I know why married men get fat – and it’s not because we’re lazy

Married men are three times as likely to be obese than unmarried men – it turns out that, for guys, wedding cake is extremely fattening. As Dr Alicja Cicha-Mikolajczyk, lead author of the study at the National Institute of Cardiology in Warsaw, told The i Paper: “Married men do not have to try so hard to maintain a normal weight if they are accepted by their partners. This may result in men paying less attention to their body weight and health.” The assumption seems to be that married men simply give up taking care of themselves as soon as they feel like they can. Goodbye to the svelte single you took effort to maintain – once you’re married you can clock out, put your feet up, crack open a can of lager and sink your face into a series of increasingly large pizzas. (Photo: Supplied).

My own experience

Personally, I didn’t gain weight or let myself go after getting married, due to an ingenious life hack: I had a head start, having looked a mess since I was a baby. At no point in my life have I ever looked like I didn’t sleep in a hedge and live primarily on Tangfastics. If anything, I look slightly better than I did 10 years ago, because I don’t get invited to parties any more and am too tired from running around after my daughter to stay awake past 9pm. But for guys who didn’t take my shortcut, it’s definitely a thing: married men, more mass. Is it as simple as laziness, though? Or is there something else at play? There’s an argument to be made that, rather than giving up on looking after themselves, married men simply move on to the next thing. This is a huge generalisation, but while women seem to see life in the big picture with myriad factors that need to be examined and worked on, men see it more as a long to-do list. (Photo: Supplied).

Finding the right partner is a big decision

So, if you had “find a spouse” on your to-do list, and you’ve got one now, you cross that off and move on to the next task. It’s almost like a video game, admittedly a reasonably primitive one — once you pass a level in Tetris you don’t have to ever think about it again, you just do the next one. Find a wife? Completed it, mate. If staying in shape felt like part of that task, it might get left behind. What’s next? Ooh, I’m going to get really into homebrew. Finding a partner and settling down is, for most people, one of the most significant decisions you’ll ever make. Crossing that off as a task? Incredible. Short, finishable, bang-bang-bang tasks seem to come easier to dudes than more holistic approaches. Think of how most heterosexual couples – and this is a big generalisation, but one that feels pretty true based on the three people I just WhatsApped – decorate their homes: the woman carefully researches and plans the vibes, the aesthetic, the colours and the flow and picks out the furniture; the man clambers on stepladders and hammers stuff together. Big picture versus small tasks. (Photo: Jacob Wackerhausen/Getty).

What works for me

Making positive, healthy choices is so much easier for men if they’re presented as smaller, tangible, bite-sized ones we can wrap our handsome little heads around. Like, I know I should exercise more in order to lead a healthier life, but that feels like a vast, nebulous idea, one which naturally leads into thinking about death and whether there’s really ultimately any point in anything. Much more appealing than spiralling into an existential crisis is being given a small prize: after vaguely intending to be fitter for absolutely ages, it took signing up for a half-marathon to make me dig out my trainers, blow the cobwebs off them and get running. A concrete, attainable task with a deadline and a fun medal at the end: easy. (Photo: Getty/Moment RF).

Women do have it harder than men

Things like Stoptober and Dry January help make an intangible “healthy is good” vibe into tangible, completable tasks with start and end dates. This isn’t a new idea – we’re in the middle of Lent, historically the Dry January of pancakes. Look, there’s obviously a lot going on with anything involving weight and gender: society places much more emphasis on women’s looks than men’s, and many women grow up with a much more complex relationship with food than men do. Reducing anything to “Well, women think like this and men think like this” disregards all sorts of complicated factors. (Photo: Getty).

The truth about married men

But so does saying married men are lazy and complacent, and that’s why they let themselves go. Sometimes, yeah, absolutely, it is — there are idle slobs everywhere, giving the rest of us a bad name. But some chunky husbands’ minds might just be on other things – they’ve got great big lists in their heads of Stuff To Do, and no sense of priority, and it doesn’t necessarily occur to them to put looking after themselves on there. That’s a sad thought really, and something I’ll try to remedy for myself after I finish this big bag of Tangfastics. (Photo: Getty).