VOL. 16 · AUGUST 22, 2026

As always, coffee first, lads.

The Research

Two things are true at the same time, and the general public still can't seem to accept that.

The first is quite serious.

About 40% of American adults have obesity — 39% of men specifically. Nearly 10% have severe obesity, and that number has kept climbing even as overall obesity leveled off. Add in the men who are overweight but not obese and you land at roughly three-quarters of the American male population carrying excess weight.

(CDC/NCHS Data Brief No. 508, September 2024; NCHS Health E-Stat 111, February 2026)

I don't think I need to soften what that means for all of you. There is no hiding that obesity drives many of the health issues we see today, including hypertension, type 2 diabetes, coronary disease, stroke, and multiple cancers. Put simply, it shortens lives and it wrecks the quality of the years you have on this earth.

It's expensive, too. The Milken Institute put the total cost of chronic disease driven by obesity and excess weight in this country at $1.72 trillion — about 9.3% of GDP, split between $480.7 billion in direct health care and $1.24 trillion in lost productivity.

(Milken Institute. America's Obesity Crisis: The Health and Economic Costs of Excess Weight. 2018)

Here is what obesity actually costs.

A study of 3.6 million adults in the UK put a number to this. A nonsmoking 40-year-old man with obesity can expect to live about 4.2 years less than a nonsmoking man of the same age at a healthy weight.

(Bhaskaran K, et al. Lancet Diabetes Endocrinol. 2018 Dec;6(12):944-953. PMID: 30389323)

4.2 years may not seem like a lot to you. But that doesn't even take into account the quality of those years — and it's worse the younger you are when it starts.

An analysis out of Johns Hopkins estimated that a white man in his twenties carrying severe obesity — a BMI over 45 — loses as many as 13 years. That's a 22% cut to his expected remaining life. Moderate obesity ran 2 to 5 years.

(Fontaine KR, et al. JAMA. 2003 Jan 8;289(2):187-193. PMID: 12517229)

Now. Four years. Thirteen years. Those are abstractions until you ask a different question, which is the one I actually want you sitting with this morning.

Whose years are they?

Because they're not the years in the middle. Nobody loses time out of their thirties. You lose it off the end — and the end is the part where you're a grandfather. It's the wedding. It's the phone call at 11pm from a kid who's thirty-four and needs his dad. It's being the man in the room who has already been through this and can say so.

Four years is the difference between meeting your grandchildren and being a photograph on their wall.

And it isn't only your loss.

Researchers combined national registry data from Denmark, Sweden, and Finland — millions of children, followed as long as forty years. Among them, 189,094 lost a parent between six months and eighteen years old.

Those children carried a measurably elevated risk of death themselves, and it persisted into early adulthood. It held regardless of the child's sex, regardless of their age when it happened, and after accounting for socioeconomic status. Because these were wealthy countries with healthcare, the researchers noted the effect is unlikely to be explained by material deprivation.

(Li J, et al. PLoS Med. 2014 Jul 22;11(7):e1001679. PMID: 25051501)

I want you to read that again. Losing a father in childhood shows up for that generation, and for the next one.

Now let me be straight with you about what that study is and isn't.

Those children didn't lose their fathers to obesity. They lost them to everything — accidents, cancer, heart disease, suicide, all of it. That study is about what happens to a kid when his dad dies, not about what happens to a kid when his dad is heavy.

And the 4.2 years I quoted a minute ago mostly come off the back end of a life. For most men, obesity isn't going to take you while your kids are six months to eighteen years old. It's going to take the years after that.

So I'm not going to stand here and tell you that carrying an extra forty pounds means you won't see your son graduate. That would be dishonest, and you'd be right to stop reading.

Some men do die during those years. Severe obesity carries a much steeper cost — thirteen years for a young man with a BMI over 45 — and heart attacks at forty-eight are not rare enough. Not most men. But some, and none of them thought they'd be the one.

And when that happens, the Nordic data tells you what it costs the people left behind. That's the piece worth knowing: if your own health is the reason those years get taken while your kids are still in the house, the bill doesn't stop with you. It gets handed forward.

