Is your spouse or SO overweight? Do they change their diet with you?

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  • Mine is but not to the degree that I am!
    My husband is 6'2" and I'm 5'3" but I tend to eat what he does. He is 30 lbs overweight and I am about 140 lbs overweight.

    After my planned mini binge this weekend he told me that he was going piggy back on weight watchers with me. I didn't ask him to but this will be so much easier because he'll soon realize how bad it sucks when he wants hot dogs and hamburgers on the grill and I can only have one hot dog or one hamburger. Or when we have family beloved 'cheap pizza' night and I can have two little pieces of cheap pizza with a huge salad. I can modify but I'd rather just eat a lot of healthy!
  • DH is overweight and has expressed interest in losing 40 pounds...but for some reason has a kneejerk "NO!!!!" reaction to doing WW with me. Instead he's asked me to plan food for him, and direct his exercise. So, being the clever human I am, I'm putting him on Points and not telling him. I do all the cooking and all the grocery shopping, so he'll never know!
  • We are about the same as you Liz. I still would like to lose about 118 more pounds and Jeff--to be in the "normal" range--about 40 but realistically he'd like to lose about 20 and muscle-up.

    When I first started out, he was very against doing anything diet or health related. I was shaking up the status quo and he was dead set against it. whatever I wanted to do to my body was fine with him but don't mess with his man meals. I finally challenged him to give up his regular pop for two weeks and he dropped like 10 pounds. He was excited about that but is back on regular pop. He now does modify meals when cooking by draining and rinsing hamburger meat, buying low-fat, fat-free stuff for me.
    I just slowly switch out meals and make them healthier. Of course he still has two meals away from me and until he wants to make a change for the healthier there is nothing I can do.
  • I think thats whats good about WW! My dad has lost a ton of weight because my mom did the same thing.


    My husband was eating pop tarts for breakfast. He loves to drink coffee with tons of sugar and creamer. He comes home at lunch and eats whatever
    Okay I'll fess up I have no control over my man!

    Yesterday was his first full day and he got heartburn from a banana and then later from an apple.
  • From my start weight, I wanted to lose about 100 lbs. The hubby is overweight but nearly as much as me. I need to lose about 75 lbs now and he needs to lose about 30. I'm at 210 and he's 200. He is happy to see me trying to do something different with my weight. I have impressed him as much as he wanted to buy some Ketchup flavored chips last night and I told him to go ahead. He didn't want to hurt me by having them. I told him "I have the willpower to say no."

    He is willing to fix his own meals in leiu of me fixing something more healthy. I would make him eat what I do but considering he is very, very picky. It's kind of hard for me to put him on any restrictions as to what not to eat. He won't eat fruit and he is limited as to what he'll eat for veggies. He'll eat potatoes, corn on the cob and lettuce on very rare occasions. So I pretty much just buy stuff I like and work around what he will eat. If I have soup, he has to fend for himself to find something to eat. I decided that I have to change how and what I eat and if that means making 2 meals for us then that is what I have to do. I've lost 3lbs in the last 2 weeks due to changing my eating habits so I am not going to change now.

    Hopefully, he'll be daring to start trying some other things but until then I can't force him into it. Hopefully, I will make it to under 200 before by my Christmas goal and I will weigh less than him.
  • Annie, your avatar is so funny!! I wonder what it says about me that I feel like I could just sit and watch that for hours?

    Well, this topic is a bit of a sore one for me.....I've been battling with Lorraine for a LONG time now to join me in eating on plan and exercising. It's so hard. She wants to, and she sort of had to eat healthier by default last year when I was 110% on plan. (I do all the cooking, as well as almost all the grocery shopping.) She was left to her own devices outside of dinner, even though I always made sure she had healthy eats in the house to select from. (She's a District Manager, and not only works out of our home office a lot but also manages her own schedule and can grab healthy eats before heading out the door to the car.) But, while I lost 80 pounds, she lost nothing. Literally nothing. It made it so much harder for me, too! It was always such an effort to fight her on everything from what we were having for dinner to whether I felt I could go out to dinner to my taking the time to exercise after work when I should have been cooking her dinner!

    Unlike the aforementioned husbands, Lorraine has about as much to lose as I, at this point. She's taller than I, but she still has to lose about 80 pounds to reach 160-ish, which is a healthy weight for her height and build. Now that she's quit smoking (she's past the 100 day mark! ) and we've finally put the elliptical together (yesterday!) and she's got a fully diagnosed permanent heart condition as a result of the Lyme Disease -- now that all of these have occurred, it seems like the planets are aligned to get her frightened, unhappy *** on some kind of plan! She is miserable about it, but she does finally seem reconciled to some kind of progress. The infectious disease specialist has this really powerful father energy, and he's made her cry about it a couple of times, so that's helped also. The poor sweetie. I love her and hate to see her cry, but I'm all for anybody that can scare her enough to make her change her evil ways!

    I do really feel good about it now though -- I really feel strongly that this time she's serious, knows in her heart that it's a necessary thing, and will start to take the steps necessary to make lasting changes.

