by Susan Wiggs
BABE-IFICATION
Making sure you look your best on your wedding day
ELIZABETH
Dear Readers, I do not naturally look as good as I did on my wedding day. Shocking, right? I used my wedding as a motivating force to build a healthy foundation for the rest of my life. Okay, that’s what I told people. I really just wanted to look hot. Think about it: your wedding day will be the prettiest day of your life. It’s all downhill from there. Just kidding—but it will be one of your most photographically documented days, so I put a high priority on reaching my full babe potential. For me, though, getting in shape for the wedding had an unanticipated benefit. It really did have an effect on my life.
Admit it: you want to look smokin’ hot on your wedding day, too. Those pictures will be everywhere, you’ll have an ex-boyfriend in the congregation, one of your bridesmaids weighs ninety-five pounds soaking wet and you have to dazzle everyone. And, hey, maybe you can spend your engagement developing a healthier lifestyle for yourself. Maybe, as your love grows for your future husband, you can also find a new love for yourself and for your bodacious bod. Just imagine it: your legs can climb mountains; your arms can give your fiancé a giant, crushing hug; your hands can carry bags from Macy’s, Banana Republic AND Sephora without chipping your manicure.
I graduated from college with a lifelong athlete’s breezy lack of concern about my figure. I had been on sports teams my entire life, so my normal routine included a daily three-hour swim workout fueled by a diet consisting of everything from bacon fries to cookie dough. This was working well for me…right up until I replaced my swim coach with a boss, my teammates with a cadre of coworkers and my team captain with a 6-foot-4, 165-pound Adonis of a fiancé.
Here’s something nobody tells you about moving in with your man: he eats. He eats more than a gestating elephant.
So when you’re preparing dinner together during those first blissful months of cohabitation, you end up making two man-sized portions—and you split yours down the middle. At first, you eat half your serving and save the rest for lunch. One day, you’ll be feeling extra hungry and you’ll eat three-quarters of it. The next day, you’ll do the same thing. Before you know it, you’re on the slippery slope to eating as much as your man does, despite the fact that you’re half his size and his metabolism runs circles around your own. One day, you step on the scale and realize that you’re carrying around the weight equivalent of a small pony and you can’t button your favorite jeans.
At least that’s what happened to me. And if it doesn’t happen to you, I don’t want to hear about it because I’ll have to shoot myself.
Still, there’s a right way and a wrong way to get rid of your welcome-to-adulthood saddlebags. I’ll tell you what I did, but the most important lesson you can learn from me is to learn what your rockin’ bod needs from you. What worked for me might not work for you. The best you can do is sit quietly with yourself from time to time and take a minute or two to really listen to yourself.
It will be awkward at first—I mean, come on, who really buys that whole “my body is my temple” crap in the first place?—but find a way to be conscious of yourself. Once I started doing this, I noticed that I always felt uncomfortable and slightly comatose after every meal. I had started popping Tums like they were candy. Eventually, I figured out that it was because I shoveled food into my face like a madwoman who was afraid the imaginary voices in her head were going to steal her sustenance. So every time I sat down to dinner, I made a point of eating more slowly and pausing to savor my food. The next thing I knew, it had been a whole month and I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt the chalky, sugary texture of a Tums in my mouth.
I also noticed I was feeling lethargic and sleepy. I called my future mother-in-law, who is conveniently a doctor (seriously, try to marry into a family with a doctor—it is awesome), and she said it sounded like I wasn’t getting enough exercise. My first reaction was to protest. If I wasn’t getting enough activity, then what did she call my nightly cardio routine that consisted of striding from the couch to the refrigerator and back, carrying homemade hand weights fashioned from leftover containers of Thai food?
I think she must have talked to Dave about my concerns because I noticed that he slyly started asking me to go on runs with him. Then, for our anniversary, he gave me an endearingly girly shirt (isn’t it funny how guys assume that if it’s pink, we’ll like it?), emblazoned with a photograph of us and the words “Team Awesome” across the chest. “I think we should run a half marathon together,” he said, “and I made myself a matching shirt so we would have a team uniform.”
