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AIBU?

Share your dilemmas and get honest opinions from other Mumsnetters.

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

464 replies

HelpMeHelpMyWife · 29/03/2026 22:01

I'm male, stepping into the lions den.

My wife (51yo) is obese. There have been a few times over the years when I've suggested that she's destined for a mobility scooter or worse and offered her a few tips of how I managed to get rid of 3 stone and generally vastly improve my health. Needless to say it went down very badly indeed and I don't really dare mention it again. (Although I feel it's my duty to. A duty I am now shirking.) I've talked to her mother a couple of times and her mother said she's talked to her but clearly that has not helped either.

Lately she's had bad hip, knee and back pain, so my fear that she's actually damaging herself now. I know from my own experience that with 3 stone less everything became easier.

She does Weight Watchers meetings but that clearly has zero effect.

So what do I do? Mentioning it to her is out but something's got to change or she's essentially going to be handicapped. (In fact I'd argue she already is, she couldn't climb over a fence, for instance.)

I'm half tempted to say something to our teenage daughter in the hope wife will listen to her but that seems a massive thing to put on her. (Perhaps not as massive as a mother on a mobility scooter, or ill.)

On personal note I find the whole thing intensely frustrating. Shouldn't Weightwatchers be pointing out the health risks of being over weight? Or her doctor? When I started getting knee pain and a few other medical early warning signs it was blatantly obvious that losing weight and getting fit was the obvious first step and ten years on the benefits have been obvious. It's not rocket science. (Sorry about the last paragraph, I needed to get that out.)

WTF do I do? Or do I just accept it and try to forget about it?

YABU - "Mind your own business and let her make her own mistakes."

YANBU - "Do something to help which I've suggested in a reply."

OP posts:
JenniferBooth · 29/03/2026 23:04

Has your head been turned by someone at work @HelpMeHelpMyWife

Morepositivemum · 29/03/2026 23:05

With the greatest of respect so many women I know have husbands who lost weight through huge obsessive changes and joining gyms and talk about having no crisps and chocolate in the house. That’s not the way everyone wants to lose weight. I went down to my ideal weight in a new physical job by cutting down on crap and I was cranky and miserable and exhausted all the time. I am now up but lost by halving the crap I was eating as opposed to never having what I was craving. I’d parrot what others say, if you don’t help a lot in the mornings, if you don’t clean, if you don’t ask what would you like to do today or say you’ll do the evening stuff so she can get an early night- easing stress is a huge factor

vdbfamily · 29/03/2026 23:06

Do you both work full-time. Is there a reason she does all the shopping and cooking? My DH does all the shopping and cooking in our house. He cooks very healthy meals from scratch and does not buy any biscuits or crisps etc. He is tall and slender. I have been obese my whole life. It has already been mentioned by a couple of people but I was discussing weight loss with my GP and was told that it is usually pretty easy for men to lose weight with a couple of simple changes to diet/ lifestyle, whereas for women,post 50, it is incredibly hard to shift excess weight without eating tiny amounts.
I don't know what to suggest other than you shopping/ cooking and showering her what healthy eating looks like.

DaffodilTuesday · 29/03/2026 23:10

It took me about two years to lose three stone by going to the gym regularly and cutting out the lattes. But I am single and if I had had someone on at me about my weight, I am afraid they would have been out the door. It’s hard when you are working, parenting (single parenting in my case) and running a house to find the time for the gym, and to be honest, my housework has taken a nosedive because I prioritise the gym and pool, DC and my job now. There are just not enough hours in the day. But I know when I was still married, my husband would have expected the house to be organised as he wanted it to be.
So I do think the questions about what the domestic split looks like matter.
But I also think leave your wife alone. Support her in other things, make sure she is confident and has time to do things she enjoys. Enjoy the life you do have. And if her weight is a deal breaker for you, then call it a day. Certainly do not suggest she takes weight loss injections, they are a medical intervention with risks and should be a free decision to take.

