Heavy burden

So, I am trying to lose 3 stone (45lbs or thereabouts) by July next year so I can go wedding dress shopping without feeling like a blob.

This is very fucking hard.

Now, not to be all middle-class problems about my life (I'm well aware I have a very blessed life in pretty much all respects), but I have always struggled with my weight. I was a rounded child that lost all the puppy fat and still thought she was fat when I was a size 10/12 (that's a US 6/8). Gradually over the years, the weight has crept on and I never did anything about it. If I could tell 20 year-old-me one thing, it wouldn't be 'don't waste your tears over that person' or 'don't choose that job', it would be 'get down a gym and quit smoking or you'll struggle later in life'.

My mother (bless her) has also always struggled with her weight. To make sure I 'never had her problems', she refused pastry, cream, bacon, butter, full fat or sugar puddings and myriad other evils at our dining table growing up. I have never been one of those people who has to have something sweet after dinner. I've never eaten a huge amount. But I like my food, I like my food cooked in butter and juices, I like to eat out, and I love love love to drink.

So I cut back on what I was eating. I've tried not to eat carbs at lunch and dinner because they make me sleepy, so I kept up with that. I eat porridge for breakfast and salads or soups for lunch. I eat salads or chicken casseroles for dinner. I attempt to eat Asian (Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese) if and when we go out. And I all but stopped drinking during the week. This is on top of my new regime of going to Pilates once a week, seeing my trainer once a week and going to Zumba classes twice a week (hopefully going up to three when my back problem can cope).

I keep a food diary and send it to my personal trainer (told you it was a middle-class whinge). And now she wants me to give up booze totally.

I actively look forward to my 3-4 glasses of wine a week. I love wine. I love the taste. I love the smell. I love how it feels decadent on my tongue.

I honestly cried when she said she didn't think I'd see any weight loss without stopping drinking. I'd rather give up cheese and chocolate than booze. I gave up booze once before and didn't lose a single pound. So I'm feeling very depressed and put out that all of my changes and effort appear to count for nothing unless I give up everything I like. I can't even keep one fucking treat while I sweat and cry and go to bed hungry and ignore that other people are shovelling awesome-looking food in their mouths.

I compromised and said I'd quit drinking after our engagement party in two weeks. I'm sure when I get into it, it won't be that bad. I'm sure I can cope with it for a while. It will do me good, and hey, with that and my exercise and diet, this time it might just work for me and I'll go to Cuba in December looking svelte.

But I just feel a bit like I've been kicked while I'm still down, you know?

Worries

I am convinced somewhere along the way my mother is going to send me a card similar to this.

Not for me

If I see another article on how to get the Vintage look for your wedding, I'm going to scream. Vintage is everywhere, sometimes real Vintage and sometimes fake Vintage, but it all involves birdcages and tea cups. And peonies and pink and green. I am so bored of the Vintage theme, I really am. It's now too easy to do. Everyone is doing it. Can we have a new trend now?
Or to go to the other extreme, there is the punk, modern pin-up hipster trend which is the second most common theme - more prevalent on the internet than in magazines. Edgy and cool, you have to have non-traditional parents or balls of steel to have this - looks fantastic and is so not us.

The third major theme seems to be Tiffany blue. Seriously.

What about the brides that don't fit into these themes? I want something less romantic and twee than Vintage but less kitsch and more traditional than hipster. I do not want Tiffany blue, unless they sponsor my wedding.

Oh, I know that sometimes there will be a feature on a beach-themed wedding, or one with a peacock theme, but come on: their must be more inventive ideas than this? What about a movies/Hollywood theme? Or a global/travelling theme? Or a Storybook love theme? Or modern fairytale? Or burlesque? Or a circus theme? So much fun stuff, so little makes it into the pages of the magazines in the shops. Such a shame.

Mrs Blobby in a Dress

While we're on the topic of wedding dresses, I have a confession: I am not at all excited or thrilled at the prospect of The Dress TM. There is a very good reason for this and then another, smaller reason.

The main reason: I am fat. I am five foot three and I'm a UK size 16. I have a prominent belly and I don't look very good in clothes. I have very low self-esteem. I am now exercising at least four times a week and am on a strict diet, and the idea is to lose at least 45 lbs before I start shopping. So I can't get excited about wedding dresses, because a) if I tried it on now I wouldn't look very good and I would cry and b) when I think about dresses, I think about muscle pain, being unable to breathe and salads.

You can see how this a downer.