    I sure hope so. For both of our sakes.
  • My dh is very thin. He is 6'2" to my 5'1". I was like you, goalnorolls, I would eat as much as him. He has never had to diet a day in his life, so he totally doesn't get how hard it is to loose weight. But, over the years he has gotten a little more understanding about it through watching me struggle with it.
  • My hubby is slim--weighing-in at a little over my goal weight. His diet changed after we married and I started doing all the cooking--it had been centred around convenience foods, whereas I tend to cook most things from scratch.

    He eats whatever I put in front of him and is pretty much unconcerned about what that is. He's very much an eat-to-live kind of bloke without any of the emotional baggage that I attach to food and eating, lucky man!

    Having said that, I sometimes do separate meals for us, making him pies (both fruit and meat) and cheesy macaroni that I don't eat--I don't like pastry and I prefer my pasta with a tomato & tuna sauce.

    He could certainly eat better overall, like cutting down on his cookies and sweeties, but he's happy and healthy, and I refuse to be one of those people who irritates the life out of everyone else by espousing the I-Know-Best mentality. Like those pesky ex-smokers.... I love that they've been successful in quitting the evil weed, but I really don't need them lecturing me about what I choose to do.
  • My bf is overweight as well, about 30 pounds. When we first met though, I was thin, and he was 80 pounds overweight.. and then he turned me on to the dark side of fast food!! We are struggling to find a balance of eating out and at home. I've always bothered him to eat more veggies and fruit, and of course he's ignored me. However in the summer he got VERY ill, so I got on his case more and more, but it didn't work either. A couple weeks ago he started getting really sick all the time, and went to the doctor to discover that he's likely got IBS and now NEEDS to eat fruit and veggies just to feel stable.

    Sarah - it's amazing how a sickness can shake a person, eh? Sometimes thats what it takes unfortunately.. personally I am semi glad this happened to the bf, only because he now can't afford NOT to take care of himself. I didn't know Lorraine was a district manager, thats quite the stressful job! Recently at my company ALL of district managers in my province quit, and then we lost out regional manager.. it's quite the stressful job I don't know how she does it!

    One thing I finally did teach my bf was the difference between "Josh size" and "Aimee size", mine being the smaller portion.. it's a start I suppose...

    -Aimee
  • Sarah, please give Lorraine a hardy from me on her smoke-free 100 days. That's awesome! I started a thread that mentioned "scared skinny" in it. For me, and others, medical reasons have provided some motivation.

    My DH has lost some weight as I started cooking better, and eating less. He should lose about another 30 so I actually have a little less than he to lose. However, he's not that concerned about it, while I've become rabid and fanatical about these last 20 lbs. Oh, well. I did get him to change from white bread to whole wheat, and buttermilk waffles to nutrigrain waffles, because of his hereditary colon cancer risk.
  • Great topic

    My hubby is 6ft, and 180-185 lbs.
    I'm so close to being less than him for the first time ever

    He's tall...got a very broad chest and shoulders, and long, muscular limbs and body.
    He is a wildland firefighter, and has been an outdoorsman his entire life. He can RUN UPHILL for 45 minutes straight. He can hike 23 kilometers in ONE DAY! Right now, he's picking chanterelle mushrooms and making some pretty good money. He goes out and hikes around all day, every day in the rainforest picking mushrooms.So around 8-9 hours of hiking every day.

    Crazy man.

    Sometimes I get very sad (mostly I'm just in AWE), and down on myself because of all he can, and DOES do.
    I have a gimpy ankle that causes me all kinds of problems in life and exercise, and it makes me so SAD that even if I'm thin and fit enough to do some of those things...I'll never be able to do most of them because of my dumb foot

    I've also wondered (in my much less confident days) why he'd want to be with me...who is NO match for him in that department. (I've learned since then with lots of therapy that there are plenty of awesome things about me...don't worry )

    I can't wait to weigh less than him...there's something really awful about being five feet tall and weighing more than my muscle bound brute of a husband.


    xoxo
    Linda
  • Linda - I also wonder (around the same time each month.. funny that...) why my bf would want to be with someone so overweight, we've talked about it and he wonders why I would want to be with him.. people are FAR to insecure these days.

    A little OT, one day I was helping this lady who was buying shorts, and told me she wanted something to cover her love handles. I had no idea WHAT to say, seeing as she was a size 3. But it just kinda shows you, it doesn't matter the size, there will always be something we don't like (unless you are one of those fortunate people who loves their body! ).

    -Aimee
  • Colin is a wee bit overweight, he has a good (beer) tummy! He has lost weight since the beginning of the year, about 7lbs. He is a good eater, and eats whatever I cook. I have made one healthy meal which he refused to eat, but then I threw it out too, as it was awful, hte one time I actually use a recipe sheesh!

    I wish he would cut down on the beer a bit, that would help no end, and then there's the cigarettes, but nobody's perfect!!!!
  • DH is not overweight, he is underweight at about 125 lbs and 5' 7.5". Makes me sad when I think about the fact I want to lose 129 lbs, which is 4 lbs MORE than what he weighs. UGH!
  • DB is 6'2", 180 pounds. He could eat nothing but lard out of a bucket all day & not gain any weight.

    I am crossing my fingers for Lorraine, Sarah!