If you’ve ever been in or around typical wedding culture, there seems to be this incessant desire to look “perfect”. It’s often the most photographed day of your entire life (and all eyes are on you!), so there can be this pressure to look/be/feel perfect.

Enter dieting.

Dieting can be a “solution” to feeling more in control, to losing weight (“I’ll look better in my dress!”), and to buying into this illusion that your body will be more perfect.

(And if you’ve been reading my blog or listening to my podcast for any length of time, you know I’m all about busting these myths!)

So here is why I didn’t diet for my wedding:

1. Dieting Always Backfires

I definitely did have old tapes that crept back into my brain leading up to the wedding. They weren’t necessarily full blown diet thoughts, but thoughts like:

You should try to eat clean.

Drink a lot of water the week leading up the wedding so you flush out anything that makes you bloated.

Your dress is tight, are you sure you don’t want to eat lighter? 

You should cut back on carbs a few weeks before the wedding.

Those sneaky little diet thoughts sound innocent enough, right?

Wrong. They are just thoughts disguised as restriction!

I know from 12 years of dieting that the cold hard truth is this: diets never give us what it is we truly want. 

Even if a diet thought seems believable and even if your mind says “this time, it really WILL work”, it won’t. If you go on something, you’ll go off of it.

I knew no matter what I restricted, it would backfire. So I opted out of the cycle 🙂

2. This Is My Body.

Here’s the thing…this is my body size. Yes, I’ve fluctuated in size over the years (and that fluctuation got less and less as I stopped dieting/binging and my weight became more stable).

But what would be the point of “trying” to change my body size? My husband has seen all of my body. Why would I want to show up as anything but me?

Now not dieting was MUCH easier for me now than when I deeply struggled with my weight. (*But the irony is that only when you stop dieting can your weight begin to normalize-whatever that means for your body.)

So if you’re thinking “well, of course she didn’t diet, she doesn’t have 30, 50, 100 pounds to lose”, then I invite you to visit this post 🙂

The point is that this is my body. This is my size and I wanted to show up as my authentic self.

(If you need inspiration and haven’t heard this song, listen to “This Is Me”!)

3. I Didn’t Want The Focus To Be On My Body/Weight.

People get insanely caught up in weddings. The industry promotes this idea of perfection: in your body, for your dress, with the venue you choose…they remind you “it only happens once, so you better get it right!”

And I’ll admit I did get caught up in the “perfection” part a few times leading up to the big day…but I always talked myself down from taking action on them.

I didn’t WANT the focus for 6 months leading up to the wedding to be on my body. Almost 1/3 of my life has been spent obsessing over my body and I did not want to get caught back up in that.

I wanted the focus to be on celebrating my marriage and gratitude for this partnership in my life. So much of my life was spent thinking about my body & food; I just didn’t want to revisit that (ever!).

Seriously…I can look back on any photo in the past and know where I was in my weight/food/body struggle. (“Oh, there’s me on the Great Wall of China. I had just binged the night before and was anxious about finding a place I could run.”)

And I was steadfast in my desire to BE in this experience without obsessing over my body. Dieting only perpetuates that focus, so I was not going to let myself go down that rabbit hole!

So if you have a big event coming up (or even a wedding!), I hope this inspires you to keep letting go of dieting, no matter how much it tempts you!

Here are a few pics from our day (BTW-I think there will be a follow up post on this about not criticizing yourself in photos! After all these years, this can still get me! ?♥️)