As a plus size woman (size US22-24) I was sooooo embarrassed during every aspect of my wedding planning and the actual wedding. Dress sizes are so much smaller than normal sizes, and the cheaper dresses don't tend to go as big as I am. I ended up having to go to a boutique and buy a floor dress that was tight. I was thrilled because it was tighter, I looked slimmer, and "slimmer is prettier." My husband did the lighting for our stage, and I was asking over and over if the lighting was too much, if it made me look bigger. I hated taking our pictures, and hated looking at them because I was comparing our pictures to other's. It was so painful for me. Every step of the process was filled with body judgement - though, I thought it was because I am overweight, I didn't realize it also affected slimmer figures so heavily. People close to me asked me to drink more water, and eat very little so I would lose weight and fit into my dress on the wedding day. My little sister was my only bridesmaid and she felt so bad that her body was shown in the dress, even though she looked STUNNING. There was so much weight-guilt all around, I heard it from EVERYONE. It's a shame. Remember: your body serves you, and works very hard for you. It provides you with so much! Love it for that.
Sending my love to you ♥️ this is so engrained in our culture, it really takes each of us to try and make a change. I hope you enjoyed your wedding day and had lots of fun still, it’s a celebration of love so I hope you and your partner are very happy!
I know my comment is late but when I started looking at wedding planning I was bombarded with weight loss supplement ads and workout program ads. This did lead me to spiral a little and I had to start getting ad blocking extensions to turn on when looking at anything wedding related.
Thanks for sharing - nowadays it’s so easy for those products to reach exactly who they want based on our searches. I hope you were able to block all of it out, it’s already such a stressful process x
Thank you so much for this video! ❤you did a wonderful job with historic research to put these rituals into context. I got married last year and found the diet culture surrounding weddings to be very difficult to manage and triggering (as someone with a historic eating disorder). It all started with shopping for a wedding dress when the sizes were not consistent with standard sizing (meaning you often were upsized by 2-4 sizes). We kept our wedding small (16 people in Las Vegas) and a secret from most family and friends to keep the pressure as manageable as possible. For me (and my husband), this was hugely helpful.
Thank you so much for sharing your experience 🙏 I really think that, knowing that the dresses run small, it’s really ridiculous that the sizes are not adjusted to reflect realistically what size they will fit - glad you found a solution for you and I hope you had a lovely celebration ♥️
The importance of marriage as a societal construct also varies between countries and cultures. In my understanding being someone’s wife seems to be pretty coveted status in US for example and people seem to get married veeery fast. Cause it’s ”romantic” or they wanna ”seal the deal”. Almost seems that sometimes people don’t concider it real until you have a ring on your finger. In Finland (not sure about other nordic countries), it doesn’t matter at all in a legal sence if you’re married or live in a ”common law marriage”.
True… but nowadays it’s almost with everything.. Xmas for example… stressing people about nothing… traditions.. why? Because we did it for ages? I’m so glad it’s all over
Wedding is a good business for companies who serve couples. But in reality a lot of people don’t even want “traditional wedding” but society has pressure on brain and people waist money for nothing ….
I definitely agree on the money point - some weddings cost as much as a down payment for a house, I find it very hard to justify! But my family have never been very traditional anyway 👀 so I can see how it’s different for some other cultures
I relate to this so much! I am currently planning our wedding and every wedding prep search I do on pinterest includes a crash diet specific to weddings! I have always been so perplexed as to how any crash diet could be wedding specific?? I was aware of this culture when wedding dress shopping and told my family that I would not buy a wedding dress based on the hope that I would lose weight, but this was still an expectation when I tried on dresses that I felt were not flattering - my family told me that I just needed to lose weight and all the dresses would fit better but I have seen time and time again brides buying dresses too small for them and massively fluctuating in weight in the lead up to the wedding due to the pressure to lose the weight and plan a huge wedding
Thank you for sharing your experience ♥️ I think you’re looking at it in the right way, unfortunately the pressure to go on a diet is so amplified during wedding planning! I hope you’re able to navigate this in a healthy way and have an amazing time at your wedding! 🙏✨
One thing you didn’t mention is sex. Even if most people don’t wait till the wedding some do. Since people who gets married is more traditional than the average person we can say a bigger portion do this. Many brides want to look their best for their first time with the groom. Since the beauty ideal is thinnesses that leads to dieting.