Joliefolie · 29/03/2026 23:11

If you truly love your wife and genuninely wish the best for her physical and mental health, you will educate yourself on menopause, protein and veg fibre focused nutrition and strength training / relaxing flexibility exercise, the need to feel cherished and supported. You will commit to taking on much more responsibility for food shopping and cooking for the next 18 months, you will enourage her to value her self-care and you will act with humility and kindness with regard to a situation you have never and will never experience yourself, i.e. that of being a menopausal woman with a patronising husband who needs to work on his empathy skills.

PuzzledObserver · 29/03/2026 23:11

Brightbluestone · 29/03/2026 23:01

I’m assuming she wants to lose weight? Could you afford Mounjaro? (Or if she has diabetes she could get it for free on the NHS) Maybe asking her mum or another family member to talk to her about mounjaro would encourage to give it a try? I’ve lost 4 stone on it since May last year and am down to a healthy bmi. It’s dramatically improved my life, I’ve never lost weight with such little effort and never lost this much in my life! It’s expensive but it’s absolutely worth every penny, plus you save loads on money you’d have spent on food/takeaways

Having diabetes isn’t sufficient to get you mounjaro on the NHS. At the moment you need a BMI of 40, PLUS 4 out of 5 specific health conditions, of which type 2 diabetes is one. But if she hasn’t got three others and isn’t that big, she won’t be getting it on the NHS any time soon.

OP, I am in your position in reverse. When I met my husband of 25 years, he was a healthy weight and I was morbidly obese. I have yo-yo’d over the years (binge eater, food addict) but eventually got my shit together. I’m still overweight, but 8 stone down on my peak, and maintaining there or thereabouts for a year so far. He, meanwhile, has gradually put on weight and is now obese.

I do not say anything. I love him to bits and it hurts me to see him eating all the chocolate and crisps and biscuits (which I no longer eat, so I have to cope with them being round the house). But I will not say anything to him, because I know how much I would have hated it if he had said anything to me.

Actually, that’s not entirely true. 2.5 years ago, he suggested that once Christmas was over we should stop buying so many snacks and try to lose some weight. I readily agreed. I did it, and he did not. And a month or so back, I said that if he wanted to change anything about how he was eating (I do all the cooking) then he only had to tell me, and I would support him as best I could.

That’s it. No more. He’s uncomfortable. I know he’s uncomfortable. But it’s got to be his decision. Just as my decision was mine.

Batties · 29/03/2026 23:11

HelpMeHelpMyWife · 29/03/2026 22:50

conforming to the way in which you believe she should look

Why do women think weight is merely about looks? I think trivialising it in that way is a big part of the problem. It's about not ending up handicapped or with diabetes or dead.

It’s not about you wanting her to be healthy or not. She’s a grown adult, and grown adults are entitled to make their own choices even ones other people think are unwise.

If this was genuinely about supporting her, that would be a different. What you’re doing instead is trying to influence her by using your child to make her feel guilty, and that’s manipulation
not support Bringing a child into it crosses a line. It’s unfair on her, and it’s unfair on the child,

Your generalised comment about women, and the use of the term ‘handicapped’ is quite telling

Flowers898989 · 29/03/2026 23:14

I'm 10 stone and couldn't climb a fence 🙈🤣

user1492757084 · 29/03/2026 23:16

Love her as she is and support her when her doctor suggests that she lose some weight due to her leg and knee pain.

Encourage your wife to see a doctor about knee pain.(without mention of weight).

Delight in going on a walk with wife of an evening after dinner.
Delight in going walking in a park or stately garden on weekends.

Buy water slide tickets for you both to enjoy Water Adventure Parks. Play golf and tennis together.
Encourage wife to walk your dog every second day.

You eat healthy food as snacks and cut out alcohol for yourself, except for special occasions.

Wife has to choose her own life.

JenniferBooth · 29/03/2026 23:16

JustGotToKeepOnKeepingOn · 29/03/2026 23:02

Why don’t you offer to do all the food shopping and cooking for the family and see if you can help make a difference to the way the whole family eats?

