Many brides that their impending wedding day makes a great motivator for their weight loss goals. Upcoming nuptials are a good marker for health goals: your friends and family will be looking at you all day, you're going to fill several albums with pictures of you and your new spouse, and you have to fit into what will likely be a very expensive and wonderful dress. All of these factors make getting in shape for your wedding an important goal, but try to keep these tips in mind as you're dusting off your chin-up bar:
Waiting Until the Last Minute will Wreck your Body
Typical engagements last close to a year - so unless you're running to the altar, you've got plenty of time to develop good, healthy habits. Don't spend months cramming in burgers and fries as you're addressing invitations only to switch to a cabbage-and-tequila diet two weeks before your final dress fitting. Getting healthy and losing weight is a long, difficult process, and you need to respect your body as you work toward your goals. Start small, and work your way up to taking out red meat and dessert, or drastically reducing your daily caloric intake. Long-term weight loss is a marathon, not a sprint, and if you crash diet at the last minute, you're not going to find results that last.
Dieting Alone Isn't Optimal
Try to think about weight loss as a reflection of both biology and physics: If your body isn't getting as much energy as it usually gets, it's going to find it somewhere else so you don't starve. Your hope will obviously be that it takes what it needs from fat that you've already got, but there are other places your body can find what it wants: your muscles. Unless you're using your muscles regularly (by exercising them), your body will assume that it's cool to dissolve them. You will see yourself losing weight, but good luck with the pickle jar in a few months. Incorporate an exercise regimen in whatever capacity you can, and find time for both cardio and weight training.
Don't Stop
When I was in high school, one of my teachers got engaged in the first few weeks of the year. She immediately switched from high sugar/high fat foods to fresh green salads and colorful, whole fruit, in addition to a high-intensity workout routine that she followed for months. By the time her big day came around, she's lost more than fifty pounds. When school started the next year, it had all come back.
The reason most diets don't work is because the people employing them tend to be short-sighted. They think of their new routine as a temporary hardship that will give them results that last forever, but the truth is: You can't just diet; you have to change the way you live. Make your new habits a part of your life, or the weight will flood back to you as soon as you return from your honeymoon. Use your wedding as your motivation, not your goal.
When designing the favors that you want to distribute to guests during your wedding reception, it’s important to remember simplicity. With place card holder wedding favors, you kill two birds with one stone and guarantee that your trash cans won’t be full of tiny strips of expensive stationary by the end of the evening. Place card holder wedding favors combine the place cards (sometimes called escort cards) and the wedding favors into one glorious gift for your guest. Place card holder wedding favors are a great idea for weddings of all guest list sizes, and they help cut down on clutter on place settings. Instead of finding room for the place card, place card holder, and wedding favor, they’re all combined into place card holder wedding favors.
The consolidation of space isn’t all that’s important in place card holder wedding favors – they also make for wonderful and cohesive accessories. The stationary on your place card holder wedding favors (or lack thereof) will match the favor seamlessly, and might help to pull together the aesthetic of your table design. Place card holder wedding favors also make for a livelier (and less bare) escort card table. Guests can be excited for their place card holder wedding favors from the moment they cross the threshold into your reception!
Are you a DIY sort of bride whose main concern is boxing your favors – not ordering them? Wedding favor containers come in all shapes and sizes and are a perfect vessel for the DIY bride. So whip out the glue gun and keep the following tips in mind as you exercise your creativity on a few wedding favor containers:
Don’t leave your wedding favor containers until the last minute. Favors might not seem like such a big priority right now, but don’t let wedding favor containers wait until the week before. If you don’t have a choice (busy work schedule, other more-pressing DIY projects), enlist help from your bridesmaids to stuff wedding favor containers over a long weekend. Make the offer more appealing by offering drinks or dinner (and promises of everlasting loyalty) to your maids.