My aunt (the only wedding I've been to in my life) only grew out her hair because she usually wears it short but she wanted to have a hair-do on her wedding day. I didn't know there is this specific wedding beauty craze. I mean, women are always expected to be at their most beautiful (yikes). But this is even on another level ...
Hey! Jessica wishing you a happy new year and your videos are too too too helpful to me in my life and I love your videos so so much and I wish you reach 40K Subscribers very very soon!🎉🎉💕
I'm getting married in 3 weeks. Our engagement shoot a year ago plummeted my body image. My doctor grumbled that I was putting pressure on myself because of "photoshopped celebrity weddings" and I didn't need to diet because my BMI was just fine. I felt like I was treated like a child. She sent me to a nutritionist. The nutritionist completely ignored the fact that I had an impending wedding, and told me to eat more than I normally do because I was at a lower weight than she liked. After two weeks, I started getting nightmares about being overweight. Hearing about my struggle to stick with her "eat more" plan, she told me to keep trying. It feels like the pre-wedding weight mania is inescapable for someone recovering from an ED. And yet health professionals don't really know how to address it. Maybe I'm unlucky or am not doing something right. But I look forward to a time when photos are rarely taken of me again so I can think about something other than my appearance in them.
P. S. I grew up in the Russian diaspora, where fat phobic talk is rampant. An aunt who works at a wedding magazine has openly disparaged the images of brides in American media... I think we should celebrate that magazines are moving towards publishing more diverse bodies. But to her, it's something to grieve. Cultural upbringing like that sticks with you regardless of what you personally value. Our words about other people's bodies have rippling effects. I hope my diaspora and home country can evolve away from this rhetoric soon. I try to do my part by talking about diversity to my family. But it feels like I never get my message through. At most, family members watch their words more when I'm in the room. Sigh.
@@sashas5390 I’m sorry for your experience. You are right these things take a lot of time to change when they’re rooted so deeply in a culture… I still hope you’re able to enjoy the amazing wedding day you deserve, remember it’s a celebration for you and your partner ♥️ sending you much love xx
such a well-researched and interesting video! im definitely far off from getting married anytime soon but this is an eye opener, thank you c: as someone also from the uk, i'm definitely sporting the double sock vibe too hehe
So from my view as a women married in the USA, weddings area big deal. From my understanding 100 years ago they weren't but with the added technology of TVs the first royal wedding from England started the whole 'be a princess for you wedding' idea. With the advent of social media, things continued to blow up. The perk of being married here is really a HUGE tax break, so sometimes people do rush weddings to save money. Also I'm sure in the coming years we will see more and more LGBT+ sources for wedding advertisements. It was limited, at least in the USA, because it wasn't legal in most places. Also I may be generalizing, but the LGBT+ people I know are against the heteronomy of weddings and so they don't spend as much when they do get married, so they aren't targeted for a lot of marketing here.
Thank you for adding to this - I think that’s definitely a big difference compared to Europe, like someone already said here, if two people live together at the same address for a period they can then claim tax breaks as a couple even without a formalized marriage. Good to keep the conversation going, this is interesting! xx
I live in Saudi Arabia, where arranged marriages are common , it's really depressing and unfair for most of us, girls and men as well... and the thing is that most of these marriages end with divorce, to the point that basically divorce here becomes really normal . Nothing against divorced people or divorce in general, but if you are going to get married, you should from the beginning have the right to choose the one that you want to spend the rest of your life with.
As a plus size woman (size US22-24) I was sooooo embarrassed during every aspect of my wedding planning and the actual wedding. Dress sizes are so much smaller than normal sizes, and the cheaper dresses don't tend to go as big as I am. I ended up having to go to a boutique and buy a floor dress that was tight. I was thrilled because it was tighter, I looked slimmer, and "slimmer is prettier." My husband did the lighting for our stage, and I was asking over and over if the lighting was too much, if it made me look bigger. I hated taking our pictures, and hated looking at them because I was comparing our pictures to other's. It was so painful for me. Every step of the process was filled with body judgement - though, I thought it was because I am overweight, I didn't realize it also affected slimmer figures so heavily. People close to me asked me to drink more water, and eat very little so I would lose weight and fit into my dress on the wedding day. My little sister was my only bridesmaid and she felt so bad that her body was shown in the dress, even though she looked STUNNING. There was so much weight-guilt all around, I heard it from EVERYONE. It's a shame. Remember: your body serves you, and works very hard for you. It provides you with so much! Love it for that.
