Second, and much more important, is the question of who or what is to blame for the burgeoning size of the American wife. Some would say it's the fact that after having children her misshapen belly can often not throw off the added weight. But that's a spurious argument, because there are plenty of women who return to their normal weight even after triplets.
Blaming the kids for being bloated is an unfair burden to slam on your children. Somehow I don't think that telling your kid, "Mommy and I used to have great sex, and I was wildly attracted to her, until she had you and started to look like a hippo," is going to do wonders for your child's self-esteem.

Still others attribute a wife "letting herself go" to the enormous responsibilities of women who have to balance family and career, leaving them little time for a healthy diet and exercise. No doubt there is much truth in this assertion. And yet, these same wives who have little time to look after themselves in their marriage suddenly find a huge amount of time to beautify themselves when and if they decide to have an affair. Indeed, studies show that one of the biggest giveaways of a wife having an affair is when she suddenly begins exercising, dieting and wearing silk undergarments instead of cotton.
Which leads me to the following controversial, yet, in my opinion, unassailable conclusion: When wives put on a lot of weight, it is almost always the fault of an inattentive or distracted husband. When their looks no longer mean anything to them, it's because they're married to someone who they don't think would notice anyway.

Women love being attractive. Sure, there are exceptions to the rule, like body-building she-men or tomboys for whom overalls and armpit odor is heavenly. But, by and large, even brainy career women who wish to be appreciated for their minds rather than their bodies still wish to be physically desirable. What woman doesn't want to be regarded as beautiful? How much more so a married woman, who revels in her husband's attention? And when a wife suddenly starts growing a beard and doesn't go to a beautician, or puts on an extra load and doesn't run to the dietitian, she is behaving unnaturally and we have to ask why.

The blame lies with her husband, who long ago stopped noticing her when she did get dressed up. Thus, she concludes: "Why bother? With all the responsibilities I have with the kids, my job and running the home, why put time into my appearance when he never looks anyway?"

The healthiest diet for a woman is to feed off her husband's compliments. When told by the man she loves that she is beautiful, a woman is given the incentive to live up to the compliment. Silence and indifference, however, bloat her up and make her fat. Indeed, marriage runs on what I call the football-fat equation. Every one hour he puts into watching mindless TV sports equals one extra pound on his wife's backside. Pretty soon, his wife starts looking like a linebacker.
A man from Los Angeles wrote to me about how his wife grew faster horizontally than their 2-year-old grew vertically. He told me he was disgusted by her weight, but chose to say nothing because he didn't want an argument. "There is no easy way to tell your wife she's fat," he wrote.

"Yes," I agreed. "But there is a very easy way to prevent it from happening in the first place. Did you tell her how beautiful she was when she was thinner? Did you compliment her when she did up her hair? When was the last time you took her to the mall to buy clothes, helped her try it on, and told her what she looks best in?"

He admitted that he had not done any of these things in years. Is it a puzzle why she gave up? Would a woman who lived alone on a desert island get dressed up every day to please the coconut trees? And if she lives alone in the solitary island of a lonely marriage, will she not console herself by indulging in the sensual pleasure of food, when she is bereft of the sensual pleasure of touch and sex?

While husbandly apathy is the main cause of a wife's weight gain, telling her she is beautiful even when she is overweight is a better weight-loss program than the Atkins, South Beach and Dr. Phil diets combined. If your wife has grown too wide, encourage her to trim down, not by telling her she's fat, but by telling her she's gorgeous. Her feeling that you watch her beauty will inspire her to watch her weight. This might sound simplistic; and it is. Simply stated, it works.
Last summer, I bumped into a couple with whom I was friendly more than a decade ago. I remembered the wife as a woman of great beauty and sparkling eyes. But now her body was bloated, her face was shriveled. While she still smiled brightly, she otherwise looked horrible. As I subsequently discovered, her husband had gone through a rough financial period.

Unable to support his family and falling increasingly into debt, his self-esteem plummeted as well. He would come home every day in a depressed state and offer his wife monosyllabic responses to her questions. Whereas once he had been attentive, he now came home and got straight onto his computer for hours on end. A week turned into a month, a month into a year, and soon he was barely noticing that his wife was alive.

True, he had lost a lot of money, but he still had life's greatest blessing: a young and beautiful wife who loved him. But with him unable to appreciate her, she became as unhappy as him, and her looks went out the door along with their credit. When I saw her, I told her she looked beautiful. It wasn't a lie. Her beauty was still there, covered over by all her misery. It could still come out, if only her husband would unearth it with laser-like focus. There is a direct correlation between a husband's attention to his wife, and a wife's attention to her looks.

The next time you notice your wife has added a couple of pounds, perhaps it is you, rather than she, who should be looking in the mirror.

Copyright Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, 2005

*This article was originally posted Friday, 15 April, 2005