For everybody else — the majority — what obesity takes during the childrearing years isn't your life. It's your capacity. It's whether you can get down on the floor and back up. Whether you coach the team or watch from the car. Whether you've got the energy left at seven o'clock to be a person your family enjoys, or you're just the guy on the couch.

That's not as dramatic as dying. It's more common, and many men are living with that right now.

I'm not telling you this to frighten you into a diet or a change. I'm telling you because knowledge is power. Sometimes a little fear is a good thing — but I've also watched fear paralyze people a hundred times, and I've watched shame make it worse still.

The reason I'm telling you is because a man will do for his children what he flatly refuses to do for himself. I see it all the time. He'll skip his physical for years and never get his blood work done, but if his little girl has a cough or a scratch, he's in the medical office that afternoon.

My point is that we tend to push everything out onto others and rarely actually think about ourselves. But if you keep kicking that can down the road, eventually you may not be able to kick the can anymore.

Your weight is not a vanity problem. It's a fatherhood problem, and a brotherhood problem, and a husband problem. Those years don't just belong to you.

Anyone telling you this carries no health consequence is lying to you, and being kind about it doesn't make it not a lie.

The second: shaming men about their weight makes it measurably worse.

I know we like to joke about our own weight, or other people's. But how we approach that matters immensely in terms of wrangling in the current state of men's health in this country.

Researchers at Florida State followed 6,157 adults in the Health and Retirement Study, measuring weight and height in 2006 and again in 2010. They asked who had experienced weight discrimination — the comments, the looks, the treatment.

The people who reported weight discrimination were about 2.5 times more likely to become obese by follow-up. Those already obese were about three times more likely to still be obese four years later.

The effect held after controlling for age, sex, ethnicity, education, and baseline BMI. And it was specific — other forms of discrimination showed no relationship to obesity risk at all.

(Sutin AR, Terracciano A. PLoS One. 2013;8(7):e70048. PMID: 23894586)

Shame didn't just fail to help. It pushed men in the wrong direction.

Let's talk about why that happens.

The proposed mechanism is unglamorous and, if you've ever been on a bad run, familiar. Stigma is a stressor. Stress raises cortisol and drives eating. It also makes people avoid the gym, avoid the doctor, avoid the very rooms where the problem gets addressed. So the shame produces the behavior that produces more shame.

(Tomiyama AJ. Appetite. 2014 Nov;82:8-15. PMID: 24997407)

Anyone who's tried to hate himself into shape already knows how that ends. It works for about six weeks and then it doesn't.

For a comparison you'll recognize: it's the same idea as two people from different political affiliations, where one is trying to yell or shame the other into believing he's wrong, instead of looking for middle ground or asking good questions. All you've done is push him into a corner and make him double down on whatever he already believed.

So where's the middle ground?

You cannot tell a man it doesn't matter. It does. Pretending otherwise is a betrayal dressed up as compassion — or as avoidance. A man who's been told his weight is fine for ten years and then gets a diabetes diagnosis at forty-five has not been well served by the people who told him that, or by the people who should have been honest with him about what was going on.

However, this does not mean you can be a jerk about it. Not necessarily because it's rude, even though it is, but because it doesn't work. It has been studied for decades at this point, and all it does is make things worse. If your goal is actually for the man to be healthier, contempt is a strategy that fails on its own terms.

Again, two things can be true at once. You can be direct about the problem while also being warm and kind toward the man. Those two are not supposed to be in tension. We act like they are. They aren't.

Here's the difference in practice.

Contempt sounds like: "You did this to yourself." "I don't know how you could let yourself become such a fat piece of shit." "You need to eat less, it's really not that complicated." "You just need to work out and stop eating so much." "You need to find some discipline in your life." "It's time for you to start getting up early and getting to the gym and not making so many excuses."

Directness sounds like: "My man. I love you, and I can be honest with you. Your weight is going to cost you, and I don't want that for you — and neither does your family. How can I help?"

Same information. Completely different outcome. One tells a man he's a piece of garbage. The other tells him there is absolutely a problem, but it's something we can tackle, and something we can do together.

And remember.

Men, on average, wait longer to see a doctor, are less likely to seek help for weight, and are far more likely to handle it by not discussing it with anyone. We are experts at making a private failure out of a solvable problem.

If you're someone carrying weight that is a problem — it is definitely a problem, and you are also not a bad man for it. Both of those sentences are true at once.

