Stressed-Out Mate Bad for Your Weight

Is your spouse feeling stressed? Then you may want to watch your waistline, a new study suggests.

“We found that your partner’s stress, and not your own, predicted an increased waist circumference over time,” said Kira Birditt, a research associate professor at the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research.

Birditt and her university colleagues also found that quality of marriage also seemed to play a role in whether husbands and wives fattened up over the four-year study.

The study can’t prove the association. But Joan Monin, of the Yale School of Public Health, said that based on this study and her own research, “stress reduction interventions should be aimed at couples rather than individuals.”

Another take-home message: “It’s good to be aware of your partner’s stress,” said Monin, an assistant professor of chronic disease epidemiology, who wasn’t involved in the new study.

Waist circumference matters because it’s “an indication of excess abdominal fat and a risk factor for several different illnesses,” including diabetes and heart disease, Birditt said. For women, a waist circumference more than 35 inches indicates a health risk; for men, waist circumference more than 40 inches does.

For the study, Birditt’s team used data from the university’s Health and Retirement Study. More than 2,000 married men and women answered questions about their waist size, marriage quality and stress levels in 2006 and again in 2010. They were in their early 60s, on average, and had been married an average of 34 years.