We Had Both Tried and Failed for Years. So Why Did It Work This Time?

We have been married sixteen years. Like most couples we have had our share of difficult stretches, and like most couples we do not tend to advertise them.

The one worth writing about did not arrive as a crisis. It arrived as a set of photographs from a day out.

The Photographs

We had driven north to see family and spent the day sightseeing. At some point we took pictures of ourselves, the way you do.

We looked at them together later on. I am not going to dress this up. We were both shocked, both embarrassed, and it put us properly low for the rest of that day.

Neither of us had been under any illusion beforehand. We have both been bigger people for most of our adult lives, and not especially fit with it. There is a saying about happiness making you fat, and there is something in it.

But knowing a thing and seeing it are not the same. A photograph does not negotiate.

The Drive Home

It is a long way back, and we talked for most of it.

By the time we got home we had decided to do something about it. That was not new in itself — we had both decided to do something about it plenty of times before.

What was new was the word together.

Not the same diet. Not the same exercise. We are different people with different days, and what suits her has never much suited me. Together in support, rather than together in method.

Why It Had Never Worked Before

Every previous attempt had been a solo effort inside a shared house, which is harder than it sounds.

One of you holds the line. The other does not, and ends up sitting there in the evening eating something in front of the person who is trying. Not out of malice — simply because they were not the one who had made the decision.

It takes almost nothing to break somebody’s resolve when you live with them, and you can do it without intending to at all.

That is the part I had never properly understood. I had always read those failures as a shortage of willpower. Mostly they were a shortage of alignment.

Two Plans, One Agreement

So we set it up properly, and we started with food and portion sizes and nothing else.

I settled into a routine built around a meal replacement in the middle of the day and a small, sensible dinner. She went with a fasting pattern and smaller portions, which fitted her days a great deal better than it would ever have fitted mine.

Two approaches, chosen separately, running alongside each other.

We were strict — with ourselves, and when it was needed, with each other. That second part only works if both people have agreed to it in advance. Nobody enjoys being questioned about what is on their plate by someone who has not signed up to the same thing.

We Told Nobody

The other decision was to keep it to ourselves.

No announcement, nothing said to family, nothing put online. It was our problem and we wanted it to be our attempt — without an audience, and without anyone checking in kindly every few weeks.

That mattered more than it sounds like it should. There was nobody to disappoint except each other, and nobody at all to perform for.

Six Months Before Anyone Said Anything

It is slow. That is the honest description of it.

It took something like six months before people started to notice, because gradual change is more or less invisible to anyone who sees you regularly. There is no week in which it becomes obvious.

What kept it going through that stretch was not the results, because for a long while there was not much to see. It was that on any given bad day, the other one was still holding the line.

Sixteen years in, I would have told you I knew exactly what my wife and I were like together. I would have said we are good in a crisis, which we are.

What I had not appreciated is what the two of us can do with something slow and unglamorous that nobody else knows about — where the only thing holding it up is that neither of us is prepared to be the one who stops.

That turned out to be the part that mattered. Not the plan.