Oh, and I'm not slagging women who are size 16 and higher and proud - you go and be proud. Full figured women can be gorgeous. I am not one of those women. I am not curvy, or full-figured - I do not go in at any point. I look like someone who should be a size 12-14 and has eaten too much because that is exactly what I am. The shortness doesn't help either. I'm like an apple with dumpy legs.

The smaller reason is that when I think about structured gowns, my lungs get worried. I don't want a lot of structure digging into my rib cage. I want to be able to breathe and eat on my wedding day. Beading makes me worry about scratching the inside of my upper arms, as this is what happens when I wear anything beaded, and lace makes me simply itchy all over. I generally dislike all decoration that traditionally goes on wedding dresses. Plus, white and ivory are not my colours. I have seen maybe two dresses I like and that's it.

So it's going to take a few months before I can get excited about wedding dresses, and I fear the actual shopping for them. I don't want the beading and lace that covers 90% of wedding dresses and so either my shopping will take minutes or months. Not an appealing prospect!

Movie weddings

Having a mosey around the internetz to see if I can spot any dress styles I like and I come across the following: two slide shows on movie and TV weddings.

It strikes me that most wedding dresses in movies and TV are either hideous or blah - the same no-sleeve dress with beading. I think the only one I'm drawn to is Anne Hathaway's in Bride Wars. Of course, the likelihood of me a) affording and b) fitting into a Vera Wang are slim to none, but oh well!

PES: Pre Engagement Stress

I really, really wish I had found this series of blog-posts over at A Practical Wedding a year ago. Being 'pre-engaged' can be a hellish, hellish time. I was an insufferable whinger that went completely crazy - you can tell this because I started this blog about two months before we got engaged!

When I talk about the pre-engaged state, people can look at you oddly and query 'you mean dating?'. No. no, I do not mean dating. There was a good year and a half, two years of 'dating' in our history and I wouldn't call that pre-engaged. I mean the state where you have had The Talk, the one about your future and how you would like to marry each other and who wants kids and where will you live and all the other things that make up your life as you wish it. You squeeze each other's hands when someone says something lovely at a wedding and grin at each other when people say 'you two next, eh?'.

Well, you do those things the first couple of months. Then it starts getting a bit more serious. I mean, you need to know about his family medical history and what he thinks makes a good proposal. You start looking at your friend's wedding pictures again, and hanging on to their every word about the proposal. Then, you have your first hissy fit. It might not be over something big. It might be he said he can't envision it this year, or he hasn't really thought about it that much, or he didn't look at the handy list of ring ideas you gave him that one night you were all loved up.

This is when it starts biting you in the ass. Because if you are anything like me, you are in control of your life. You make decisions on things that impact your life, with and without your partner. The very idea that someone else is the gatekeeper, and therefore in control of your future happiness, makes you want to scream.

So you scream. The first fight was solved easily enough by you blaming low blood sugar and him hugging you and telling you he loved you. The second fight is uglier; it involves sentences like 'They are getting married and they've only been togther 18 months!' and 'Everyone but me is getting married and they all pity me!' and 'Maybe you don't really love me.' It's a bit of a train wreck.

My best tantrum came after a trip to Hatton Garden (London jewellery district) to fix a bracelet and we then had a look at rings through the windows. I was thrilled. I wanted to try them on, just to see what suited me. Just to feel like maybe we were getting to that place. Plus, shiny diamonds. Who wouldn't? He didn't want me to try any on. 'What's the point?' he asked. 'We're not buying anything.'

We walked to the Tube station in silence and then I had a crying fit of epic proportions. I felt like he wasn't serious, and although I didn't want him to buy anything just yet, I just wanted us to take one more step down that road. I felt guilty for pressuring him and frustrated that he couldn't see how important it was to me. It turned into a horrible, horrible day.

I wish that I had known that other people were doing the same thing. That there were others who were just as impatient, just as 'in the marriage place' to be behaving as I was. I don't really wish I had done anything differently, because that wouldn't be me (plus, I think the fit got through to him how much I wanted some form of nod towards commitment). My friends appeared to take the whole 'your future happiness is in his hands and his decision alone' with grace, but now I'm not so sure. I think I might ask them to see if they too had massive fits and crying tantrums. I bet it's more common that I thought.

So if you are in the pre-engaged state, for the love of god, don't worry about any of these thoughts. This is normal, and what happens when we continue to let a patriarchal custom dictate our lives :) It is also shorter than you think, because your partner is genuinely waiting for the right time to do it his way. So hold tight, search the web, join in the frustration and have a wee laugh at yourself. You'll need it to get through the months.