Okay, all together now: AWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW.
I’ve since talked to Dave about this and he insists that he was not using the half marathon as an excuse to get his fiancée to shed a little bit of her extra padding. I tend to believe him, since he wouldn’t even notice if I dyed my hair black and pierced my eyebrows. He comes from an intimidatingly athletic family: his mother and two brothers are all marathon runners. He was just excited to get me to share another interest with him.
Well, people, we sat down and devised a training program for me. Over the course of three months, I slowly increased my long-distance runs until I could run ten miles without stopping.
I ran the Rock ’n’ Roll half marathon in Seattle exactly one month before my wedding. Oh, and what a run it was. Twenty-five thousand people, a boatload of local bands and enough energy drinks to float a yacht. I even managed to rope Molly, my best friend and bridesmaid; Dave’s mom; and his brother into running the race as well. (Spoiler alert: I finished last among us, but that’s to be expected of someone from the Wiggs clan. We’re large and slow-moving, like glaciers.)
The night before the race, I found myself in a tizzy-fit of nerves. I’d been training for this race for months, calling my mother to whine about my aching legs and reminding myself that this was all worth it if it meant I looked gorgeous in my wedding dress. When I realized that in less than twenty-four hours I’d be completing a milestone that had once seemed as distant as my wedding, I had a little breakdown.
Dave found me crouched on the kitchen floor, eating brown sugar straight from the container with a spoon and crying.
This was new. He tried to pry the spoon from my sticky hands, but I jerked away from him and told him that I wasn’t going to run the race tomorrow. He didn’t even bother trying to convince me otherwise—he knew it was time to call in the big guns. He called my mom. I was not privy to the conversation, but according to him, she had one piece of advice: “Feed her, put her to bed and rub her back until she’s asleep. It worked when she was two, and it’ll work when she’s twenty-five.” Dave dropped everything and took me out for an ENORMOUS pasta dinner. He shoveled gnocchi and garlic bread into my face until I whimpered in protest, then whisked me home and tucked me into bed, staring at me anxiously with the eyes of a desperate man. He turned me on my side and commenced pawing at my back, unable to be gentle amid the swirling maelstrom of my stress.
But, oh boy, did it work.
Within five minutes, I was blissfully asleep, and when the alarm went off the next morning at the crack of dawn, I bounded out of bed, ready to take on the world.
The reality of the race hit me again as I took off my jacket and looked down at the T-shirt Dave had made, but this time the butterflies in my stomach came from knowing that I was about to run the half marathon I’d been training for, and that I was exactly one month from my wedding.
The race began and I was feeling pretty great. Awesome music was blasting over the loudspeakers and I felt light and loose on my feet. We got to the first band, and lemme tell you: live music during a race is inCRED. Every time I heard the strains of a rock song rolling back up the course toward me, I got a little bounce in my step and sped up so I could get to the band and hear what they were playing.
However. The route turned east and suddenly we were headed straight into the sun. This was approximately mile 3 (of thirtee
n), or right around the time I felt a painful tightness start to creep into my left knee. While the course wasn’t very hilly overall, the first little bit of elevation turned the tightness into a gradually intensifying pain. At the next water station, I took a walking break and tried to give my leg a wee rest. “Holy crap,” I thought, “I still have ten more miles of this misery and my knee is already giving me trubs. What am I going to doooooooo?” (Yes, I did draw that syllable out into a howl in my head.)
Unfortunately, the five-second walking break didn’t really do much for me (big surprise). I slowly came to understand that my knee was just going to get worse and worse. By mile 6, I felt like someone had shoved a knife up under my kneecap and was twisting it with glee.
And here’s the moment I knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that in a month I would marry the best man on the face of the earth: sweet Dave stayed running alongside me this whole time, telling me how cute I looked and how excited he was for me. He never once breathed a word of complaint as I whined and cursed and lashed out at him. He didn’t say a thing about the fact that he normally ran twice as fast as we were going. The next thing I knew, Dave reached out to put his arm around me and I burst into honking, messy tears.
