Alternative vows

I’m in a reflective mood at the moment. It’s only natural I suppose, what with a wedding coming up.

Like most girls, when I got engaged I assumed that I would drift up the aisle as a lissom size 8. Well, maybe a 10, I have boobs. I had two and a bityears before the wedding plenty of time to lose the weight I need to lose and then some.

I don’t know why it didn’t happen. Well, it started to happen and then there was a backwards slide and then it started to happen again and another backwards slide…the point is, with all the forwarding and backwarding I’ve kind of ended up where I started.

It’s a question of motivation – it must be. But as D said to me the other week, with barely concealed frustration, what is more motivating than your wedding?

I suppose I was waiting for the magic switch to flick in my head. You know the one, where it suddenly all becomes easy. Where resisting high calorie food and wine (er, and cider and gin and…) no longer causes me to so much as blink. The one where I no longer turn to food and drink for solace when life goes a bit pearshaped. The one where cheese on toast isn’t the panacea to all ills. The one where exercise becomes enjoyable. The one where I suddenly become the person who says, “I really don’t like fatty foods anymore – and I get grumpy when I don’t go to the gym five times a week.”

Turns out there is no magic switch, not even one marked "Wedding". For me it will always be an effort of will – and I will NEVER be the person who stops liking cheese. But, (and this is the kicker) I have every tool that I need to make it happen close at hand and I’ve wilfully ignored them for the last two and a half years. Or, if not totally ignored them, let them lie fallow for long periods.

But I can’t change that now. And despite the fact that they have not seen me achieve any meaningful shrinkage, those same years have been good for the most part. I am finally enjoying my job, and feeling confident professionally. I am coping with my anxiety issues. I am (and apologies for the cliché) more at peace with myself than I was in my early twenties – despite the fact that I am bigger. I think that represents a degree of personal growth (of the spiritual rather than the literal kind!)

I wonder how sad I am that I will not be the slender bride I assumed I would be? You see, the closer I get to the big day, the more I realise that it is not about the wedding it is about the marriage. It’s not about the bride, it’s about the wife. The wedding is one day, and yes, I hope it is a glorious, happy day, but I’m doing it because I want to be Mrs D more than anything else in the world. I want to make him proud of me. I know at the moment he wishes I was thinner. Well, I can’t be a slim bride, but I can be a slim wife. And I will be.