‘We’re getting married THIS year!’, is probably the most over-used phrase in our house at the moment. Since the moment the clock struck 12 on New Year’s Eve I have said it to Andy more times that I can count. Now we’re into April, it seems like we’ve suddenly gone from having a wedding ‘next summer’, to having a wedding only a few short months away. The six months to go mark seems to have sailed way past, and now we’ve got less than 150 days until the big day! I’m ridiculously excited, but slightly terrified too!
This turning of the year has got me back into the wedding frame of mind. I slipped out of planning mode for a bit at the end of last year; the big things were booked, it was too soon for the little details, everything seemed so far off. Suddenly though, I’m gripped with a new sense of urgency. There’s lots to do, and lots to do now! I’m back pinteresting like crazy, hunting down the perfect way to decorate a jam jar, attempting to draft wedding invites, and trying to learn how on earth paper pom-poms are made. I’ve started a wedding ‘to do’ list, to try and make sure everything gets done before the big day. It’s a very long list….!
The first thing on my list was tackle the Dreaded Wedding Diet. I know Paris got onto this months ago, so I’m a bit behind, but now we’re well into 2016 is here, it’s time to get wedding dress ready!
The wedding diet had been a bit of a joke, usually only referred to as I was tucking to a massive curry (with all the added extras) or a slice of cake. Now though it seems time to actually do something. I don’t have a particular weight in mind, I’m just hoping for a few less lumps and bumps under my wedding dress.
The first thing I did was tackle a Whole30. The idea is for 30 days you eat ‘clean’. No grains, no dairy, no alcohol, no sugar, no additives. It sounds absolutely horrendous when you see it on paper like that, but in reality it’s not that bad. I did a couple of Whole30s two years ago and lost about a stone and half and felt really good. Weight loss aside, it left me with more energy and better skin. No bad thing in the wedding run up.
The thing I like best about Whole30 is that encourages you to eat. As long as you follow the rules you can eat as much as you like. Hurrah! I’m not good with restrictive diets. I get hungry quickly (Andy’s taken to carrying emergency snacks around with him), and I’m not a nice person when I’m hungry! I would be horrendous to live with on something like the 5:2 diet. Similarly I’m not very good at the ‘a little bit of what you fancy’ rule. When I fancy pizza, I usually fancy the entire pizza.
The lack of pizza was a bit of a challenge, but otherwise I quite enjoyed the food, and I’m trying to keep the rules up as much as possible now I’ve finished my 30 days. My freezer is chock full of individual portions of soup, vegetable curries and stews cooked up in big batches. I’m eating lots of courgette noodles and cauliflower rice (see above). They’re surprisingly satisfying so I’m not feeling deprived. The hardest bit I found was breakfast; my usual porridge or cereal was swapped for eggs, eggs and even more eggs. I got so sick of them some days I could easily have just skipped breakfast entirely. All those eggs were worth it though, and I finished the plan a stone lighter. Part of that could be due to the be due to the food poisoning we both picked up on our Christmas holiday in India though, so I guess I can’t take all the credit!
Photo-bombed in India.
Three weeks ago I finally bite the bullet and joined a gym. I’d been putting it off for so long because gyms in Hong Kong are veeeery pricey. The cheaper ones, like one I used to go to, are full of aggressive sales staff, pushing you to sign up to personal training by attacking you with comments about how fat you are, and how you’re doing everything wrong. I struggle to motivate myself to exercise at the best of times, so knowing that I’d have to face that every time would usually be enough of an incentive for me to stay at home. I decided this time it was worth paying a little bit more for somewhere I’d actually enjoy going to, and so far its paying off. My planks and squats might be rather pathetic, but I can feel myself getting stronger already.
The next thing on the list ended up there a little by accident. A few weeks I popped into Benefit for an eyebrow wax. I usually just tackle my brows myself with tweezers, but I had a discount coupon so thought I’d treat myself. I mentioned to the brow technician that I was trying to tidy my eyebrows up a bit because I was getting married in the summer. She let out a gasp. There was panic in her eyes. When in the summer she asked? June? July? When I told her August she actually sighed with relief. That’s fine, she said, that gives me time to sort this out!
Now, I know my eyebrows are a little bit scruffy, but I never realised my eyebrows were that bad. I went through the standard faze of terrible over plucking in my teens (I’d share a picture, but its just too embarrassing!). At one time they were so short and pointing my brother took to calling me ‘Spock’. Another time I started plucking between my eyebrows and went a bit far one way. Tried to even it out but went to far. Tried to even out the other side and so… you get the idea, until I had a less than attractive two-inch gap between my eyebrows. Thankfully those days are long gone and these days I don’t do too much more than a little bit of tweezing. Even this, apparently, is too much. My eyebrows are a point of horror for brow technicians. I left the shop under strict instructions not to touch my brows in any way, and to go back to benefit every month to let the stylist fix me.
So that’s that, the next few months will see my To Do list ticked off with hopefully a slightly slimmer, slightly fuller browed me!
Jennie x