Because that too much like hard work whereas words are cheap

jellyfish798 · 29/03/2026 23:17

Joliefolie · 29/03/2026 23:11

If you truly love your wife and genuninely wish the best for her physical and mental health, you will educate yourself on menopause, protein and veg fibre focused nutrition and strength training / relaxing flexibility exercise, the need to feel cherished and supported. You will commit to taking on much more responsibility for food shopping and cooking for the next 18 months, you will enourage her to value her self-care and you will act with humility and kindness with regard to a situation you have never and will never experience yourself, i.e. that of being a menopausal woman with a patronising husband who needs to work on his empathy skills.

This.
Or you'll find yourself in divorce court.

Gurrul · 29/03/2026 23:19

Americasfavouritefightingfrenchman · 29/03/2026 22:35

I’m in same position. What my husband could do to help is to take over a load of the kids activity stuff that I’m constantly keeping track of and playing chauffeur for so I have a bit more time/energy. A lot of my overeating stems from stress and exhaustion (menopause not helping!)

You kind of have to be a bit self centred on a successful diet (not in a bad way but I just mean you can’t constantly be considering what everyone else wants & need to just focus on you) & I’m finding it incredibly hard to be that at this life stage as everyone including my husband has almost constant demands on my time and energy. I realise it’s my responsibility to say no but if your wife feels the same then not making those demands yourself and picking up some of them from other family members would help.

This is absolutely true. I've been able to lose weight with diet and exercise ONLY because I've (finally) had the time and headspace and energy to do it.

You have to plan the food, buy the food, prepare and cook the food (normally this is all a lot harder if you're eating healthily and avoiding UPFs). Clean up after cooking from scratch. The fresh food goes off faster, so watch all the use by dates, and shop more often. You probably have kids and other family members to feed as well. They all have their own requirements. So do all the extra planning and buying and prepping and cooking and cleaning up for that, too.

AND THAT'S JUST THE FOOD.

Sorry, but no wonder women in their 50s are buying readymade lasagnes and oven chips and snacking on Twixes. We have enough shit going on in our lives. Work, kids, elderly parents, housework, etc etc etc - it all gets dumped on us, just as our bodies age and we struggle to get the right HRT. Good luck with those healthy eating projects. Good luck finding time for a walk or a run as well (which, incidentally, you will only feel safe doing in daylight hours and 'safe' areas, because you're female. No quiet footpaths or 5.30pm winter walks for you!)

I've managed it. But that's only because I'm massively privileged (in terms of time and money). And it's still been a big effort. Sorry, but I have to rant because I know how hard it is even with those advantages. Look at the burdens which are put on so many women, and think about how feasible it is for them to carve out enough time to care for themselves, when they already have to care for everyone else.

nocoolnamesleft · 29/03/2026 23:20

Why don't you do all the shopping and cooking, so that you're the one who has to use willpower in the supermarket?

Unexpectedlysinglemum · 29/03/2026 23:23

My suggestion for helping in a loving way. Don’t talk about the weight again, she knows. Make her feel very loved. Remember things. Take things off her plate (metaphorically, although literally might get the job done too!) encourage her to do things to take care of herself in general, see friends, dentist and doctor, go shopping together, spa days. Tell her about holidays you want the two of you to do together. Ask her what she is excited about in your future so you can both visualize it. Model healthy behaviors as much as you can. Do self care activities like aromatherapy evenings or sound healing workshops. Hopefully she will start to focus on herself and the mindset will change and she’ll come to her own conclusions about what changes she needs to make to enjoy her life more.

JenniferBooth · 29/03/2026 23:24

If they are daft enough to bring back Fat Families i think they will find the reaction very different to what it was in the two thousands

Unexpectedlysinglemum · 29/03/2026 23:25

Also you can order simmer eats ready meals so no wasted time cooking and only healthy food eaten

Smilesinthesunshine · 29/03/2026 23:25

Batties · 29/03/2026 22:43

Question OP, why do you think you have the right to tell a grown woman what to do with her body?

Because he will be the one escorting the obese partner to hospital appointments and surgeries when she has to have every joint replaced!

Fishingboatbobbingnight · 29/03/2026 23:26

TooPoor4PandaPooTea · 29/03/2026 22:35

Everyone's solution to bring overweight is WLI.