Sending my love to you ♥️ this is so engrained in our culture, it really takes each of us to try and make a change. I hope you enjoyed your wedding day and had lots of fun still, it’s a celebration of love so I hope you and your partner are very happy!
I know my comment is late but when I started looking at wedding planning I was bombarded with weight loss supplement ads and workout program ads. This did lead me to spiral a little and I had to start getting ad blocking extensions to turn on when looking at anything wedding related.
Thanks for sharing - nowadays it’s so easy for those products to reach exactly who they want based on our searches. I hope you were able to block all of it out, it’s already such a stressful process x
@@JessicaVianaa Thank you for your kind comment. Thankfully I am now in a healthier mindset.
Thank you so much for this video! ❤you did a wonderful job with historic research to put these rituals into context. I got married last year and found the diet culture surrounding weddings to be very difficult to manage and triggering (as someone with a historic eating disorder). It all started with shopping for a wedding dress when the sizes were not consistent with standard sizing (meaning you often were upsized by 2-4 sizes). We kept our wedding small (16 people in Las Vegas) and a secret from most family and friends to keep the pressure as manageable as possible. For me (and my husband), this was hugely helpful.
Thank you so much for sharing your experience 🙏 I really think that, knowing that the dresses run small, it’s really ridiculous that the sizes are not adjusted to reflect realistically what size they will fit - glad you found a solution for you and I hope you had a lovely celebration ♥️
The importance of marriage as a societal construct also varies between countries and cultures. In my understanding being someone’s wife seems to be pretty coveted status in US for example and people seem to get married veeery fast. Cause it’s ”romantic” or they wanna ”seal the deal”. Almost seems that sometimes people don’t concider it real until you have a ring on your finger.
In Finland (not sure about other nordic countries), it doesn’t matter at all in a legal sence if you’re married or live in a ”common law marriage”.
Very true!
True… but nowadays it’s almost with everything.. Xmas for example… stressing people about nothing… traditions.. why? Because we did it for ages? I’m so glad it’s all over
Wedding is a good business for companies who serve couples. But in reality a lot of people don’t even want “traditional wedding” but society has pressure on brain and people waist money for nothing ….
I definitely agree on the money point - some weddings cost as much as a down payment for a house, I find it very hard to justify! But my family have never been very traditional anyway 👀 so I can see how it’s different for some other cultures
@@JessicaVianaa yeah I agree with you)
I relate to this so much! I am currently planning our wedding and every wedding prep search I do on pinterest includes a crash diet specific to weddings! I have always been so perplexed as to how any crash diet could be wedding specific?? I was aware of this culture when wedding dress shopping and told my family that I would not buy a wedding dress based on the hope that I would lose weight, but this was still an expectation when I tried on dresses that I felt were not flattering - my family told me that I just needed to lose weight and all the dresses would fit better but I have seen time and time again brides buying dresses too small for them and massively fluctuating in weight in the lead up to the wedding due to the pressure to lose the weight and plan a huge wedding
Thank you for sharing your experience ♥️ I think you’re looking at it in the right way, unfortunately the pressure to go on a diet is so amplified during wedding planning! I hope you’re able to navigate this in a healthy way and have an amazing time at your wedding! 🙏✨
My husband picked out my wedding our wedding everything 😅
One thing you didn’t mention is sex. Even if most people don’t wait till the wedding some do. Since people who gets married is more traditional than the average person we can say a bigger portion do this. Many brides want to look their best for their first time with the groom. Since the beauty ideal is thinnesses that leads to dieting.
