AIBU to try to help my wife lose weight? Somehow.

Op, you have a double whammy of talking about weight and being male.

You are perfectly reasonable to want to address this and I certainly would, if my DH was getting obese.

There have been some good suggestions amongst the ridiculous, and I hope you find something that works.

@HelpMeHelpMyWife great to hear that you don't hold your wife in contempt and simply want to help her. Hopefully you understand now that she won't be ignorant of the facts of weight loss, and that the issue is around wanting to change and being able to effectively implement change. How do you think you could help with those two issues, given what you've read here on this thread?

You're not helping here @HelpMeHelpMyWife We all know the facts, your wife will know the facts for goodness sake. Knowing and being able to effectively implement, and want to effectively implement are very different things.

You sound like you have a lot of contempt for your wife, tbh.

Appallingly ignorant and insensitive. You’re fine with being offensive and distasteful?

I’m inclined to agree with @CallingOnTheMegaphone. Has it occurred to you your DP’s comfort eating is due to unhappiness in her relationship?

This is horrible. This woman is suffering health issues, why would you want her to be gorging on fatty caloric food and lying about dieting.

Education = it’s always harder for women

Depending on height a size 18 is morbidly obese. Why are you rooting for someone going for chippies who has health issues relating to obesity and has young kids? Very strange how normalised we make food addiction but not alcohol or nicotine addiction

Obesity rates in other eras were lower because the conditions were extremely different. So for 1960s UK, it's a roughly 50% smoking rate. For much of human history, it's the ever present threat of starvation, including situations where it was deliberately inflicted on people out of sheer wickedness.

You are not going to replicate these in 2026, so there's not a great deal of point ruminating on whether someone who's obese now would be so in a totally different environment. Because we're in this one.

OP you're not coming across well on this thread at all. I would dearly love to hear your wife's side of this. I'm picturing someone who is size 18 at most, doing her best to juggle everything in life, and who's meeting her mates for a chippy tea on the evenings she tells her twat of a DH that she's off to WW. Rooting for you MrsHelpMe!

Very offensive and distasteful comment. Suggest you delete.

Half the population smoked, which is important as nicotine is an appetite suppressant. That and central heating.

There are other factors too, but I think it's often missed that there are lots of people who are the first of their genetic line not to be either half starved or smoking. The conditions allowing a person who's more predisposed than average to become obese have only arisen quite recently. And the average human is quite prone, really. Most adults in the UK are overweight or obese, and any society that's affluent enough to feed the population but doesn't have widespread smoking invariably ends up going the same way.

Nowhere near as many as there are now!

I've just had a look at the WW website and it's got pictures of women eating cookies and talk of there being 'no good and bad foods'. And frankly I think that's unhelpful.
OP, I mentioned this upthread, but before considering WLI, which will be very costly and might prove very hard to stop, you could both read the books by the dietician Mindy Pelz which explain weight gain, weight loss, breaking sugar addiction (which sounds like the real issue here), the menopause's impact on metabolism and age-focused eating from a female perspective. You can get them from Amazon or from a library. She has helped a lot of women. Sometimes a book can be more beneficial than constant 'encouragement' from family members.

Maybe change the framing. Make it about a healthier lifestyle for you both as you age, and to instil good habits in your DC, rather than weight loss.

This is a good time of year to start (Spring/Summer). Could be your reason to broach it: clocks just gone forward. As you’ve already said, evening and/or Sunday walks are a v good suggestion. Great for mental health as well as physical. Getting out in nature and watching the seasonal changes. Maybe pick set days, e.g. Tues, Thurs, Sun and walk somewhere nice from your home (or by bus/train on Sun) rather than drive to a beauty spot, so she can’t opt to sit in the car. The kids would benefit. They could take bikes or scooters. My DC used to love long bike rides while we walked. Take a picnic/healthy snacks.

I’ve found swimming v good once over 50. Water supports joints, you use lots of different muscles and burn more calories. I treat myself to a sauna and steam afterwards, which is great for skin and hair, then a salad lunch in the leisure centre. Not too expensive with a council leisure card. The best way to build up is sets of 4 or 6 lengths at a time, with a few mins rest (and water) at end of pool in between. Start with only two sets, then add more once it gets easier. I got up to 50 lengths in sets of 6 in space of a year.

As for healthy eating, I do think you should say something if she’s teaching the DC that crisps and confectionary are ‘treats’. It instils v bad habits. Nothing wrong with eating crap now and again, but should be recognised as crap, not a ‘treat’. Could you suggest cutting these things from shopping list for the kids’ health and instead give them peeled/chopped up fruit in a bowl as a snack: freshly picked strawberries and raspberries grown in garden, apple with a little lemon juice, grapes, pineapple, mango.

Also switch out all ultra-processed food for whole food. Plus drink green tea for gut health.

And how about you insist on cooking on certain set days and make tasty salads with lots of ingredients (celery, radish, apple, beetroot, olives) and seeds/nuts and a home-made low-cal dressing, perhaps with baked or pan-fried fillet of fish (mackerel, salmon, sea bass etc).

Agree with PP that your tone isn’t great. You sound exasperated rather than kind. It’s odd to talk about not wanting to be your DP’s career, esp when she already sounds like yours (if she does all the shopping/cooking). Suggest you don’t compare your own weight loss and running to your DP’s. She’s dealing with the menopause (which you should read up on) and her body is physiologically and hormonally v different to yours. And v likely she carries more mental load (which is exhausting, especially over years).

Good luck 🍀

'simply' are you for real?!
Maybe you should stop with the nasty comments and bragging about how easy your weight loss was, and start doing something positive. Maybe you could cook some healthy meals, go on romantic walks together. You need to be motivational and encouraging.

I second that. I lost some weight with WeightWatchers six years ago, but then lost interest and put the weight back on again. Last year I was diagnosed with metabolic liver disease, so knew I desperately needed to lose weight. Have lost over three stone, but still have just under three more stone to go. A major health scare definitely spurred me on. That, and a photo DIL took of me and DS. She wanted to capture the two of us together and I soon realised I was huge!