Some Fight Weight Gain - Others Welcome It
We found out by polling hundreds of women in an exclusive red book survey. Here, the surprising ways--both good and bad-those extra pounds can change a marriage.
Let's face it: most of us aren't Demi Moore. As the years go by and they have kids two or three, the laws of physics take hold and our bodies tend to expand rather than contract. Nothing terrifying--5 pounds here, 10 pounds there, and the next thing we know, we're up 20 or so pounds over our wedding-day "fighting weight." In fact, according to a recent Redbook online poll of more than 300 women, 97 percent admit to scaling up since they were married.
The PC thinking has been, if its true love, some extra poundage on the wife shouldn't have much of an impact on the marriage. Yeah, right is your likely response to that. The truth is, bumping up a couple of clothing sizes can change everything--all the way from the conversations you have during the commercials in The Practice to whether your sex life still rocks. While most marriages won't crumble due to some extra pounds, ask any woman who's been there before marriage she used to think how do I gain weight but she easily gains weight after having kids. You'll find that weight gain changes a marriage--and in some very surprising ways. We did, and here's what we heard.
Why the weight goes (and stays) on First things first: It's not wholly a matter of lousy eating habits; medical researchers say there are some very good reasons why a woman's body gets heavier as the years pass. With every passing decade your metabolism slows down, meaning you'll most definitely gain weight over time unless you cut back on calories or start burning more of them through exercise, says Barbara Luke, Sc.D., professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Michigan. Also, female hormones favor what she calls the laying down of fat. This increases during pregnancy especially. Some of that fat is used to nourish the fetus, but some is intended for breast-feeding. It's pretty common for women to keep on a few pounds with every pregnancy. Okay, okay, so physiology can account for a few extra pounds. But it's really the married lady lifestyle that can trigger a serious weight gain. Gone are your single days when you'd grab a yogurt for dinner after stair-climbing yourself into a serious sweat at the gym. Cooking for one is a bore, notes Dr. Luke, but cooking for two is fun and social and part of your new role with your husband, so you eat more. And then the kids come, changing your relationship to food still further. Incidentally, some research has shown that women eat more sweets and high-carbo foods when under stress, while men eat less of them, says Neil Grunberg, a neuroscientist at Uniformed Services University in Bethesda, Maryland. The secret language of the scale so there are some good reasons why women put on pounds once they marry. And, say the experts, weight gain is not always a bad thing. If a woman has gained 10 or 15 pounds, this can be a sign of good mental health, especially if she had been fixated on keeping her weight unrealistically low.
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