Just admitting that out loud can be the first step toward improving your life. And if you're the friend of someone who's struggling, be the guy who is honest, compassionate, and lends a hand. It's about climbing the hill with him, not yelling at him from the top that he needs to catch up to you.

One final thing.

The reason shame fails and love works isn't necessarily sentimental. It's mechanical.

Shame will usually make a man hide, and a man who is hiding does not go to the doctor, does not join the gym, does not tell his wife he's worried. Love and honesty give him a reason to be seen.

And the reason is right there in his house. You are not necessarily trying to get lean for the mirror, even though that can help. You are trying to be at the wedding. At the recital. On the fishing trip. On the ski trip. Listening to your grandchild read you a book.

That is always going to be a better motivation than disgust, and it's the one that always works.

Worth Remembering

I love this quote about fatherhood because it reminds me immediately of the men who were father figures in my life, including my own dad.

They gave me incredible advice and they were there when I needed them. But I've learned the most from their actions.

Even though they failed in many different directions — just like you and I will fail in many directions — they were always trying to live better and do better. The greatest gift you can give your children is living your life and striving to be a good man, and letting them have a front-row seat to watching that.

One more thing to take with you here. If your kids are learning what a man is by watching you, they're also learning how a man treats his own body — whether he takes care of the thing they need to stay standing. They're learning how a father should treat a woman. How a father should work. How a man ought to take care of himself.

You teach all of that far more by example than by words.

Try This Week

Write one journal entry about your father, or a father figure in your life.

Keep this simple. Grab a pad and paper, or a journal for those of you I've finally convinced to actually start journaling.

I want you to make some notes about your dad, or a father figure, or even a male mentor in your life. And if you have the unfortunate position of not having any of those, I'd encourage you to write about what you wish a father would have been.

Write down some things about him. Both good and bad — because he certainly wasn't perfect. There are things you can take from him that were beautiful, and things you can take from him that may not be so beautiful, but that you can learn from.

Take five to ten minutes and just write it down.

And remember: this is obviously something you can keep to yourself. But in twenty years, maybe your children will see it. It may end up being the only thing they ever know about their grandfather, or about the men who shaped you.

What a wonderful gift that is.

From the Bookshelf

Strong Fathers, Strong Daughters: 10 Secrets Every Father Should Know Meg Meeker, MD

The minute I found out we were having a little girl, I bought this book. It is likely the single most important one I have read on being a girl dad.

I recommend it to every father of a daughter, because the world can be a scary place.

Reading and rereading it has changed the way I view being a dad to a little girl who's going to enter that world. I can't insulate her. I can't put bubble wrap around her for all of life. So it is my job to be an example to her of what a good man is, and to teach her her value and her worth.

This book gives you a blueprint for that.

Closing Thought

I lost my old man twelve years ago. March 12th, 2014.

My life has moved a long way since. The sadness isn't as deep as it was, and it doesn't consume my whole day anymore. I think far more on the beauty of having had him at all than on the sadness of losing him.

But I still miss him. I still think about him all the time. I still mourn that he isn't here to sit and have a cigar with, or drink a glass of whiskey, or belly laugh at bad jokes.

I know I'm going to see him again someday, and there's real solace in that — especially knowing his body is whole again. My heart still grieves anyway.

I tell you that because I want you to know it's okay to keep grieving.

Somewhere along the line we picked up the idea that grief runs on a concrete schedule, and that a man still carrying it after a decade has failed at something. That's complete nonsense. Nobody ever tells you that the sadness you feel is the exact size of what you had.

Now, I'm not saying you should be overemotional or lose control every time you think about the ones you love. But if you've lost someone, you don't have to erase them to stop hurting. That's not how it works, and trying to do it costs you the person twice.

Use the memory instead. Tell your kids about him. Cook the things he cooked. Say his name out loud at the table. Talk about his jokes, the things he did, the memories you loved.

And it is perfectly okay if that makes you emotional. I still get choked up all the time thinking about my old man, and I have no shame about it. Not one bit. To know that I had someone so special that it still makes me emotional is a beautiful gift.

It isn't about forgetting. It's about remembering that you got to have them at all.

That's all for this week, fellas. Have a great weekend.