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Lose a few pounds, tone your body and have a flat stomach to fit perfectly into your wedding dress on D-Day. An automatic feature for some women. But others have said no to the traditional pre-wedding diet. On TikTok, these women encourage future brides to assume themselves as they are.
No more exhausting yourself with intense sports sessions, following a draconian diet and inflicting the ordeal of the weekly weighing before your wedding. A movement inspired by the body positive now invites future brides to accept their bodies. Unlike the hashtag #sheddingforthewedding (lose weight for marriage), which encourages brides to starve themselves by following drastic diets, round women rebel and say no to the pre-wedding diet. On TikTok, women, like Brynta Ponnfilm themselves eating junk food the day before D-Day. In her video, she wants to reassure her subscribers: “If you think you should starve yourself before your wedding, the answer is NO”. The goal? Show women that weight loss is not a mandatory step, and that you can always have fun. Now, more and more content shows women with buxom waists in wedding dresses. The hashtag plussizebride now has 53 million views.
Reject the dictates of thinness
This self-acceptance movement has gone viral thanks to Sydney Holmes, a young American who got married over a year ago. Like many other women, she felt the pressure of premarital diets while watching videos on TikTok. But she decided to say “no” to this diktat and to stay as she is. Dubbing herself “the favorite fat bride of the networks”, she subsequently inspired other future brides to deprive themselves of nothing. In one of his videos on Tik Tok, she quips: “It’s hard to believe I dieted for my wedding…because I didn’t.” In the comments, the socionauts applaud the snub of Holmes: “Two years ago I thought like this, now there are three months left before the wedding and I have not lost a single kilo. love for me!”. By showing herself with her white dress, the young woman proves that it is possible to feel beautiful as a bride with her curves. “My husband fell in love with me in this body. He thought I was absolutely gorgeous on our wedding day. And it was, I was sexy”she tells the New York Post.
Beyond the acceptance of their bodies and their forms, these women also wish to remove an additional source of stress and anguish in the preparation for their marriage. “Every bride should do whatever makes her feel comfortable, but for me, it wasn’t about focusing on losing weight,” says Renata D’Agrella Kenen the newspaper. “There’s a lot of pressure to look your best on your wedding day, but I reject the idea that your ‘best’ means being as thin as possible,” she adds. “Without that stress, I was able to focus on the more important aspects of the wedding day, like the special times with my husband, family and friends.”
A race to perfection
If these women have managed to ignore a host of injunctions around marriage, this is not the case for everyone. Many women continue to document their premarital weight loss process on TikTok. According to one investigation conducted in 2019 by TreadmillReviews, 62% of women said they had tried to lose weight before saying ‘I do’, by dieting and/or exercising. To speed up the process, some even indulge in coolsculpting (non-invasive technique of sculpting your body and removing cellulite). And some also impose a diet on the guests. Indeed, it is not uncommon for brides to ask their bridesmaids to lose weight. In 2017, several outlets, including The Sun, reported the story of Rachel Lenhoff, a bride-to-be who enrolled her bridesmaids in a specialized bootcamp called “Bridal Bootcamp” in order to lose weight. On Youtube, videos exercises are even specially dedicated to brides-to-be.