When my partner and I got engaged – it almost happened by accident.
One morning when I was pregnant with our son, we started chatting about the idea and by the end of the conversation had decided we would do it.
For a few weeks, we only told my best friend, as we weren’t ready for the cascade of questions that tend to accompany an announcement such as engagement. When will we get married? Where? What will we wear?
I also knew that inevitably there would be questions around how I planned to prepare my body for the big event; if I was going to try to diet or exercise myself into a specific shape.
Having learned in my life to date quite how disastrous such crash diets are for my overall well-being, I was determined to reject this notion that I had to conform to a certain expectation.
And beyond that, I wanted to enjoy our wedding and the build-up as a celebration of our love and the partnership we’ve built — not a demonstration of my ability to starve myself and work myself into the ground for the sake of the ‘gram.
We opted for a small civil partnership ceremony while I was pregnant, followed by a big party a year later.
As predicted, once the outside world knew about our decision, the questions came pouring in — especially painful, as predicted were a couple about ‘the dress’ and if I planned to squeeze myself into something smaller than my current size.
But I knew that, whatever traditions I kept for my big day, one I was intent on rejecting was not making myself miserable by crash dieting because of pressure to look a certain way.
It’s become somewhat of an addendum to a well-rehearsed sequence of wedding traditions (especially for brides); date for a while, fall in love, get engaged, crash diet, get married.
The pressure on women to look good on their wedding day (or any day really) is, of course, nothing new – but with social media it feels like that has ramped up tenfold.
Funnily enough, being 8.5 months pregnant at the first ceremony, I didn’t think twice about how my body may be judged or viewed by the outside world in photos. I opted, if anything, for a dress that emphasised and celebrated my body in its pregnant glory
As a plus-size person who has struggled with self image all their life, that alone felt like a small revolution.
For the reception party this summer, though, staring in the mirror at my postpartum body, I started to feel that familiar shame creep back in. Now I wasn’t pregnant, what excuse did I have to not look like the ‘perfect bride’? By ‘perfect’, of course, I mean ‘thin’.
Over the past few years I’ve been thinking and writing a lot about the differences between what you weigh and your overall health.
For me, at least, eating well, exercising a lot and seldom drinking has not translated into thinness. But it has made me feel happier and healthier.
And yet, I couldn’t deny the massive urge to do what I know to be the thing that is least conducive to my overall health and wellbeing – crash diet.
The fact this idea even crossed my mind, was a surprise to me. After all, I’ve been up and down on the scales over the years, and have learned that the potent cocktail of contentment, acceptance and satisfaction with yourself is the best beauty treatment on the market.
It took a lot of strength but instead of looking up new fad diets and throwing away my money on the hope of false promises, I decided to focus on my overall well being ahead of the wedding day instead.
This meant exercising regularly, eating well and investing more time in people that made me feel good about myself, rather than bad.
It also meant finding a plus-size friendly wedding dress designer who understood my vision for how I wanted to look on the day, and made a dress that fit my body and shape perfectly — as it was. Not some imagined future version of my body, but the body I took to my first fitting.
I tried not to stress too much about it all, and frankly, in the first year of motherhood and with some pretty big mental health challenges on my plate, I simply didn’t have the time or luxury to worry about it all. It was freeing.
I can’t pretend I felt completely secure with myself the whole way through the dress-buying process. There were plenty of moments where a lifelong fear of dressing rooms, and of people looking at me, and my body, bubbled to the surface.
But in order to battle these, I knew I needed back up, so I took my best friends and my mum to the fitting – the best hype squad known to humankind.
In fact, it was them who persuaded me to try on the dress that would eventually become the dress, even when intrusive thoughts told me that overweight people shouldn’t wear sequins.
The whole process of getting a dress to fit me, rather than the other way round, was so much more peaceful than I had anticipated. And all of the effort I put into feeling healthier paid dividends in the run-up to the wedding, typically a pretty stress-filled period.
And even better, by opting out of a crash diet that might only have ‘helped’ on the wedding day, I have, in turn, committed to sustainable long-term lifestyle changes that are much more likely to benefit my body and mind beyond one event.
And what could be more healthy than that?
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