I was so full of love at that moment—love for the man next to me, for the family and friends running the race with me, for my parents at home, tracking my progress on the race website. But I was also a little wistful. I realized, hobbling my way past the mile 8 marker, that part of my life—the part where I was the darling of my family, where my mother still thought of me as a little girl and was ready to swoop in at a moment’s notice to help me clean up my messes—was about to come to a close. In one short month, I would enter the mystical world of married women. My mom and I would, for the first time in my life, share the same title. We would be Wives.
Normally the idea wouldn’t be that emotional, but eight miles into a half marathon, with a knee screaming in pain, I had to slump down on the side of the road and have a little sob-fest.
As soon as he saw what was happening, Dave came straight back to my side and whispered, “This is going to be the hardest mile of the whole race, but as soon as we hit mile 9 you’ll feel fine.” I don’t think he meant that to sound like a metaphor for our wedding, but it totally was. We were one month out—all the big pieces were in place, but we hadn’t filled in the little last-minute gaps yet. The wedding seemed close enough to touch, yet everyone around me acted like four weeks was an eternity. The only other person who was feeling the pressure in the same way as me was my mom.
And oh, did I want my mommy at that moment.
But I was happy to settle for a caring, worried groom instead.
Dave ushered me to the medical station about five minutes later and gave me two Advils. I steeled myself against the pain in my knee and pushed ahead to what I knew would be the steepest hill of the entire race. Having gotten my head wrapped around the midrace wedding panic attack, I suddenly felt a renewed sense of excitement and optimism. As I ran the hill, I picked up speed.
And apparently I’m friggin’ good at running uphill. I was passing people left and right, even with my knee pain, and by the time I got to the top I had left a whole army of suckers in my wake. At the hill’s crest, we entered a tunnel—which apparently was full of Prozac-flavored air, because I suddenly felt GREAT and started skipping and cheering.
The next thing I knew, I had blown by the mile 10 marker and I was zooming past person after person. Dave laughed to see the change that had come over me (and I thought—but didn’t say—that he should start getting used to my crazy mood swings). By the time we emerged from the tunnel, I was pretty much on drugs. That’s how great I felt. The pain in my knee was still excruciating, but I didn’t care.
Suddenly, I could see the finish line.
Talk about an adrenaline rush. As we rounded the bend, I could see the balloon arches marking the end of the race and I knew that, despite the knee, I would be able to push through the pain and run hard for the rest of the race.
I began to sprint as I ran down the ramp into downtown Seattle and could hear cheers reverberating across the entire city from the stadium where the finish line waited. I wanted to scream with exuberance, but I didn’t because that would have been embarrassing and I like to pretend to have decorum sometimes.
Over the weeks leading up to the race, Dave and I had been finishing every practice run holding hands—to make sure that we looked good when we got to the end of the race. Well, folks, I screwed it up. About two hundred yards away from the finish line, Dave reached out and grabbed my hand and I suddenly burst into tears (again). In that moment, I thought I would explode from the love I felt for him. I was so proud of myself for finishing, and so thankful that My One did it with me. I fought to keep my sobs in check because I wanted to look pretty for the professional photo of us—but no luck. The result ended up being a picture of me half crying, half smiling, and was pretty high on the ugly scale. But in the photograph, you can also see the incredible feeling I had, knowing that my months of training and hard work had paid off.
A month later, I had the same ugly-yet-touching expression on my face as I walked down the aisle toward my groom.
I’m nothing if not consistent, I suppose.
So if you’re a runner, you’re probably wondering what my time was. I’ll admit, I felt a little sheepish about how slow I was—but I had to keep reminding myself that I was new to the sport and hadn’t really figured out a way to keep my body from breaking down on long runs. My overall time was a 2:15:13. Dave, whose best time in the half is a 1:13, made sure to point out that the race was a record for him, too—his Personal Worst. Har har, jerk. I guess he thought he could tease me after the crying and hysterics were over.
