Sigh....

Marchesa Spring/ Summer 2012

Louis Vuitton Spring/ Summer 2012

Dior Spring/ Summer 2012

Jason Wu Spring/ Summer 2012

Ralph Lauren Spring/ summer 2012

Oscar De La Renta Spring/ Summer 2012

Erdem Spring/ Summer 2012

Shoots to inspire

Sometimes inspiration shoots get a bit of flack for being unrealistic but they’re really so inspiring and soooo pretty! Just have a peek at these....

http://www.lovemydress.net/blog/2012/01/rock-n-roll-meets-60s-french-chic-a-jetset-honeymoon.html

http://www.greylikesweddings.com/2-inspiration/new-year-styled-shoot-by-eric-kelley-photography/

http://www.stylemepretty.com/2012/01/09/oahu-beach-inspiration-photo-shoot-by-la-fleur-weddings-simply-bloom-photography/

http://www.rockmywedding.co.uk/a-splash-of-contemporary-colour/

http://www.100layercake.com/blog/2012/01/03/vintage-hollywood-glam-shoot/

http://elegantwedding.ca/2012-01-12/inspiration/elegant-details/

Sunday catch up

 I’ve had a lovely week after taking a prolonged visit home. As previously mentioned I took two of my bridesmaids to The Alternative wedding fair which was great and we spent the whole day in London which included lots of cocktails and marvelling at the wonder of Harrods.

We did pretty well getting up early that morning considering we had been out the night before. I love being back in my hometown, getting together with my girlies for cocktails and dancing!

During the week the boy and I went back into London and visited the Ice bar. It was so fun, a cocktail is included in the entrance fee and I had a super yummy tequila concoction. My hands were sooo cold though!

We warmed up with THE BEST AFTERNOON TEA ever! I believe myself to be a bit of a connoisseur of afternoon tea and this offering from Podium was amazing. First we were brought a ‘tea butler’ and I chose a fruits of the forest tea and then we were given our plate of sandwiches. We had a choice of scones and I went for chocolate chip with chocolate praline spread which was divine! There were 4 full sized cupcakes (raspberry, lemon, toffee and chocolate) and then little miniature delights including a macaron, a marshmallow cone, a pineapple crumble, a raspberry mousse and a few other bits and bobs. Oh and this was all served on a SOLD CHOCOLATE PLATE!! I took the sandwich pic but my pic of the main cakes just couldn’t do justice.

 

I’ve been doing all kinds of chores and errands this weekend and tonight, when the boy comes back from work, we are going out for dinner. It will be nice after a weekend in my pj’s haha.

Hope everyone else had a lovely week!

"I'm not overweight. I'm just nine inches too short."

Me as a child

My struggle with weight has always been...well a struggle! As a child I was always a skinny little thing and that progressed into my teenage years. I was pretty straight up and down (with a big bum!) and that had its plus points. I was ‘the skinny one’ in my friendship group and I have to say that was something I rather enjoyed being. I was lucky with my metabolism, I used to be a really fussy eater so I would snack A LOT on chocolate and sweets and I never ate fruit or veg. I was active but in a way that is typical of most children, I played games with my friends and walked a lot of places, I didn’t actually do any particular exercise or sport. I remember I would wish for boobs to come along, I SOOO wanted them but overall I was happy with my figure.

Me just starting university

It all started to change when I met the boy at the age of 16. I think a few things contributed to this really. Firstly around this time was when alcohol started becoming more of a weekend fixture with regular house parties and secondly the boy and his family introduced me to so many new foods. I was always worrying about turning food away and appearing rude so I would try all manner of things, it was good because I became a much less fussier eater but it was also bad because I discovered things that were very yummy but very naughty (kebab, pie, pizza and carrot cake to name a few!). My future mother in law is quite a baker as well so heavy cakes and puddings became a regular occurrence.

We then moved out into our own apartment to go to university. Drinking became an even more regular incidence as did post night out kebabs! Living on our own away from our parents brought the novelty of being able to choose your own dinner and I have to say, we acted like children who had been left alone for the first time. We had an extortionate amount of takeaways and I loved to bake cakes. Combined with some medication that I was on my weight ballooned.

Me at my biggest

I was nearly 12 stone and I’m only short, it left my BMI at 30.7 which surpasses overweight and is technically counted as obese. Mentally I didn’t have much of a problem with my weight, I felt I knew how to dress in order to maximise my best assets and I always got a lot of positive attention from people. There were slips ups, particularly holidays; I had times I would cry on the first day because I couldn’t bear myself in a bikini. 

When I got engaged my first thoughts didn’t turn to a wedding diet, in fact it wasn’t until nearly 5 months later that I started watching my weight. I would say my final decision to lose weight came from 5 reasons:  

       1. My 5’2” frame was struggling to support my size G boobs. I had frequent back ache and found them so hard to dress! It’s hard to look demure when your boobs can hardly fit into anything without spilling over. No normal shops catered for my boob size and the specialist shops were quite expensive, I really wanted boobs a few sizes smaller. 

       2. Money! We used a takeaway site where after your order you were given points which could be collected and spent on things when you had enough. From the points we were roughly able to work out what we had spent on takeaways and it was enough to take us on a holiday! 

  

     3. I knew from early on I had wanted a vintage dress and after 5 months of being engaged and seeing various wedding blogs for me it was really important however I knew at my current size I would genuinely struggle to find one in my size.  

