Imagine surviving a decade and a half of marriage and a serious struggle with illness, only for your partner to decide that your worth is tied to a number on a scale.
This woman in her 30s has a husband in his 40s, and they have been married for 15 years. They have one child who is 22 months old, whom she is still naturally feeding.
Earlier in the year, she got her physical done, and her husband said she needed to ask her doctor about going on a GLP-1 in order to lose weight.
“I acknowledge that I have gained weight over the course of our marriage. I have a chronic medical condition, and we first met when I was very ill and in and out of the hospital,” she explained.
“My BMI at the time was 19, and I had gained up to a BMI of 25 over the course of our marriage. He pushed me to lose weight, and I had gotten down to a BMI of 23 pre-pregnancy, and my BMI now is 24, so I am not overweight, but it is a definite difference from when I was younger.”
Before getting pregnant, she had an hourglass figure with her bust and hips being the same width. Her waist was 10 inches smaller than her bust and her hips.
After giving birth, her weight was basically the same, but her backside got smaller, and her waist got larger.
She has said to her husband before that she’s not interested in going on a diet while still feeding their child, so he backed down. She figured that entailed them both agreeing on when she should start trying to lose weight, but she was wrong.
She was incredibly upset that her husband was nagging her to get on a drug for weight loss when they had talked about a diet beforehand, and she’s not ready to do it just yet.
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“When I came back from my physical and said my Dr. didn’t recommend I take the medicine, but try to increase exercise, especially since taking the drugs and not exercising can cause muscle loss, my husband said he didn’t really care about my health and thought I needed to put more effort and attention into being more appealing to him,” she added.
Speaking of appealing, she has packed up the majority of her nice clothes, and she is wearing maternity clothes or clothes she can get messy in.
It’s not like she puts on t-shirts and sweatshirts all the time; she does have outfits that are considered appropriate for the office, but she’s no longer wearing date night clothes.
Yesterday was her husband’s birthday, so that evening, she decided to put on a dress her husband always loved seeing her in, and she put her hair down and added makeup.
“His reaction was, ‘I appreciate you wore the dress, but it really doesn’t look the same anymore.’ Then at dinner, when I mentioned that my mom had offered to pay for me to get an outfit to wear to a conference I will be presenting at next month for my birthday, he told me I should take friends, so I don’t pick out clothes that I like but that I don’t look good in,” she continued.
“I feel like I was putting in an effort and got slapped down, I wasn’t feeling insecure about my body changes after the pregnancy until he told me ‘belly fat is unappealing to everyone’ and now I feel self-conscious about the way I dress too.”
“If I put in the effort but he doesn’t appreciate it, it makes me feel discouraged about trying. It seems like the only thing I can do to make him happy is lose weight, but even then, I won’t have the same body I did in my 20s.”
The only weight she should be losing is the dead weight that is her husband. What a jerk for being all over her to drop some pounds!
If he doesn’t like her mom bod, her husband shouldn’t have gotten her pregnant, because a woman’s body, of course, looks different after having a baby.
I couldn’t imagine having to live with this kind of pressure to look good. How crushing and depressing. Her husband absolutely doesn’t seem like a man worth being with.
What advice do you have for her?
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By Bre Avery Zacharski
Hi, I'm Bre, Chip Chick's CEO! I have a degree in Textile/Surface Design from The Fashion Institute of Technology, and... More about Bre Avery Zacharski