As we were leaving the stadium, I saw a guy wearing a shirt that said “Toenails are for sissies.” With that in mind, I cannot write about my first half-marathon experience without including an ode to my right middle toenail, which lost its battle to remain a part of my foot after the race.
Middle toenail, I hardly knew ye. You managed to make it through months of training, but alas, the actual race was simply too much for your little body to bear. The entire tip of my toe became a blister full of blood and pus, and I knew that when it broke, you would ride off into the sunset, along with my ability to wear open-toed shoes. I mourned your loss, thanked my mother for her excellent taste in close-toed wedding shoes, and painted toenail polish on my skin on the day of my marriage so I didn’t look like a weird, four-toenailed freak.
So there you have it. What started out as an attempt to get skinny for my wedding ended with an emotional race that reminded me how to find joy and energy in the whirlwind of the last month before my wedding. It was great. I laughed, I cried, I cried some more, I licked dried sweat off my upper lip and I lost my toenail. And I gained an appreciation for running, which is a skill that will keep me healthy for many years to come.
Okay, that last part is a lie. I still sort of hate running. But I can do it—and when my man is with me, it’s not so bad. Most of the time.
Oh, and I won’t complain about the twenty-five pounds I lost (and kept off ), either.
CONFESSIONS OF A ZITTY BRIDE
Dear Readers, there’s more to the beautification process than simply getting your bod in shape. My friends, let’s not forget that beauty is skin-deep—meaning that you need the stuff on the outside to look great, too. (Oh, did I misinterpret the whole “skin-deep” thing? No? Didn’t think so.)
Ever since I was little, I’ve had bad skin. I don’t know what it is—apparently I did something awful in a past life, because I’ve been punished with acne-prone skin from a ridiculously young age. I’ve also developed the nasty-yet-totally satisfying habit of spending inordinate amounts of time exactly one inch from the mirror in the bathroom, squeezing the hell out of my pores. Don’t act like you don’t know what I’m talking about. The average person’s nose is, from an inch away, rife with pores that are just
begging to be poked and prodded for hours on end. We’ve all done it. And since we’ve all done it, we also know it usually makes the skin look worse than it would if we just left it the hell alone.
Still, I am proud to say that on my wedding day, I had smooth, clear skin. And that’s a pretty big statement from me, queen of Accutane, a dermatologist’s dream, who always has some sort of breakout or rash or allergic reaction to her own sweat. One of my biggest concerns as the wedding got closer was that I would walk down the aisle with a bumpy face. My makeup artist could conceal any redness, but what about the shadow from a Vesuvius-sized zit?
A month before the wedding, I called up the Medi-Spa at Virginia Mason Hospital in Seattle and made an appointment. I figured it would be better than a regular spa because it had “Medi” in the title. Also it was located in the hospital, so if I had some sort of extreme reaction to the coconut oil–infused acid mask they could rush me down the hall to the emergency room screaming, “BRIDE WITH BAD SKIN COMING THROUGH! WE NEED THE BEST DOCTOR IN THE HOSPITAL, STAT!”
As it turns out, they do not offer that service.
Luckily, though, I got set up with Diane—an angel who leaves strains of harp music in her wake—and she knew exactly what to do for me.
I’m not going to pretend to know the names of all the different lotions she put on my face, but by golly did they work. I went in to see her three times in about two weeks and after each appointment, my skin got a little better.
However.
Two weeks before the wedding, I went in for my last appointment. I plopped myself on the heated bed and turned my face toward the doughnut-shaped light-slash-magnifying glass.
Diane bent over my face and wiped my skin with some nice-smelling sponge thingy.
“This is not good,” she said.
At first I was like, “What gives?” because I actually thought my skin was doing pretty well, considering. I mean, yeah, I was still a bit broken out but at least it wasn’t red alert status, the way it had been two weeks ago.