When I got married, I was a slim 6’2”, but I’ve gained a lot of weight. My wife gained about 20 pounds but recently lost that and more. I’ve been as high as 265, but I’m now at 238 and losing about a pound a week, which isn’t fast enough for my wife. When I contemplate going on a stricter diet, what comes to mind is feeling angry, tired, and hungry at my high-stress job. My wife said that I obviously love food more than her, and that if I won’t lose weight for her, maybe I’ll do it for our boys. She considers me self-centered and narcissistic because I’m not losing enough weight, and I consider her self-centered and narcissistic for framing every argument in terms of what she wants and isn’t getting. What do you think? Does being overweight mean you don’t love your significant other? 

— Fatso 

Some women just can’t appreciate their husband’s collections: comic books, shot glasses, broken-down cars, chins.

There’s your wife, wagging a carrot stick at you, telling you that if you loved her you’d be surviving on iceberg lettuce sandwiches or going on the Drink Your Own Urine Diet — whatever it takes to drop flab fast. Probably because weight loss seems easier for her, she assumes you’re lazy and self-indulgent. She’s now trying to guilt-ivate you into losing weight (“Picture your children fatherless … Doritobreath”), which is more helpful than voicing the other thing she’s probably thinking: “I don’t want to have sex with you; I want to harpoon you.” 

Chances are, the problem isn’t that your diet isn’t “strict enough” — as in, you should be sniffing celery sticks instead of eating them — but that you’ve been following the obesity-causing dietary “science” promoted by the government and much of the medical establishment. The “weight loss” diet they advise — high-carb, low-fat — is actually a weight-gain diet. Also, as Dr. Mary Dan Eades, co-author of “The Protein Power Lifeplan,” writes, “Study after study has shown the low fat diet to be a failure in treating obesity, in solving diabetes, in reducing blood pressure or in decreasing heart disease risk.”

Investigative science journalist Gary Taubes spent more than a decade digging through the body of research on diet. As he writes in “Why We Get Fat,” the evidence shows that it is carbohydrates — from sugar, flour, easily digested starchy vegetables like potatoes, and juice and beer — that cause the insulin secretion that puts on fat. So, if you want to drop pounds — and not just one a week but like they’re stones falling off a truck — eat low-carb/high-fat foods like cheeseburgers. Even bacon cheeseburgers. (Just see that you feed the bun to the pigeons.) 

Unfortunately, it seems your love handles have become resentment handles. Some of the ill will between you may melt away as you lose the gut that Ding Dongs and Mountain Dew built, but it points to a bad pattern. You don’t win marital arguments by clinging to how right you are and how wrong your spouse is; you win by working together to make things as right as you can for both of you (“us first” instead of “me first”). Some problems aren’t solvable, but you’ll be more able to shrug off an impasse if you’re consistently putting yourselves in each other’s place. That’s the spirit that keeps you from striking out in revenge — for example, by insisting you’re on the Zone diet (but not mentioning that it’s the zone from the outermost wall of Dunkin’ Donuts to the outermost wall of Cinnabon).

Memory bank fraud 

I’m trying to start a relationship with a woman, but I can’t stop thinking about my last girlfriend. I want a family (eventually), so I couldn’t marry her. She already has two children, which is a dealbreaker for me, and has other baggage: debt and baby daddy drama. But, we developed a deep love, and I’m having a hard time getting over her. 

— Stuck

It was the best of times, it was the best of times. And it’s called selective remembering. Your mental projector keeps playing this loop of your ex trying on lingerie. 

There are never any misty shots of the repo man or your ex emerging from the mist to chase the baby daddy with a big cleaver. And where are the little mind movies of her children? Or as you call them, “dealbreakers,” not “dealbenders.”

Keeping this woman as your fantasy girlfriend will be a wedge between you and any woman you’re with in real life. To move on, harness the power of negative thinking. Sure, go ahead and indulge. Take that walk down memory lane with your ex. Just be sure you ask the cameraman to pull out to reveal the stroller you’re pushing with some other guy’s screaming kids in it.