Have they all forgotten that WLI only work on a calorie controlled diet? @ACynicalDad @Sogrownup3 @Gurrul @worcesterpear and whoever else thinks that a woman going to WW won't know about WLI.

absolu and complete bollocks and shows you up as someone who has not been on them or had a close relationship with someone on them !! I lost 9 stone on Mountjaro and it’s changed my life for the better . I no longer have blood pressure meds , osteo arthritis infections in my knees .. no longer need a CPAP machine to prevent death through sleep apnea. Nor do I need statins for my now perfect cholesterol.

PLEASE STOP THE NONSENSE ABOUT NEEDING TO BE ON A CALORIE CONTROLLED DIET .. it’s nonsense . WLI stop you being hungry and give you the ability to eat very small portions before being full !
I eat curries, takeaways occasionally but I also love cooking . Nothing is off limits because the drug makes the portions so small !!

SunMoonandChocolate · 29/03/2026 23:26

Sorry, I haven't had time to read the full thread, but if no one has already suggested it, and you aren't short of dosh, you could perhaps ask her if she'd like you to pay for her to try Wegovy or Mounjaro. Perhaps approach it by saying something along the lines of I know you've been trying really hard with Weight Watchers, and I've heard some good stuff about these weight loss drugs, if we can afford it, would you like to give those a try?

I'm disabled but have always struggled with my weight, and my DH has never complained about my weight, but knows being so heavy and unable to exercise upsets me, so if I bring up the subject, he always says, 'Well you know I love you whether you're fat or thin, but if there's something new you'd like to try, you know I'll support you in any way I can', and he does. For example, if he knows I'm trying to stay off the sweet stuff and he wants something, he'll go and eat it in the kitchen, in the car, or anywhere else that I won't see him, as he knows it's unfair to eat stuff in front of me that he knows I don't want to be tempted by.

On the other hand, you could always mention that you've read about someone (me) who in spite of not being able to exercise due to a disability, has managed to lose 1 1/2 stone, by using something called 'Slimpod' - Google it and read up about it so that you can explain it to her - it works to retrain your brain with regard to eating, and where I had tried every diet in the book, as it was something new and completely different, I decided to give it a try. You can get a 10 day FREE trial, and compared to Weight Watchers, etc., it works out really reasonable. After the free trial, if you decide you want to keep going with it, it costs £49 a month for just THREE months, and after that, it's free. All you need to do is listen to a podcast at some point every day, a lot of people, including me, do it at night just before going to sleep, I often fall asleep during it, although I think it's only 9 minutes long, but the information is still absorbed by your subconscious, and as I say, for someone who had a bad habit of comfort eating, and snacking while watching TV in the evenings, it's really worked. I've been doing it for 10 months now, and as I say, I'm barely able to get out of bed, so if your wife can exercise, that will of course help, although it really isn't necessary. I've actually stopped the evening snacking, although can have something now and again if I want to, just not lots, every night. However, I rarely have any desire for chocolate anymore, and that used to be absolutely IRRESISTIBLE to me. Oh, and just so you're aware, I have no links to the company, but just wanted to share the info as it's really helped me.

GOOD LUCK!

JenniferBooth · 29/03/2026 23:26

Smilesinthesunshine · 29/03/2026 23:25

Because he will be the one escorting the obese partner to hospital appointments and surgeries when she has to have every joint replaced!

Do you really think he will be doing that when he cant even be bothered to shop or cook. Come on now.

Woodfiresareamazing · 29/03/2026 23:27

HelpMeHelpMyWife · 29/03/2026 22:01

I'm male, stepping into the lions den.

My wife (51yo) is obese. There have been a few times over the years when I've suggested that she's destined for a mobility scooter or worse and offered her a few tips of how I managed to get rid of 3 stone and generally vastly improve my health. Needless to say it went down very badly indeed and I don't really dare mention it again. (Although I feel it's my duty to. A duty I am now shirking.) I've talked to her mother a couple of times and her mother said she's talked to her but clearly that has not helped either.

Lately she's had bad hip, knee and back pain, so my fear that she's actually damaging herself now. I know from my own experience that with 3 stone less everything became easier.

