Weight Gain, Loss in Divorce

    A woman's weight can change based on how happy she is in her marriage, according to a recent study by a weight management firm. “Our emotions have an enormous effect on our health and weight. The periods in a woman’s life that see their weight rise and fall link directly to new chapters in their love life or family status,” said Jane McCadden, of Slendex, the company that conducted the study.

“The study also illustrates how difficult women find it to maintain a stable weight throughout their lives. Even when women lose weight, bad habits soon return and another phase of weight gain follows,” McCadden said.

Women traditionally watch their weight while dating and lose weight before their wedding, gaining it for pregnancy and during the years in which they are caring for their children. About 70 percent of the 3,000 women studied said once they were comfortable with their partner, they became less stringent about maintaining their weight.

The study results were no surprise to Brette Sember, attorney and author of the book, "The Divorce Organizer." She thinks weight gain is also a sign of a troubled relationship. "I can tell you that a significant number of my female divorce clients lost weight after the divorce. I always attributed it to wanting to remake their lives, but it's likely it is also linked to being free of a troublesome relationship," she said. 

Her clients, she said, are among the many women who shed weight through a marital breakup, a trend known as the divorce diet.  At a speaking engagement in January, 2008, Sarah Ferguson, the Duchess of York, said her weight problems began as a teen -- shortly after her parents' divorce -- when she began using food as a way to cope with her problems. "My only friend was food," she said. 

Ferguson turned to food again as a way to deal with the pressure of being in the media after she married Prince Andrew, fourth in line to England's throne. She was dubbed the "Duchess of Pork" after her weight gain. After her divorce and the death of her friend Princess Diana, she said joined Weight Watchers, which helped her shed the weight. 

"There's no magic in it," James Harris, a psychologist and manager of the Eating Disorders Program at Presbyterian Hospital of Dallas, told a reporter for the Dallas Morning News for an article on the divorce diet trend. "A person going through a trauma, like divorce, is often burning more calories and eating less calories, and that makes the weight come off quickly." 

In the same story, Daniela Schreier, an assistant professor at the Chicago School of Professional Psychology, told the newspaper that many women lose weight after a spouse confesses to an affair. "They can't believe what's going on, they've lost the feeling that the world is a safe, just place, they have difficulty concentrating, and they'll lose an incredible amount of weight in just the first few weeks," she said.

"Whether overeating, undereating, excercising themselves into exhaustion or merely telling themselves they are fat or ugly when they look into a mirror women, in particular, tend to take situations out on their physical bodies," said relationship expert Brenda Della Casa, author of "Cinderella Was a Liar," which offers relationship advice for men and women. "Self-victimization is an epidemic among women and, as a relationship author who has interviewed thousands of them, I can tell you that more often than not, women torture themselves to be what they feel the man they like wants them to be."

Women, she said, "may lose weight in the beginning of a relationship, not because they want or even need to, but in order to compete with other-read: thinner- women for the man's attention and is it possible that the reason that many women and men gain weight after getting comfortable is because that is how they are most comfortable."

Her advice: "I think it is very important that we not always equate not being a size 6 with being unhappy."