'I'm a plus-size bride, here's why I won't lose weight for the wedding'
A bride-to-be says she won’t be losing weight ahead of her wedding after having an ‘epiphany’ about her body six years ago.
Hannah Attewell, 36, started dieting when she was 12 years old, and spent her 20s wearing all black clothes until she changed her mindset at age 30.
"I went on my first diet at 12. It was so instilled in me. I remember trying on a pair of trousers and them not fitting anymore and thinking I was fat when it was probably just a growth spurt," she explains.
"One girl in drama class said: 'Why are your knees like that?' in front of everyone sat in a circle, which I hadn’t noticed until that point so it gave me a new insecurity. I was acutely aware I was the fattest person in my whole school and my friends were all thin."
Attewell adds that these insecurities were heightened when she would go shopping with her friends at the weekend and ‘nothing would fit’, which made her feel left out.
"I felt like their mum trailing around after them chaperoning, and it felt very exclusionary because fashion is such an important thing as a teenager," she adds.
In her late teenage years and 20s she would only wear black so she ‘merged into the background’.
"I used to just wear black all the time. I remember wearing black on a beach in Australia," she recalls. "I wouldn’t wear anything that had any sort of personality.
"Now I wear things I enjoy wearing that show my personality, whereas before I would just try and be invisible and would only wear things that would mean I’d merge into the background."
Attewell, a size 24, says she didn’t go on dates in her 20s, but when she turned 30 she realised she was done with dieting.
"I was sitting on the sofa thinking about how many pounds I could lose a week until Christmas and I thought 'I can't do this anymore'," she says.
"I realised I can't be 45 and still feeling like this. I’ve been obsessed with losing weight for half my life. All the things I could’ve just done but didn't because I thought I had to wait until I’d lost weight. I had an overwhelming feeling of not wanting to settle for this anymore and waste no more time."
Attewell decided to use this newfound mindset to her advantage and went on ‘26 first dates’ before meeting her fiancé Charles Anderson, 32, a council administrator.
"In the past, I’d always go on a second date with someone if they said they liked me because the approval was enough, even if I didn’t want to," Attewell explains.
"Instead, I went into every date not even asking myself if they liked me. I went into them asking myself if I actually liked them."
Attewell met her now fiancé on Bumble and had ‘long phone conversations’ before they met.
"In terms of my weight there was no question,” she adds. "He's always saying 'you are the most beautiful girl in the world'."
The couple got engaged in April 2024 and Attewell started wedding dress shopping in May.
"At no point was I like maybe you should lose weight for this," she explains. "This assumption that you need to lose weight for your wedding is old.
"What if there's another way to feel good that doesn't involve going on a fad diet and weighing yourself every morning and letting yourself be dictated by this?
"The average UK woman is a size 16 but the most commonly stocked size in wedding dress shops is an eight. Our bodies change all the time, it's normal, especially as women."
Attewell, a wedding photographer, from St Albans, Hertfordshire, adds that you shouldn’t feel the need to change for anyone as "everyone at that wedding knows what you look like. They should be on your side".
"I've come a long way to feel okay about being fat, but spent the rollercoaster of my twenties refusing to do things because of it," she adds.
"I’ve realised it's only a small part of who I am, and I'm not going to use a load of mental energy trying to change.
"Before I wouldn't date. I wouldn't go on holiday, and I wouldn't have met my fiancé if I hadn't changed my opinion about myself.
“I do all the things I wouldn’t do before, there’s nothing I wouldn’t do now."
Additional reporting by SWNS.
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