She does Weight Watchers meetings but that clearly has zero effect.

So what do I do? Mentioning it to her is out but something's got to change or she's essentially going to be handicapped. (In fact I'd argue she already is, she couldn't climb over a fence, for instance.)

I'm half tempted to say something to our teenage daughter in the hope wife will listen to her but that seems a massive thing to put on her. (Perhaps not as massive as a mother on a mobility scooter, or ill.)

On personal note I find the whole thing intensely frustrating. Shouldn't Weightwatchers be pointing out the health risks of being over weight? Or her doctor? When I started getting knee pain and a few other medical early warning signs it was blatantly obvious that losing weight and getting fit was the obvious first step and ten years on the benefits have been obvious. It's not rocket science. (Sorry about the last paragraph, I needed to get that out.)

WTF do I do? Or do I just accept it and try to forget about it?

YABU - "Mind your own business and let her make her own mistakes."

YANBU - "Do something to help which I've suggested in a reply."

Hi HelpMeHelpMyWife. Congratulations on losing weight and increasing your fitness!

I hit my highest weight ever during lockdown - 14st 3 lbs. All that banana bread and hours spent cooking from scratch as I was clinically extremely vulnerable and didn't go out for months ...
So in June 2020 I decided enough was enough.
I started walking every day, at least a mile. It was very hard initially but after a few weeks I started to really enjoy it, and gradually my fitness improved and I could walk longer distances, and even up hill!
At the same time I started eating less, and eating healthy - basically a Mediterranean diet.
By November I had lost 3 stone.

I say all this because there is no magic bullet answer - it's the same as it ever was: eat less (crap), move more.
But your wife has to WANT to do it.

She's probably menopausal, which can be a killer for MH as well as all the physical issues. But she will feel better being fitter, as you know.

She could also try the eating window and intermittent fasting - basically the 5:2 diet.

What do you think might motivate her? Planning a great trip to places she's always wanted to visit which would involve walking?
A stay at a spa resort which has healthy foods only?
Shopping for fab new clothes when she's reached her target weight?

You know her best - is she happy at her current weight? In which case, don't waste your time...

Edited to add - I'm not a fan of weight loss jabs. I think it would be very easy to put the weight back on unless you keep taking them.

Also - would it be possible for you to take over some of the shopping/cooking? Then you could buy healthier ingredients and maybe inspire your DW to do same...

HelpMeHelpMyWife · 29/03/2026 23:28

But I will not say anything to him, because I know how much I would have hated it if he had said anything to me.

Men are different to women. Tell him. Tell him absolutely bluntly. I was obese, although I'd convinced myself I was "fit but fat", (That's always a lie.) My blood pressure was at the top end of normal and the Doc just said in plain language that I was a fat bastard and I was storing up medical problems for myself. That really was my moment of realisation it so obviously true that I was wrecking my knees and heading for high blood pressure and god knows what else. Changed my life.

So my vote is to spell it out to him. Even if he ignores it he won't be offended.

OP posts:
WallaceinAnderland · 29/03/2026 23:28

She knows.

She knows she is obese. She knows she has health problems. She knows that she is limiting her lifespan.

It's her choice.

Focus on your own choices.

pepperminticecream · 29/03/2026 23:29

Lostinbrum · 29/03/2026 22:55

Yanbu. Its you thats going to end up looking after her if she doesn't shift the weight and does end up immobilised. Because the more things hurt the less she is going to want to do and so the bigger she gets etc etc. In my house we are quite blunt with each other so im afraid so home truths would coming her way

I agree. It’s a touchy subject but as someone in a marriage who decided to create a family, I think it’s imperative that I do whatever needs to be done to keep myself as healthy as possible. Illness happens but I want to do what’s in my power to be healthy for my children and husband for as long as possible. My husband agrees. It’s hard work and often I’m forcing myself to workout but it’s worth it.

tipsyraven · 29/03/2026 23:29

brunettemic · 29/03/2026 22:24

Sorry, bit if you’re as obese as OP implies then it’s easy to lose some.

It really isn’t.

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