My dad thinks my mom is fat and I feel caught in the middle.

My dad (66M) resents my mom (61F) for her weight. When they met 30-some years ago, she was insanely skinny. I am by no means overweight but have never been that small in my life. After having 3 kids, she never dropped the baby weight, and so on and so forth. I know she tries and fails to diet, I empathize with her struggle, as a woman. Here's the thing, though. She probably falls in the overweight category, but I doubt she is considered obese. She has maybe 30 lbs to lose. But to talk to my dad, you would think she was an absolute fat slob. She is in a highly physically demanding job, at over 60 years old, and has never had any joint replacements, etc. He is upset because he thinks of her weight as a personal insult to him, because he prefers a model-type. He has always been slender himself.

Because I relate more to her, and I dislike how he exaggerates her physical condition, it is hard for me to distance myself enough to know what to do for how to respond when he engages me in these conversations. It is mainly uncomfortable for me because it makes me so sad to imagine ever having a husband be so critical of my weight. But he does have a valid point, I guess, in that she should respect the way he wants his wife to look, and of course it is always healthy to make the effort to cut excess weight.

I doubt she knows that he talks to me about this, which also makes the situation weird to approach. Obviously I don't really want to encourage him to talk to her more about it because I think he is pretty apathetic to the emotional aspect of it.

TLDR: Is my dad a jerk for fixating on my mom's weight, or is my mom insulting him by not making a better effort to lose weight? What can I say to either one of them about this to help?

EDIT: okay so, general consensus seems to be that he is in the wrong. Does anyone have a gentler way to say this to him, or maybe a good idea of what to say? I'm not going to call him a jerk to his face, even though he is being rude I want to actually get through to him, not just make him mad or make him disregard what I have to say.

Submitted September 29, 2020 at 06:37PM by sloppy_taffy_wagon https://ift.tt/3kZpb3H