Woman + Man + Weight Convo = Crazytown

I had a 5 minute conversation with the fiance last night that made me think back to the post at The Great Fitness Experiment on men’s feelings towards weight.   It was that he does want to drop a few lbs before the wedding, but he is going to wait until about 90 days out, start eating right, and then he’ll be in good shape.

What.  The.  Hell.

After I got over the initial shock that he actually had some desire to do this pre-wedding craziness, then the realization that the idea of waiting until 90 days before the wedding to start the body modification process seems absurd.  Aren’t we always dieting, all the time?  How can you just wait until then, won’t you gain a bunch of weight before then and just end up at square one?

And then a scarier idea popped into my head.  He’s going to start 90 days out from the wedding and he’s going to do so much better than I will have, starting 9 MONTHS out.  He’ll look like he’s been in the gym for years.  Meanwhile, maybe I will have lost 1/2 my desired weight loss goal by then, be bitter he is doing so great after starting so long after I did.  He’ll feel great and look great and be happy with how he looks or at least suffer no additional neurosis because of it.

Then, I made the cardinal mistake of life, relationships, and all other things sacred.  I asked him if he could tell if I lost any weight.  Doh!  You don’t DO THAT.  He answered, sure.  Which to me means “I-don’t-know-and-I-don’t-want-you-to-cry.”  And I said really?  And he said yeah.  So I left it alone.  To sulk in (1) my stupidity for asking the forbidden question and (2) in the fact that I would so be able to tell in him after about 3 months, how long I have been working on the weight issue.

There have been a ton of articles about how women and men lose weight differently, can handle different foods, have different emotions about weight and in general can’t do the same thing and get the same results (except for apparently P90x and Insanity).  It’s all over the interwebs that as a woman – your man will do better at weight loss than you period, end of discussion.  It’s biological and emotional, a double wammy punch to our collectively harder to lose female gut.  I’ve read tips on how to lose like a man but it seems the point is that it’s something we will struggle with more.  I don’t need an article to know how this works after living with my own man dieter.  When he wants to lose weight, he just eats less and works out a little more and blammo.

It’s frustrating.  And last night I did a lot of thinking and realizing how messed up I was to make this a negative on ME.  I wasn’t happy he was going to eat healthier (which I should be!) or happy that he would be taking better care of himself (if only temporarily).  Instead I was scared that he would succeed and I would fail.  How horrible to realize that I was more scared of his success than I was confident in my own potential.

I know I can’t be the only woman who has had these feelings (am I?) so I’m embarking on campaign SWEAT (Stop Worrying, Eat And Train).  It’s a two part campaign. The first part, stop worrying, is the part to stop stressing out about his goals, my goals and just be more positive.  The second part, eat and train, is the action part, the things I need to do to reach my own goals.  The more I SWEAT the better chance I have at actually reaching my own health goals.

I’m on the docket to receive an updated eating plan from the nutritionist this week by the time I get back in town.  I’m excited for it, he said I can have more fruit (yay!).  He seems happy with my progress so I’m going to be excited about that and keep it moving.  SWEATing I mean.