Please, please back away from the chicken

I'm going to talk a bit about being engaged. This is mainly because I and my future husband have just entered this state after a long, long year of that 'pre-engaged' state where everyone looks at you expectantly when you come back from holiday.

I'm also going to talk about being engaged, or at least, waiting to be engaged, because of this link to the Engagement Chicken. I'm not joking. According to Glamour, if you cook this chicken for your boyfriend, you will get engaged.

Now, maybe this works if you have never cooked for your boyfriend in your whole life, and he's so overcome by the flavours of garlic and lemon he realises he can never let you go. But most people have been cooking for a while. I myself have made, oooh, at least 10 or so chickens like this since my fiance and I started dating. Strangely enough, it wasn't the chicken that made him propose.

If you want to marry your current boyfriend, at some point, you need to swing the conversation around to whether he wants to get married and how he sees his future. It should match to yours, or at least not deviate a huge amount (liking wanting kids when you don't). This should be called the Engagement Conversation. It is not a chicken. It is what adults do instead of playing games with food (alright, we play games with food too, but actual games, ok?).

If the Engagement Conversation goes well, you can maybe start the Ring Conversation. This can lead to Ring Research Trips or Ring Research Web Searches. These also are not chickens.  These are called sharing and envisioning a life together.

If the Enagement Conversation doesn't go well (if you have brought it up on the first date, for example, or if he wants to become a monk), then you can make a chicken. But not for him. Make the chicken for you. The chicken is comforting and warm, and you can make chicken soup with the bones. You can eat the soup while internet dating for your next boyfriend, who doesn't want to become a monk, or who isn't so weirdly fixated on his culinary future that he pins it all on a chicken.

Bridesmaids Dilemma

Apart from 'Have you set a date yet?' the thing most people ask me is 'Who are your bridesmaids?'. And the problem is - I don't really know. As with most people by this age, you have a number of groups of friends - some overlap, some don't. And they all have their own lives to be getting on with. Invite one person out of a specific group and the other 2 girls in it might wonder why they weren't chosen. It gets a bit political.

I have a specific issue (or in fact, number of issues) in the fact that my definite bridesmaid lives in South Korea and won't be here until the wedding. So any leaning on her, taking her shopping with me or her orgainsing my Hen Night are out of the window. My fiance has chosen his sister as his best man, so while she's involved, she won't be with me the morning of the wedding. And my step-sister and I aren't hugely close, but I wouldn't mind having her - except my mother hates my step-mother and her children, so it would feel rude to my mother to choose her.

Now, I could just have one bridesmaid. But that seems a bit Billy-no-mates. So I was casting my eye around my friends, thinking who I would like to have with me on this journey. And it's a lot of people. But I can't ask this person as she's literally going through a breakdown and I don't want to add to the stress, and I can't ask this person because that's my fiance's ex, and I can't ask this person because she's about to have her first baby and I don't think she'll want to be bothered - I think she'll want any spare time to sleep!

There is a lot of pressure on brides to include a lot of their friends and to make it all 'girls together'. There is in fact one female friend I am thinking of, but I'm not sure if we are close enough yet, so I might wait. But while I do, I have definitely chosen one other person to be 'on my side' as it were - my best male friend Dan.

I figured, it's the 21st Century - surely I can have a bridesman, yes? There won't be any dresses involved, or anything like that. But I figured I could stretch to a nice suit, whether rented or bought, and a buttonhole and his calm influence and his piss-taking ways the morning of my wedding. I just hope he likes the idea when I ask him!

Reading Between the Lines

I'm reading a couple of Sarah Iver's books at the moment and they are making me increasingly annoyed. While there are undoubtedly some good tips in there (her chapters on parent-management were good), the tone can be, well, privileged.

From talking about 200 guests, to constantly mentioning what you can do for wedding favours (parasols, hot-water bottles, seeds, sweets, fans), to suggesting to jet off in a helicopter, to fireworks displays, to actually thinking that you might get special t-shirts made for your serving staff, she's clearly coming from a place of great money. Now, my dad has been nice enough to tell me his financial contribution to my wedding, and it's above average. So trust me when I say that she is assuming a lot more than average to get these.

So far, to feed and water 110 guests, it is looking like we may have to shell out £15,000. That is a huge amount of money. We want people to have a good time, so this is our biggest expense, and I know I'm damn lucky to be able to do it. But books that don't recognise the privilege they are coming from, and therefore suggest that really, no one cares if you have a frikkin' helicopter, bug the hell out of me.