I Didn’t Lose Weight Before My Wedding

Okay, okay, I admit that I tried. A little. I wanted to resist the urge, but wow that wedding industrial complex has some serious heft. My partner and I signed up for the local rock climbing gym. I went to regular yoga classes. We shook on the worst agreement I’ve ever made: no ordering-in food until after the wedding.

That included my favorite Nepali place, so you can understand my immediate regret.

I wasn’t impervious to the lose weight before your wedding! messaging, but I tried to ignore it. I muttered affirmations to myself. Shook my soft belly in the mirror. “I love you,” I told her, even though sometimes I wished she’d disappear. I’d gained fifty pounds in the last couple years, pointed out by my old babysitter (“I didn’t recognize you, you’re so…” she said, curving her hands in the air, “much bigger.”) and my Grandma at Christmas (“Cor, Jess has put on weight, hasn’t she?”). Most of the time I practice self-acceptance. So what? It’s just a bigger body. But weddings put on a new type of pressure: to be the best, most beautiful, and thinnest version of yourself. It is the day you will see all the important people in your life, and they will stand in unison to look at you. Be so brilliant that they all can’t help but cry.

I bought my wedding dress six months before the wedding. It fit pretty well already, no clip-ons needed. I fluttered around a stranger’s bedroom, who’d listed her dress on Facebook Marketplace for a fourth of what she’d originally paid. I tried to ignore the fact that my hair was greasy and my makeup wasn’t done, peering at myself in the mirror. I strutted and posed and took a hundred photos before I walked into her living room to say I’d take it.

Dress-in-closet, I confounded my fiancé by continuing to shop for dresses.

“You only get married once… if you’re lucky!” I chirped. So I stepped into a hundred more gowns, hoping to get that tearful this is the one revelation I’d seen on so many Say Yes To The Dress reruns. “Don’t worry,” I told my fiancé, “I can always sell the Facebook Marketplace dress.”

The only time I got close to that elusive feeling was in a bridal shop with my sister and her friend in London. Their cooing nearly convinced me to spend three grand on a dress, despite having a perfectly good one at home (mom would be proud I’d taken that into consideration!) Plus, it mostly appealed because of its built-in shapewear that shrinkwrapped my body so tightly I could barely breathe. Draped and shaped like a Grecian statue. But in high school, I’d watched in horror as Keira Knightley was wrenched into a corset. “How barbaric!” I’d thought, and yet… I can see the appeal now. Still, I decided not to get the dress.

Next I had to decide what to do about body hair. I stopped shaving in a feminist fit over six years ago. Yes, everything. But what about for the wedding, shouldn’t I at least shave for the wedding? What if a camera were to capture my hairy pit in an otherwise flawless fairytale twirl???

Not to mention my hair. Should I get the balayage refreshed, the blonde highlights I’d been getting for years while now? Or should I go back to natural, since I’m trying to connect to the “real me”, whoever she is?

About three months out from the wedding, after grappling over these beauty conundrums for a while, I decided the answer was simple: Pick the version most true to myself. I am getting married. It is my event, not an event happening to me.

To that end: my body is not better smaller.

I kept going to the gym, for the mindfulness yoga classes and occasional climb, but not with weight loss as my motivation. On the day I said my vows, my dress fit me the same as it had in that woman’s bedroom. I asked my hairdresser to go back to my natural hair color, which I’d been wanting to do for a while. And I embraced the rest of my hair: au naturale.

My photographer leaned over me to get a shot of me putting on my shoes (flat, because heels for me are akin to corset torture, but for feet).

“I love my hairy legs,” I told her, and she kept them in the edit.

There’s only one photo with a peep of the wild shock of hair under my arms, but I delighted spotting the wisps of them:

I wish I could say that I made the call from the beginning. I’d certainly promised myself in the past that I’d never be “that bride”, the one who won’t eat leading up to the wedding because of aspirational dress alterations. But when the time came, I found the pressure hard to resist. I started to crumble, almost losing sight of the important thing: I matter as I am.

The best reward for this realization? A plate of momos with a side of chili chicken.

Note: this post originally appeared on Substack, as I’m trying out publishing non-finance related content over there. Please give me a subscribe if you are on Substack already! If you don’t like to read non-finance related content, let me know!