Through thick and thicker: why marriage makes men heftier

We need to update our wedding vows to take into account the likely exploding girth of the groom. Or so says another international study.

Maybe we should rewrite traditional wedding vows so that everybody knows what they are getting. Up front. On the table. Honest and true. No surprises. Picture: iStock

I thought my status as a married Australian male was pretty average, steady as she goes and tickety-boo.

Until another one of those darned international health and wellbeing surveys popped up again recently and reduced my entire marital status to ashes. This one came out of Warsaw in Poland.

I was tempted to ignore it. We love Poland – think the Solidarity Movement and Lech Walesa, Pope John Paul II, Chopin, Babka cakes, the writer Gunter Grass, glorious Krakow, the relentless castles and, of course, oh my, Krakus dill pickles.

But when did the Poles become global experts on married men? (To be fair, the country’s projected 2025 divorce rate, according to the World Population Review, looks pretty minimal at 1.6 per 1000 people compared to say Guam at 4.3 and even Australia at 2.2.) Doesn’t logic suggest that countries like Vietnam and Venezuela (both at 0.2 on the divorce Richter scale) be the leaders in studying the ups and downs of nuptials?

Anyway, a report out of the National Institute of Cardiology in Warsaw shook the world earlier this month saying that taking a person’s hand in marriage actually tripled your likelihood of becoming obese compared to the unmarried.

It gets worse. The risk of men who tie the knot being overweight to the point of obesity stood at 62 per cent compared to women at 39 per cent.

Excuse me. I don’t recall the vow that one should take thy hand in sickness and chronic obesity. I don’t recall my bride happily confirming, as she slipped the wedding band on my finger then not the size of some jumbo pork and fennel sausage, that she’d be there through thick and thin, especially the thick. That she was happy to marry a bloke who very soon would be as heavy as three.

She didn’t say I do, I do, and I do, did she?

Why didn’t we know this? Would we have stepped into the whirlpool of marriage knowing that in the till death do us part bit was literal because the groom would ultimately be so overweight he’d grow into the marital home and never be able to get out the front door again?

No, we weren’t warned. But now Warsaw cardiologists have sent a shiver up the fat-obscured spine of every married man from Toad Suck, Alabama, to Westward Ho! in Devon.

Obesity, as we know, is a world problem. According to a 2021 study titled Global, regional and national prevalence of child and adolescent overweight and obesity 1990-2021 – published in The Lancet in 2021 – obesity rates across the planet have doubled since 1990. And they’re set to climb into the future.

This study declared that “current approaches to curbing increases in overweight and obesity have failed a generation of children and adolescents”.

Now we have the Warsaw bombshell which, as shocking as it sounds, has the ring of truth about it, given myself and many of my male friends who’ve made it way past the tin and feathers marriage milestones could these days barely get their marital suit trousers halfway up a single leg let alone as far north as the waist.

Dr Alicja Cicha-Mikolajczyk was the chief author of the Polish study.

She reportedly said: “The attitude of society towards men living with obesity is different – they are treated more favourably than comparable women and mild obesity in men is acceptable. We assume that women accept life with overweight, but they cannot accept living with obesity and they are more likely than men to take various actions to lose weight – such as increased physical activity, and even returning to smoking tobacco.

Married men don’t have to try so hard to stay slim if their partners accept them as they are, the study’s lead author says. Picture: iStock

“Married men do not have to try so hard to maintain a normal weight if they are accepted by their partners. And female partners accept even men living with obesity if they satisfy their emotional and existential needs. So this may result in men paying less attention to their body weight and health.”

The Polish obesity study will be outlined in full at the European Association for the Study of Obesity’s annual conference in Malaga, Spain, in May.

Katharine Jenner, the director of the Obesity Health Alliance in the UK, recently reacted to the new findings: “This study is yet another reminder that excess weight is driven by a complex mix of social, psychological and wider environmental factors – not simply personal choice. With each passing year, the risk of living with overweight or obesity increases, particularly for women. Meanwhile, the link between marriage and obesity in men highlights how lifestyle changes, habits and societal expectations shape our health.

“The research also suggests that men may be more likely to gain weight after marriage due to factors like increased portion sizes, social eating, and a decline in physical activity, whereas women perhaps remain more conscious of body weight due to societal pressures.

“Instead of blaming individuals, we need policies that make healthy choices the easy choices – through better food environments, education, and support at every stage of life.”

In 2017, a similar study out of the University of Bath’s School of Management also found that men gained weight upon marriage and early fatherhood.

Men’s weight can seesaw as they get married, divorced, and try dating again. Picture: iStock

But here’s a possible silver lining, or perhaps a pewter one. The Bath study established that the male Body Mass Index decreased just before and after divorce, possibly because men wishing to lure a new partner pulled the finger out and got into some sort of shape in preparation for the big, bad hunting ground of dating. Again.

So here’s the rub. If we follow the latest data, as per these studies, the life of the average male goes something like this: single and thin; married and overweight; divorced but thin again; remarried and overweight again.

This boils down to two life choices. Either stay single. Or get divorced. A lot.

Or we rewrite traditional wedding vows so that everybody knows what they’re getting. Up front. On the table. Honest and true. No surprises.

I, a thin man destined for physical grotesqueness, take you to have and to hold, even if your arms eventually won’t be able to reach around me courtesy of my ballooning girth, for better or worse, for poorer but not richer because I’ll be eating the vast bulk of our savings, in prolonged sickness and rare flashes of health, to love and to cherish, given in a few years’ time there’ll be three times more of me to love and cherish, till death us do part, though my superannuation will be wiped out by the cost of the crane having to lift my body out of the house when my day of reckoning comes.

Not too romantic, is it?

Thanks Poland.