The Perimenopause Husband
Perimenopause Weight Gain: She Is Doing Everything Right
We downloaded the same fitness app. Same plan, same tracking, side by side at the kitchen bench.
I followed it to the letter. Logged everything. Stuck to the numbers.
Within a few weeks I could see it working. Leaner, fitter, exactly the way the app said it would go.
She followed the same plan and got none of it.
Why is my wife gaining weight when she is doing everything right?
Because the plan was built for a body that is not under what hers is under.
Here is what her side of it actually looked like, and I only know it because she told me before I made it hard to tell me. Measuring her food out on the kitchen scales. Doing it properly, every day, no cheating. Getting on her own scales and watching the number go up anyway.
Bloated most of the time, on top of it.
Imagine doing everything right and watching your own body ignore you. Then imagine the bloke you married getting the results you are not, at the same bench, off the same app.
That is not a discipline problem. Perimenopause is a hormonal, biological change, and it changes what her body does with the same food and the same effort. She has no say in it. The plan was never designed for it.
What is the worst thing I said about it?
This one. Out loud, in our kitchen.
I am just following the system and it works, why can't you.
I want it written down plainly, because a lot of blokes reading this have thought some version of it even if they never said it. It felt reasonable to me at the time. Same plan, same effort, different result, so the gap must be effort.
That was the whole of my logic. It was completely wrong.
I was watching myself succeed and treating her struggle as a character problem.
What did that one comment actually cost?
More than the comment.
She stopped using the app. That is how I knew.
I was still on it every day, logging away. And I just never saw her open it again. No announcement, no row about it. It was there on her phone and she did not touch it. In her head, I think, that was her saying I have had enough of this.
She stopped telling me how she felt about her body after that too. Not because I told her to. Because she had learned what my answer would be.
Every time she might have said something, she knew it would come back as the same fix it logic, so she stopped bringing it up. I took away a place she could be honest, and I never meant to, and it was gone for a long time.
Is she making excuses?
No. And if that question is sitting in the back of your head, sit with it for a second, because it was in the back of mine.
Think about what else is going on in the same body at the same time. Nights awake and burning up. A day of holding everything together for everyone else, and saving her best for them because she has to. A list of other things turning up with no warning and no timetable.
She is not coasting. She is doing it uphill, in weather you cannot see, and getting judged on the same scoreboard as you.
If something about her body has changed in a way that worries either of you, that is a conversation for a doctor or a specialist in this field, not for you across the kitchen bench.
What should I do instead?
This is one of the tools. There are more in the book. It is the one I would hand any bloke first, because it costs nothing and it is the same job every day.
Say nothing about her body, her food, or how consistent she is being. Not a comment, not a compliment that is really a comment, not a helpful suggestion. Nothing.
Then take the one part you can actually control. Go and do the shopping with her, and make sure the good options are in the house.
That is it. Be in the shop, push the trolley, and say not one word about anything she puts in it.
Having good food in the house is something you can do without commenting on a single thing she chooses. Standing back and telling her what she should be eating, from a position where you do none of the buying and none of the cooking, is the version I was running, and it helped nobody.
If you want a harder rule to hold onto: her body is not a project you are on.
Will it go back to how it was?
I am not going to promise you that, and anyone who does is selling something.
What I can tell you is that once she had some stability underneath her, she found her own way back toward the habits she wanted, on her own, without me managing any of it. Most people do, once they are not white knuckling through something else at the same time.
My job was never to manage her food. My job was to stop being one more source of shame about it.
She has not let herself go. She is in weather you cannot see, going through perimenopause and out the other side into menopause, and how you treat her body while it is happening is what she will remember about this stretch.
Start With the Weather
The Weather Report is the two-page guide to reading these days: telling a storm warning from an overcast day from a fog day, and knowing the one thing to do in each. Free, on your phone in thirty seconds.