Looking forward to watching this video tonight! ❤️
You're a darling Jessica. The topics of your videos are always very interesting and informative. Thank you
You’re so sweet, thank you so much ♥️♥️♥️
You look so good in white ❤
Aw thank you ❤❤
Agreed!
My aunt (the only wedding I've been to in my life) only grew out her hair because she usually wears it short but she wanted to have a hair-do on her wedding day. I didn't know there is this specific wedding beauty craze. I mean, women are always expected to be at their most beautiful (yikes). But this is even on another level ...
Hey! Jessica wishing you a happy new year and your videos are too too too helpful to me in my life and I love your videos so so much and I wish you reach 40K Subscribers very very soon!🎉🎉💕
Thank you so much for the love ❤
I recently got engaged and I felt pressure to lose weight before the engagement 😬(I knew the week it would happen, but not the day)
Congrats on the engagement! 🎉 I hope you’re able to ease the pressure a little so you can have an amazing fun time at your wedding ❤
I'm getting married in 3 weeks. Our engagement shoot a year ago plummeted my body image. My doctor grumbled that I was putting pressure on myself because of "photoshopped celebrity weddings" and I didn't need to diet because my BMI was just fine. I felt like I was treated like a child. She sent me to a nutritionist.
The nutritionist completely ignored the fact that I had an impending wedding, and told me to eat more than I normally do because I was at a lower weight than she liked. After two weeks, I started getting nightmares about being overweight. Hearing about my struggle to stick with her "eat more" plan, she told me to keep trying.
It feels like the pre-wedding weight mania is inescapable for someone recovering from an ED. And yet health professionals don't really know how to address it. Maybe I'm unlucky or am not doing something right. But I look forward to a time when photos are rarely taken of me again so I can think about something other than my appearance in them.
P. S. I grew up in the Russian diaspora, where fat phobic talk is rampant. An aunt who works at a wedding magazine has openly disparaged the images of brides in American media... I think we should celebrate that magazines are moving towards publishing more diverse bodies. But to her, it's something to grieve. Cultural upbringing like that sticks with you regardless of what you personally value. Our words about other people's bodies have rippling effects.
I hope my diaspora and home country can evolve away from this rhetoric soon. I try to do my part by talking about diversity to my family. But it feels like I never get my message through. At most, family members watch their words more when I'm in the room. Sigh.
@@sashas5390 I’m sorry for your experience. You are right these things take a lot of time to change when they’re rooted so deeply in a culture… I still hope you’re able to enjoy the amazing wedding day you deserve, remember it’s a celebration for you and your partner ♥️ sending you much love xx
@@JessicaVianaa
such a well-researched and interesting video! im definitely far off from getting married anytime soon but this is an eye opener, thank you c: as someone also from the uk, i'm definitely sporting the double sock vibe too hehe
May the double sock never fail us 😌
So from my view as a women married in the USA, weddings area big deal. From my understanding 100 years ago they weren't but with the added technology of TVs the first royal wedding from England started the whole 'be a princess for you wedding' idea. With the advent of social media, things continued to blow up. The perk of being married here is really a HUGE tax break, so sometimes people do rush weddings to save money.
Also I'm sure in the coming years we will see more and more LGBT+ sources for wedding advertisements. It was limited, at least in the USA, because it wasn't legal in most places. Also I may be generalizing, but the LGBT+ people I know are against the heteronomy of weddings and so they don't spend as much when they do get married, so they aren't targeted for a lot of marketing here.
Thank you for adding to this - I think that’s definitely a big difference compared to Europe, like someone already said here, if two people live together at the same address for a period they can then claim tax breaks as a couple even without a formalized marriage. Good to keep the conversation going, this is interesting! xx
And also, the average BMI of people back then was much lower, so fatness to them would be a lot smaller to us.
I wouldn't say fatness was ideal. Being curvy was i.e. having fat on the hips, not excess fat on the stomach.
I live in Saudi Arabia, where arranged marriages are common , it's really depressing and unfair for most of us, girls and men as well... and the thing is that most of these marriages end with divorce, to the point that basically divorce here becomes really normal . Nothing against divorced people or divorce in general, but if you are going to get married, you should from the beginning have the right to choose the one that you want to spend the rest of your life with.
Yeah, because you have to do this for life and not for only one event.