The spinster cycle 

I’m a 32-year-old woman with a Ph.D. I’m beyond happy with my career path, but I’m not meeting men I’m impressed with or inspired to see again. A girlfriend sent me a New York Times op-ed by a historian named Stephanie Coontz, who said that highly educated women can find a man if they drop “the cultural ideal of hypergamy — that women must marry up.” Coontz advises women to “reject the idea that the ideal man is taller, richer, more knowledgeable, more renowned or more powerful.” She claims a woman’s marital happiness is predicted not by how much she looks up to her husband, “but how sensitive he is to her emotional cues and how willing he is to share the housework and child-care. And those traits are often easier to find in a low-key guy than a powerhouse.” She then adds, “I’m not arguing that women ought to ‘settle.’” Really? Sounds that way to me.

— Dismayed

Yes, you can have it all — a high-powered education, a high-powered career, and the perfect high-powered man to go with. Of course, it helps if you’re willing to relax your standards a little, like by widening your pool of acceptable male partners to include the recently deceased.

I respect Stephanie Coontz as a historian, but as a forecaster of economic and romantic possibilities for women, I have to give her a thumbs-down.

Coontz claims that “for a woman seeking a satisfying relationship as well as a secure economic future, there has never been a better time to be or become highly educated.”

Actually, as doctorate holders “Occupying” sleeping bags outside city halls will tell you, that depends on what you’re becoming highly educated in. Ph.D. in financial engineering? Hedge fund, here you come. Ph.D. in Tibetan gender studies? You’ll be lucky to be teaching the merits of pulverized lavender in the body oils section of the food co-op. 

Coontz is wrong again in deeming hypergamy — women’s preference for men of a higher socio-economic status — a cultural construct. The preference for the alpha male is biological, an evolutionary adaptation that exists in women across cultures — and species. (Do we really think the lady peacock wants the alpha male peacock because she’s been watching way too much “Desperate Housewives”?) 

Some feminist academics claim that women only want big bucks/high status men because they lack those things themselves. But, a number of studies by evolutionary psychologists have found that women with big bucks and big jobs want men with bigger bucks and bigger jobs. Even women who are feminists. Dr. Bruce J. Ellis writes in “The Adapted Mind” that when 15 feminist leaders described their ideal man, they repeatedly used words like “very rich,” “brilliant,” and “genius” (and they didn’t mean “genius with a baby wipe!”).

So, if you’ve become the man you would’ve married in the ‘50s, don’t be surprised if your mating pool starts to seem about the size of the one that comes with Barbie’s Dream House. Biology is neither fair nor kind. What those pushing feel-good sociology don’t want to believe or tell you is that you increase your options by being hot -- or hotting yourself up the best you can. Obviously, looks aren’t all that matter, but while your female genes are urging you to blow past the hot pool boy to get to the moderately attractive captain of industry, men evolved to prioritize looks in women, so powerful men will date powerfully beautiful waitresses and baristas.

As evolutionary psychologist Dr. David Buss writes, “Women’s physical attractiveness is the best known predictor of the occupational status of the man she marries and the best known predictor of hypergamy.” 

There isn’t a person on the planet who doesn’t have to settle. (Maybe Brad Pitt farts in bed.) Want kids? You’re more likely to find yourself a husband to have them with if you do as Coontz suggests — go for a man who’s shorter, poorer, and not that intellectually exciting but who’s emotionally present and willing to be appointed vice president of diaper rash. Problem solved — if you can keep from seething with contempt for his lack of ambition and intellect. A lack of respect for one’s spouse is definitely not the ground happy marriages are built on. That’s why settling is most wisely discussed not as some blanket policy for women, but in terms of what an individual woman wants and what she’s willing and able to give up to get it. Realistically assessing that for yourself is how you find your happiest medium — between possibly being in a panic to find a sperm donor at 42 and trying to make it work now with some guy who watches the soaps after dusting a few surfaces and drinking a few too many glasses of blush wine.

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(c) 2012, Amy Alkon, all rights reserved. Got a problem? Write Amy Alkon, 171 Pier Ave, #280, Santa Monica, CA  90405, or e-mail This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it (www.advicegoddess.com)

Amy Alkon’s just-published book: “I SEE RUDE PEOPLE: One woman’s battle to beat some manners into impolite society” (McGraw-Hill, $16.95).