saying it's the man's fault that the women gain weight. After all, there are single women who are overweight.

But I think thoughtful meal planning (which is time-consuming) is necessary. The women need to cook veggies for themselves, even if their husbands turn up their noses at vegetables.

[randita]

IMO, the reason women (and men, too) are overweight is because they watch too much TV and eat too many low-fat, high-carb foods.

Adopt South Beach or Atkins as a guideline for weight loss and weight maintenance and turn off the TV in favor of exercise and you will lose weight.

[PBRSTREETGANG]

So I take it you don't enjoy the gym?

[Orangedog]

I actually put on weight after my divorce. You would have too if you ever had to eat her cooking. The only time I got any benefit out of her cooking skills (or lack thereof) was when we both became so ill from the pork chops she made that we couldn't go to lamaz class.

She made a cake once and decided to put on the icing before taking it out of the pyrex glass dish she cooked it in. I don't know what she made that icing out of, but we bent two ginsu knives trying to cut through it.

Then there were the biscuits. Ye Gods! If we would have had a pro-hockey team in town at the time I could have sold those biscuits to them as pucks.

[netmilsmom]

Good article but I am fat because I am fat. I am working, with the help of Carlo3b to not be that way.
My husband is gracious enough to tell me when I'm looking thin and loving enough to understand I am trying.
If anyone thinks that losing weight is easy, try watching tv, driving or doing a holiday. Food is everywhere. It's not like giving up drinking or smoking where one can avoid it all. We must eat. I did the not eating thing for a while, it made me faint and lose hair.
That didn't work.

[Maelstrom]

Nah, it's not a good article at all.

It's shallow, unsupported, and ignores fundamental facts with respect to marriage, women, AND men.

[CarryaBigStick]

Maybe your hubby would prefer something other than the gym?

Me thinks maybe you misunderstood what mewzilla was trying to tell you. There's one kind of exercise that all men love and can almost always find time for ... if you know what I mean ;-)

[Pedantic_Lady]

Me thinks maybe you misunderstood what mewzilla was trying to tell you. There's one kind of exercise that all men love and can almost always find time for ... if you know what I mean ;-)

Oh...you mean

SEX?

[madison10]

Without reading it..yet. I'll just say "yes" on general principles. Is truly the case if the husband is overweight or came from a family that "eats for happiness."

[LadyDoc]

We're NOT "fat".....We're soft and Fluffy...

[Publius6961]

It's a convenient way of passing the buck and blaming the wife for the loss of marriage's most important ingredient: attraction.

I have always had this fascination about what this "third rail" business is all about.
That and the certainty that this will turn into a 1000 item thread, makes it irresistible.

OK.
This reads like something from the Onion.
Assuming, for a moment, that most men (and women) find it possible to ignore the fact their mate is the size of Moby Dick, doesn't anyone else find it odd that very few people marry one?

Why is it surprising, then, that when Ms Size6 balloons to a size 16, there are serious second third and fourth thoughts?

[Quilla]

Best of luck to you, netmilsmom. I could easily be fat as I love to eat. My 45 year old husband has six pack abs and the finest, well you get the idea. I can't help but to stare at him every time he enters and leaves a room. Wanting him to feel the same way, I watch what I eat, do a little exercise, and convince myself that shopping at Victoria's Secret is for him. ;-)

[AppyPappy]

If anyone thinks that losing weight is easy

It IS easy. Watch what fat people eat and don't eat that. Don't eat bread, pasta or potatoes. No sugar. Exercise. You can eat as much as you want of anything else. You will lose weight.

[bvw]

His saying "Trust destroys a marriage" -- that's true! Unfounded trust -- by that I mean in Ronald Reagan's sense of "trust but verify" -- destroys any partnership, business or marriage. A Partnership is best viewed as a wrestling match, perhaps.

All of our good and bad parts are operating within it. What makes a PARTNERSHIP mighty is when BOTH individuals in joint action work out a good number of the bad parts. In an *unfounded* trust relationship, the parties *assume* the individuals will be able to work them out themselves, without help. Well not only does that not work -- so many "bad parts" need the help of others to be made good, but it ALWAYS leads to exploitation, and from that sin, misery, injury, violence.

A marriage is a very special kind of partnership. The kind of things that can be worked out between a man and a woman in marriage, in that special, unique, unsubstitutable partnership can be worked out NOWHERE else. To be a full person you must marry. Man to woman. Woman to Man.

Now if either party *assumes* trust, that actually keeps the things from being worked out that need to be worked out.

* * *

All that said, I can now speak to that relationship Boteach has with the mid-fortieish father of young'uns, Mr. Micheal Jackson. Jackson's cry has been to "Trust me!", yet when every common sense of his actions says they are unwise, dangerous, and puts him and his charges in compromising positions better avoided!

It is, to a reasonable view of Boteach's actions and words -- hypocrisy on Boteach's part, yet that he would address how he balances the two. Boteach's support for a man who poffers a very foolish and unsubstanstiated "Trust me!" versus Rabbi Boteach's wisdom that "Trust destroys a marriage!"