This is actually supposed to be advice to a man who isn’t attracted to his overweight wife:
Anyone whose bride is curvaceous should expect after ten years and a child or two to have some changes. By now your marriage should have reached the stage of friendship rather than pure lust. You should be more interested in her personality rather than being obsessed about her weight. Is it that you are not, in reality, worrying about her appearance but rather her obvious loss of youth and that you feel this reflects on you? Enjoy her company and don’t give a damn if she is a size 16 or a size 12.
There’s really not much point to marrying in the first place if you’re just going to be friends in 10 years. If you’re just friends, then why should she object if you’re dating a nineteen year-old waitress? And of course a wife’s appearance reflects on her husband, both men and women predominantly judge a man by the quality of the woman accompanying him. When a woman lets herself go, she is not only harming herself, but also how her husband is viewed by the rest of the world.
I suspect this is why some discontent wives seem to take positive satisfaction in getting fat, cutting off their hair and refusing to maintain themselves, because it is a way of striking at their husband’s status. It’s also why men who achieve success during their marriage prefer the proverbial trophy wife. Few things look stranger to the human eye than a successful and powerful man with a frumpy, overweight woman with bad teeth on his arm.
The problem is that while you can lead a horse to water, you can’t lead a human being to the gym or duct-tape her mouth shut. I’m fortunate in that Spacebunny is quite willing to put in the effort required to maintain herself, although that’s also an artifact of my refusal to date any woman who wasn’t at least somewhat of a gym rat.
If you’re okay with a rotund mate, that’s fine, personal tastes vary. If you’re not, then you’ll just have to drag her – or him – to the gym with you every day, work out with them and eat the same high-protein, low-carb diet they do for the next year. Don’t take no for an answer and ignore the inevitable whining, they can do it and they’ll probably even appreciate it in the end, they just need you to provide them with the willpower they’re lacking. Every time they hit a goal, reward them with something they want that isn’t food-related.
It’s perfectly doable, it’s just a question of your will or theirs coming out on top. But if there’s one thing you can count on, it’s that neither gentle persuasion, logic nor an appeal to your feelings is ever to work on anyone whose primary drive is hedonistic.