Fat girls get married, too.

Maybe it's because January has been National Fail At Silly Resolutions Month. Maybe it's because my bosslady has gone on a diet and talks about it with me nonstop. Or maybe it's because I went for a bridesmaid's dress fitting for a friend's wedding last month and was introduced to the miracle of Spanx. But as my wedding planning process has kicked into a higher gear, I've noticed that I feel more and more pressure to lose weight before "the big day."
I don't doubt that most brides, whether they're size six or size twenty-six, hear those messages -- they're really hard to escape. Even if you're not reading bridal magazines or watching Say Yes To The Dress, if you're talking with other people, it seems like it just comes up. Like it did with my bosslady. We were sitting at the circ desk when she started telling me about another assistant librarian she'd had who had gotten married during her time there.
"Rory really wanted to look great for her wedding, so she lost a ton of weight..." Bosslady said, with a nice awkward pause at the end as she waited for a response from me and I fumbled around in my brain for one. My personal response to "how are you losing weight for your wedding?" is simple - I'm not really planning to.
One thing I promised myself when I first got engaged was that I wasn't going to let insecurities about my weight rob me of any of the joy that comes with the experience of being engaged. About three years ago, I realized just how much of my life I had spent feeling like I was less of a person because there was more of me. Waking up to that was hard.
I've been overweight since I was eight years old, and I've stayed about the same proportions since puberty. When I was in high school, I evaded the pressure to lose weight by dressing like a guy -- wearing clothes that hid my shape as much as possible and masking my insecurities under combat boots and two-inch-long hair kept me a step away from being compared to the other girls.

I'm the second from the left, in all my John-Lennon-shirted glory.

When I went to college, I went to a tiny hippie school where there were so many kids trying to be unique that weight wasn't really an issue -- who cares about how one girl looks when there's social justice to be done and everyone's rockin' dreadlocks? But at that time, I started dating a guy who was really into running, weight lifting, martial arts... and two years into that relationship, he had me feeling pretty awful about my body. Before I left him, I felt like he was with me because he could stand me in spite of my curves and softness, and knowing that he found me unattractive despite the fact that we were dating was painful. When I left him, I somehow didn't stop feeling like I was unlovable because no one would look past my surface to give me a chance.
I spent my two years in library school walking two miles each day and eating haphazard meals that weren't nutritionally sound because I was trying to escape being in a place I didn't like. For about a year, it was hard for me to care for myself because I was so busy trying to shut out the world. I weighed the least I'd ever weighed (including the three diets I'd gone on while dating Martial Arts Dude), but I was miserable with myself. Part of that -- not all, but part -- came from being surrounded by the "beautiful people" who flocked to the institution. I felt like I didn't fit in because of my size (at least on the campus at large. In the library school itself, there was much more diversity -- at least the way it seemed to me.) It was in the middle of that time that I started realizing, with the help of some amazing friends and a therapist on campus, that the first step to taking care of myself was to love myself the way I was. Not allowing popular opinion about what's pretty to dictate how I treated myself and what I let myself do opened up a whole new world of experiences for me. I started wearing tank tops for the first time ever, felt more comfortable in social situations, tried more new things.

In grad school, at my lowest weight.

When I found a guy who loved me for the woman inside and who made no secret of appreciating the outside as well, I realized that my ability to trust in our relationship came partially from that foundation I'd built. Learning to be okay with myself helped me open up to the idea that someone else could feel that way about me, too.
With that history being a part of what led me to the life and love I have, I knew I didn't want to fall back into a pattern of feeling not good enough leading up to what I want to be a day of happy memories. Being a bride means being at the center of a lot of attention for a couple of hours, and being in that kind of spotlight is what motivates a lot of people to lose weight, build muscle, whiten teeth, treat their skin, and do all kinds of other things to feel like they're at their best. And that's not a bad thing -- it's great to have a goal to motivate you to make changes. But any type of changes that come out of guilt or feelings of self-loathing aren't okay with me. My personal approach to that impulse puts things in a slightly different focus because I don't want to fall back into negative thought patterns (and which would make my fiance sad, because he works hard to make sure I know he loves me the way I am). I want to make healthy changes based on what I have to gain, not lose, like more high-quality days on this earth to spend with the man I love, or knowing that my future kids will have a healthy start in life.
I'm doing my best to develop the most positive habits I can. It means trying to add more vegetables and fruits to what I cook, trying to find healthier substitutes for less healthy things, trying to embrace more movement in my everyday life. I'm not purposefully starting a diet -- I'm working on making better choices, one day at a time. I don't know whether it will result in any weight-loss or not -- but I have a lot of confidence that each time I make a decision that's healthy, I'm doing something good for myself. And one of those healthy decisions is to love myself as a size eighteen bride in a world that says I shouldn't be okay with that.

At the Woolly Worm Festival* less than 24 hours
after the proposal, when I couldn't be happier with
myself and life!

* Why yes, my county has an annual Woolly Worm Festival, in which participants race Isabella tigermoth larvae up strings for the honor of predicting the weather for the winter.