Wedding Workout

I'm typing this from the laundry room as I wait for sheets to dry.

If you remember, my mom was here for two weeks (and made our amazing wedding favors). I have to get the guest room ready because my brother and his girlfriend are coming for the last week of the month.

They need clean sheets and towels. So I put a load of laundry together and brought it to the laundry room in our complex. The laundry room is about 30 feet from our gym and the washer takes 30 minutes.

So I decided to stop just talking about going to the gym and I actually put on my cute gym clothes so I could work out while the washer was going.

Maybe it's the stripes, but I look like my hips are pretty disproportionate to the rest of my body. Honestly, that's not my trouble area. My trouble, actually, is that I was blessed with a large upper rib cage. I mean, it's not large in the grand scheme of things, but it's large for wedding dresses.

Wedding dresses, if you don't know, they make you feel fat.

In real life, I wear an extra small. That's the size I'm wearing in that photo above. When I buy pants, it's either a 0 or 2, depending on the cut. In dresses, since they're cut slimmer, I'm usually a 4.

So when I started trying on wedding dresses and was told to put on a 10 or 12, I was in shock. I didn't say anything to the consultants, but I laughed inside, thinking there would be a lot of clamping to be had.

Joke's on me because most of the dresses didn't need to be clamped. I felt fat. Really fat.

"You're body is made for wedding dresses," I was told more than once. "The hardest thing to fill out is a wedding dress, and you're doing that" I was told (which was a nice way of saying, "Your boobs actually fill the top.").

Thanks, I thought.

But I felt fat.

When I actually went to the store where I bought my dress, I was told that the store only carried European cut dresses, so they were actually smaller than most other stores.

The dress I fell in love with it was an 8. With a corset top. I didn't even want to try, but the consultant told me she would make it work. She laced the corset, then zipped it halfway. I walked to the mirror and decided this was the dress. But a European 8? That had no hope of zipping. It's basically the equivalent of a wedding dress size 6 -- two full sizes smaller than I had been fitting.

I took the dress off while the shop's owner called the designer to see if there was a 10 somewhere. I tried on a second dress that I wasn't a fan of and was told that the designer said that dress is nowhere to be found anywhere, that 8 is the only version, and he is not making it again.

The shop owner left and the consultant showed me that there was fabric up in the ribcage area. She said that a good seamstress would be able to let it out no problem and it would close.

"Or you could just lose ten pounds," the consultant said. "Just ten."

I'm used to being a 0 or 2. I've never lost just ten pounds in my life. Heck, I've never lost one pound voluntarily. 

I was debating over the dress and decided to try it on again. This time, the consultant was able to zip it all the way (after me holding my breath and taking off my bra).

"I knew it would zip," she told me. "I just couldn't try with the owner here."

I felt better. Sort of. It was still a project to fit into a size 8 ... even if it was a European size 8.

"You only have to lose ten pounds," the consultant reminded me. "Or, actually, maybe just 8. Or six."

"Sounds like I already lost four pounds off my goal," I told her.

But she's not coming on my wedding day. I won't have her magic fingers to zip me (and they are magic; she zipped another bride into a dress that she had no business fitting into). So I can either hope and pray that my mom can figure out how to squeeze me into that dress ... or I can lose six pounds.

So I came to the gym in my complex and worked out. I'm actually really, really sweating in that photo and my face is super red. I don't look as cute as the photo from when I was leaving the house.

But I guess it doesn't matter what I look like at the gym. What matter is what I look like 10 months from now. I'm either gonna look like a sausage squeezed into a dress or I'm gonna look like a woman who looked straight into a challenge and said, "I got this" and actually went to the gym on a regular basis and made sure her dress didn't have to be altered.

This is just the first day, but I'm proud of myself. Now let's just hope day two comes.

BRIDAL BABBLE: Do you have a wedding workout plan?