       

        4. My mum turned 50 and decided to celebrate by a long weekend in Spain with some of her friends. I was invited along, an invitation I turned down. My main reason for turning it down was university however I was relieved of the excuse. I knew I had the worst figure out of all the women that were going along. I was 21, they were in their 40s/50s with multiple children, it should really have been the other way around. These women looked after themselves and had great figures but there was a part of me that felt like they should have been looking at me thinking ‘oh to be 21 again’. 

         5. New Years Eve drama. We decided to have a lovely laid back New Year’s Eve with my friend and her boyfriend. We got some drinks in and went round her house for dinner and cocktails, it was a great plan. During our night in we decided to play on the kinnect, we were playing some kind of game that required running and the best way to win the race was to jog with your knees quite high. I was so struggling and I was quite embarrassed, this caused me to try and run in a different way and I fell over and hurt my ankle. It wasn’t serious but the boy dragged me onto the sofa from the floor. The kinnect has this *charming* feature where it films you then shows you the film afterwards. We watched the film back and it was all there, me running, me falling, me being dragged. What absolutely HORRIFIED me was the bit where I was being dragged. It looked like the boy had caught a whale and was trying to lift it overboard! The look of strain on his face! 

That was it, I started dieting and I’ve never looked back. 

Me now

I wrote a post a while back about how I actually lost the weight. We don’t have scales at our apartment and so the first month of dieting I didn’t think I had lost any weight. When I went back to my hometown to visit my parents I weighed myself and was shocked to find out I had lost a stone. The thing you realise when you’ve been dieting and lost some significant weight is suddenly everyone thinks it’s ok to tell you what they thought of your weight before you lost it...and it’s not positive. Knowing that what I was doing was working and that it turned out I wasn’t the only person who had a problem with my weight motivated me greatly and I continued to lose it. On average I was able to go back home every month for my monthly weigh in and there were tears of joy as dresses I never thought I would get into got zipped up easily. 

Sometimes I felt awkward about my weight loss, it was something I was proud of yet weight is a very uncomfortable issue to discuss sometimes. I have friends that have weight issues that asked me for advice and I was always worried about appearing patronising or as a know it all and I sometimes felt that people could be a bit annoyed with me, talking about how I was ‘lucky’ to have lost the weight, as if it wasn’t something I had achieved myself. Accepting compliments was something that I found a bit embarrassing as well, why is that such an English thing? One rule I had set myself right at the beginning was I was NEVER to watch what I ate or drank when I was out with friends, I enjoy food immensely and as mentioned before I’m quite a fussy eater and the kind of healthy options restaurants offer are not my cup of tea. I had so many friends who expressed ‘if we go out for dinner with you are you just going to eat salad?’, people put such a stereotype on me that I would pick at a small salad, something I find SO annoying when others do it.

I felt like my weight loss had been successful because I had brought my vintage wedding dress (and found the whole experience amazing), my back ache was gone and my boobs had become a much more manageable size and my previous takeaway fund was now able to fund buying lots of new clothes in my new size!

Sometimes when you’re dieting it’s hard to lose sight of what you actually want to achieve, it seems like there is no such thing as too rich or too thin sometimes. I’ve got no friends my height, they are all a lot taller than me so I don’t really have anyone I can compare my weight too and if my friends ever mentioned that they were heavier than me and maybe I was getting a bit skinny my reaction was ‘yes but you’re so much taller than me!’. 

Then my hair started falling out. Big clumps of it. Suddenly being an overweight bride wasn’t an issue but being a bald one was. I went to the doctors, all amounts of tests were carried out and I was told it was a reaction to me being underweight; my body had gone into trauma from the weight loss. At this point I had lost 4 and a half stone in 6 months. My BMI indicated a healthy weight and I felt like there were girls everywhere I looked that were smaller than me but I obviously took the doctor’s advice.

 

Turned out it was harder than I thought. My attitude to eating had changed completely during my diet and I was so much more aware of the nutritional value of things and I didn’t want to completely cock up my diet. I decided to increase my calorie allowance but also stop exercising. I had recently taken up to exercising and it was actually something I was enjoying so I was doing it daily. That combined with the stress I was under due to a loss in the family and my increasing hair loss meant that a few weeks later when I went for a weigh in...I had lost half a stone. Exercising had given me more muscle than I had realised and as fat weighs more than muscle when I stopped exercising I had lost weight! My bmi was now 17.9 (underweight is 18.5 and below) and I desperately needed to gain weight!

Luckily Christmas came and a lot of socialising combined with the allure of those Christmas markets led to a stone in weight gain and I’m at a healthy weight again. Balancing weight is really a hard job because it’s really hard to look at yourself and be able to see what everyone else sees. When I look back at photos of my old bigger self I don’t mind my figure at all, even though being at that weight again would be extremely unhealthy, yet I detest the weight I used to carry in my face. I think I look so bloated. My aim is just to sustain my weight, as I have my dress already I know what weight I need to maintain and that’s going to be done with some exercising, some nutritious meals...and the occasional takeaway!

Etsy shop of the week: Papercuts by Joe

$6000/ £3953

 Papercuts by Joe is simply incredible! Every item is hand cut from a single piece of paper, i mean this is beyond talent! This would be a perfect first year anniversary present, they would look so good framed!

$100/ £65.90

$45/ £29.65