I’m getting married. Why do I feel like I need to be the thinnest version of myself first?

I want to feel the best on my wedding day. So I’m counting calories and kilos and spending money on every treatment possible because I’m up all night worrying about every angle of my dress. How has preparing to marry someone who loves my body as it is, become such a brutal examination of myself? I’m coming to the end of my wedding planning, dealing with all the usual ghastly stuff: like how expensive it all is, how everyone in your life has an opinion, that my dream winter wedding is most definitely the wrong time of year, and how out-of-hand the tiny ceremony we both wanted has become. But the raging panic I have inside is less about admin and more about shedding stacks of weight. If you’ve followed me for a while, you will know this is far from my first discussion about how I feel about my body and how I feel about how the internet sees bodies. I’ve struggled with my weight for 10 years. Now I’m getting married and I want to get to a weight I’ve not seen on my scales for over 20 years. It’s psychotic that I even believe this to be a possibility, but here I am, obsessing and measuring out two meals a day while hitting the gym five times a week in October and six times this month. It isn’t abnormal for a bride to get caught up in this. Almost every person I’ve spoken to has, in fact, lost at least a dress size for their wedding, because we want to feel great and at our best. My reason to lose weight is, and has always been, that I don’t recognise myself above a certain size. I broke my arm in March and I ballooned because of the codeine and inability to move. I have been at my heaviest ever this year, and it’s been unbearably exposing seeing myself on the new, second season of my show, Messy Lunch. When I should be looking on with pride, I just see a giant ball of squidge. I am a tall girl (5ft 10 1⁄2 in), currently weigh 84kg and would love to get to 74kg for the wedding. I am big-boned, big-boobed and big-bummed, and, even at my lightest, have always been heavier than most girls. At my thinnest in adult life, I was 33 and training for a cycle across India. I was still heavy. It was the first time my trainer had taught me to lift heavy weights five to six days a week, and that doing interval runs or walking uphill was better for fat loss. I did one hardcore cycle a week, which was a 90-minute spin class in a hot yoga studio. It was the first time a fitness programme actually worked, but it became a full-time job. Now, in my mid-40s, exhausted by life, with a full-time job – several in my case – while booking a wedding with never-ending unexpected demands, it’s hard to commit to that kind of regime, but I’m giving it my best shot. You see, eating, for me, is the majority of my weight issue. It’s the thing I find the hardest to control. Mostly because I cook and eat for a living, but also because I have a metabolic disorder where my resting calorie consumption rate is 1,500, (where most women my age and height are able to expend 2,200), so I’ve understood that to mean that, for me to lose weight, I have to eat only 1,000–1,200. This is complicated by a type of medicine I have to take and years of being on ADHD meds and coming off them. Talking about this is where many people crash in on me, saying it’s unhealthy to restrict calories like this, especially with the amount of physical work I’m putting in. But I don’t understand this. Why am I not allowed to want to be thinner at the best of times? And why has this current dialogue about body positivity got to be so heavy-handed about my need to be healthier and leaner? The idea of losing weight in the suggested way — coffee, eggs and avocado for breakfast, then chicken salad for lunch and fish and greens for dinner— is never going to happen with me. My days are built around food, be it cheffing, shooting or development. On top of that, I find it impossible to eat in the morning, so it’s normally just a coffee with collagen and creatine, maple and full-fat dairy milk. I am most functional at work when I wake up, so I normally work for five hours straight. In the last hour, I get panic-stricken, as I tend to hit the gym at about 3pm and know I have to eat in this hour or it will all be too impossible. But I have choice paralysis and end up ordering the chicken. Dinner, we win at. Steak, chicken or fish, garlic mushrooms, greens and sweet potato are what I am having for the most part, but I do let myself have what I want for dinner. It would be a travesty to not eat the stuff I make in the day. I’m also making a high-protein, sugar-free collagen chocolate mousse or a sugar-free baked custard and braised fruits for snacks and also guzzling krill oil, salmon oil, biotin and pumpkin seed oil, Elle Sera, vitamins D and K, and all the medicinal mushrooms I can sink. I have lost 11kg in three months which is brilliant and I’m proud, but at this rate I won’t lose my ambition of another 10kg in time. And the weight loss has slowed down. In a panic, I am frantically looking at medical spa retreats that could help me drop the weight. I don’t even want to think about how much this will cost me, but I will feel like a failure if I don’t reach my target. I don’t like the person in my brain right now. She’s frantic, spending all my money, worrying about how she will look from every angle in her dress, and she is not happy; obsessed with a number on the scales and not comfortable with herself. I don’t know if these extremes are normal for all girls, but I also don’t know how I will react on the morning of my wedding if I feel fat. I can’t help thinking that nothing will make this situation feel better for me other than me reaching my goals. I realise this all sounds so extreme and like I’m being horrible to myself – but I just want to put this all down here to show the utter madness that we put ourselves through in the expectation that many of you will be feeling the same