MINNEAPOLIS — A local accountant, 51, has now been carrying what he still refers to as “sympathy baby weight” for approximately twenty years, three months, and eleven days after his wife’s first pregnancy in 2005.
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The accountant, who gained 34 pounds during his wife’s first pregnancy in what he described at the time as “just, like, a supportive gesture,” has since gained an additional 47 pounds and now weighs 231. He continues, sources confirmed, to attribute all of it to the pregnancy.
“It was a really big thing for us,” he said Wednesday, standing in his driveway in a T-shirt that fit him differently than it once did. “My wife was going through a lot. Her body was changing. She was eating for two. I felt like, you know, I should be there for her. So I started eating for two also.”
He paused.
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“I never really stopped,” he added.
The child born of the pregnancy, his eldest son, is now nineteen. He is a sophomore at the University of Minnesota. He weighs, per his own estimation, approximately 168 pounds. He has not, sources confirmed, been a baby in a very long time.
“My dad still says he’s carrying weight from when my mom was pregnant with me,” the nineteen-year-old said Thursday, by phone. “I turned nineteen last month. I have a girlfriend. I am taller than him now. And he still, like, gestures at his stomach and says this is because of you, buddy.“
The sophomore paused.
“He does it in a really warm way,” he added. “That’s the confusing part. He’s not being weird about it. He genuinely seems to believe it.”
The accountant’s wife, 49, has been aware of the ongoing framing since approximately 2011.
“I have not said anything,” she said, sighing. “It brings him joy. It hurts no one. If he wants to believe that the sixteen ice cream sandwiches he ate last week are because our teenage son is still gestating, that is between him and himself. I have chosen peace.”
The couple went on to have two additional children — a daughter, now 16, and a son, now 12 — during which time the accountant reportedly gained an additional 22 and 18 pounds respectively, each of which he also attributes to sympathy weight gain that he intends to lose “as soon as the youngest is out of the house.”
The youngest, sources confirmed, is in the seventh grade.
The accountant expects to begin losing the weight “around 2031.”
He was asked whether he had considered that the weight might not, in fact, be attributable to the pregnancies at all, and might instead be attributable to twenty years of eating like a man whose wife is pregnant despite his wife not, in fact, being pregnant.
He thought about this for a long time.
“I know what people say,” he said finally. “I’ve heard it. My brother-in-law makes jokes. My doctor makes jokes. The nurse who takes my blood pressure — she doesn’t say anything, but I can tell she’s thinking it. Everybody wants to say the sympathy thing wore off. Everybody wants to say I’ve made choices.”
He paused.
“But I know what I gave up,” he said. “I know what I sacrificed for those pregnancies. I know how many times I ate a whole sleeve of Oreos because my wife was crying about a Kleenex commercial. That was me. That was me showing up. And you don’t just get to walk away from that.”
He was asked, gently, whether he might now, in the year 2026, be able to walk away from it.
“I’m not ready,” he said quietly.
The accountant’s approach to weight has become, per family members, a fixture of the family’s identity. He carries what he calls his “dad tummy” with a kind of unshakable pride. He pats it at parties. He gestures at it during family photos. He refers to it, in group settings, as “the firstborn weight,” “the middle-kid ten,” and “the youngest chunk.”
Each of his children has, at various points in their adolescence, tried to gently correct him.
None of the corrections have taken.
“He just, like, smiles and nods,” said the 16-year-old daughter. “And then a week later he says the same thing again. He is completely at peace with the framing. I have accepted that this is who he is.”
The family has developed, per his wife, “a whole language” around the situation.
“When he gains five pounds, we call it a new grandchild coming,” she said. “When he loses two, we say the twins are behaving. We just work with it. That’s how you stay married for twenty-six years. You just decide, at some point, what you’re going to fight about, and you let the rest be.”
At press time, the accountant was standing at the kitchen counter eating a small sandwich he had made for himself as a snack while his wife prepared dinner. The sandwich contained three types of cheese. He was, sources confirmed, planning to have another sandwich in approximately twenty minutes.
He was not, he confirmed, hungry.
He was, however, expecting.