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Each celebration had been more lavish than the lastthe location grander, the dress chicer, the bride hungrier.
Now it’smyturn, said a strange Gollum-like voice in my head.
Feelings of inadequacy from my early 20s only fueled my weight loss bloodlust.
Before I met my husband, I’d always been the single friend.
Walking down that aisle, a whippet in white, would showher.
It would show them all!
(Cue supervillain laugh.)
I didn’t have much to lose.
Except for a few dark semesters in college, I’ve always weighed about 120 pounds.
I’m short (just shy of 5 foot 3) and busty.
I really didn’t want to give up the fun, so I decided to experiment with my workouts.
I went five days eating nothing but lean protein and fat-free dairy.
I also upped my barre workouts to seven days a week and logged extra cardio.
I was consumed by food fantasies, envisioning my postwedding feast.
In the meantime, I filled the gaping hole of hunger with black coffee.
A starving bridezilla hopped up on too much caffeineI was a peach.
My fiance knew the torture was temporary and for the most part just accepted my madness.
I blinked back tears of fury.
I chose to be a bitch.
It was that I had to be antisocial.
It seemed worth it at the time.
In the end, I got down to 106 pounds.
Though I cherish this picture, part of me was steeped in disappointment on my wedding day.
I spent too much of the “most important day of my life” justifying my body to everyone.
“You look beautiful!”
I knew it was obvious I’d lost weight, but did everyone think of me as thin-thin?
On our honeymoon, no matter how much I stuffed myself, I had to keep going.
I’d depleted my self-control so entirely that I no longer had any restraint.
In the back of my mind, I thought I’d get back on track when we got home.
But after we returned to New York, Superstorm Sandy ravaged the city.
My husband’s company put us up in a hotel until our apartment was deemed safe.
I started skipping breakfast and lunch to make up for my after-work bingeing.
(Not like “your new puppy died” tragic, but you know.)
In the morning, I’d run 5 miles before barre class.
Exercise, which I’d always loved, now exhausted me.
I was 135 pounds, and my legs felt like dead weights.
I decided to see a nutritionist.
I was desperate to slim down, yes, but even more so to stop obsessing over food.
She suggested I drop the two-a-day workouts and eat a bigger breakfast and lunch to even myself out.
I was too puppeteered by food to do any of it.
At our last session, I stepped off the scale in tears.
“Weight loss is like infertility in many ways,” she said.
“Some women get pregnant when they stop worrying.
Stress messes with the body.”
I became so sick of caring what I looked like, and this indifference finally took the pressure off.
If I had a binge, I didn’t have a go at cancel it out by skipping meals.
As my body began to trust that it would be fed regularly, the urge to binge faded.
I recently weighed myself123 pounds.
Nor do I hope he has a work event so I can pillage the kitchen in private.
The best part about being a normal weight is that I get to be a normal person.
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