How do men’s female relatives feature in their accounts of changing eating practices during a weight-management programme delivered through professional football clubs?

Social support is essential for weight loss but we know surprisingly little about how family relations are (re)negotiated when men attempt to lose weight. We use qualitative data from a men-only weight loss and healthy living programme (observations and focus group discussions) to investigate how men talk about the women in their families in their accounts of modifying their eating practices. Men constructed partners, mothers and mothers-in-law as highly influential, portraying their roles in responding to their changed eating practices in different ways as: facilitative or detached allies, undermining change, or resistant to or threatened by change. We suggest our analysis points to the need to explore how the broader social context can be acknowledged in weight management programmes to facilitate negotiation of changes to eating practices. At a more fundamental level it raises the potential for a broader renegotiation of the relationship between performances of masculinity and health.