Weigh-in Wednesday #1

I feel like Wednesday is a good day to check in with the whole diet thing.  I like alliteration and it will keep me accountable.

My last recorded weight on My Fitness Pal was 287.  I weighed in this morning at 286.  Wooo hoo, one pound lost.

Of course, I've slacked on hanging with Jillian and I've not been eating particularly well.  I'll do better.  I have to.

Thinking about Clothes

Today, on the David's Bridal Facebook page, this rocking pair of polka dot peeky toe shoes made an appearance.  My lovely and wonderful friend who works in the corporate offices of David's Bridal pointed them out to me.  At first, I was all, "Meh," but then I noticed that sassy platform.  I'm not normally a heel girl.  My messed up ankle makes wearing heels for a long period of time painful and I tend to look like a spastic robot trying to walk in them but I'd be willing to give it a try again for these babies.  Probably not for the actual wedding, but definitely for a wedding-related event.

That Girl is a Crafty One...

One of the things I'm really excited about with the impending nuptials and the Disney-ness of them (not considering for a second how excited I am to finally be Mrs. Prince Charming!) is that I get to be all kinds of crafty with all of the wedding accoutrements.

Hi!  My name is City Girl Lost and I am a crafting addict!

(Everyone say it together:  Hi City Girl!)

I spend a significant chunk of my time cutting out pieces of paper and gluing them together in interesting and appealing patterns.  I've also taken to playing with fabric.  So looking at the prices some of my other compatriot Disney brides are paying for things I can do for next to nothing, well, it makes me feel kinda bad.

How can I make such nifty things on the cheap?  I am a Cricut owner.

Never heard of a Cricut?  It's the niftiest thing ever.  It's kinda like a printer only instead of putting ink on paper, it uses a blade to cut an image (or letters) out of paper or fabric or vinyl. There's literally hundreds of themed cartridges filled with letters and graphics that you can  cut out. 

Walt's Rules part 2: Minimum Expenditures

Last time I posted about the rules I mentioned that we're planning to do a Wishes wedding.  What does that mean for us in terms of rules?  Lots.  Lots and lots of cross figuring and tabulating and math and stuff. 

Wishes weddings have a bunch of minimum expenditure rules.

There is a total amount of money you must spend on the day of your wedding depending on what day of the week you choose and the time of your events. Like most wedding type places, it's most expensive to get married and have your reception on a Saturday night.  That's why we're not doing that.

A little mouse-y magic

Oooh, sparkly, sparkly!

What a downer that last post was, right?  Thinking about my weight issues always puts me in a depressive mood so I think it's time for a perkier post. Something mouse-y and wedding-y and generally good.  So to give my amazing Prince Charming some of the credit he's due, I'll discuss his proposal.

We'd been living together for three years so it's not like we didn't have plans in mind for marriage. We'd gone to a few jewelery stores together to shop around for a ring and I knew the big proposal was coming sooner rather than later.  I tried really hard not to think about it too much.I couldn't help myself though.  I am a big mushy, sappy, romance-loving girl.

Standing in the kitchen one evening, cleaning up from dinner, Prince Charming dramatically paused and asked, "Do you want me to do it sooner or do you want me to do The Grand Plan?"

Why do I let TV do this to me?

Last night was the Prom episode of Glee.  I love me some Glee. I let last night's episode get to me a little bit.  Forgive me the whinypants post.

Of course, there was a sequence where all the girls were dress shopping and checking each other out.  Now, one of the many things I love about Glee is that there are two- TWO- girls on the show who aren't super skinny.  The character Lauren Zizes is one of the plus-sized girls (in royal blue over there) and has paired off with the hot football player, Puck, who likes her because "she's a bigger badass than he is."

Somehow, Zizes is able to shop for a prom dress at the same store as her regular-sized teammates and she has a choice of dresses to pick from.  That was soooooo not my experience. I was jealous.  I felt the tears start to run down my face remembering my prom dress shopping experience.

I wasn't horribly overweight in high school, probably on the high end of average with a tendency toward plumpness.  Shopping for my junior prom dress remains probably one of the worst experiences of high school and I've never really talked about it with anyone.

First things first: Ceremony

The Walt Disney World Resort is a big place.  It's pretty much it's own city, right there in the swamps of central Florida.  There are a whole slew of places where you can choose to have your wedding ceremony within the magical sprawl that is WDW. It's not an easy choice to make and there are lots of factors to consider in making a location choice,  including cost and scheduling and transportation.

Everyone I've mentioned our plans to wants to know if it's happening in THE SPOT.  Yes, you can get married in the Magic Kingdom, in front of the castle, but it costs close to $30K to do it.  That's just the ceremony site fee- that's not including anything else.  All that money, just to use that location. That's not the route we're taking, just for the record! 

Prince Charming and I are fairly certain that we want at least one aspect of our soiree to be INSIDE one of the theme parks but the ceremony in the MK isn't going to be it.  Having something else inside one of the parks is totally do-able but there are lots of things to consider and I'll get to that later.

Here's the kicker- if you want an in-park ceremony, in one of the other parks like Epcot or Animal Kingdom, it has to be before the park opens for the day or after it closes.  That means a 9 a.m. ceremony, which doesn't sound so bad, right?  Then you factor in prep time, like hair and makeup and dressing.  Add in time for professional photography.  Breakfast.  Transportation.  Now I'm looking at a 5 a.m. wake-up call on a day when I really don't want to have huge bags under my eyes.

But there's other drawbacks as well.  Like, if any of your events are in a theme park, you cannot bring in an outside photographer.  You have to use Disney Fine Art Photography services. You also have to use Disney florists and in some cases, you can't have amplified music.

So I think we've ruled out actually getting married in a park.

Prince Charming and I sat in front of our computer and looked at all the options and came up with what we think are our plans.  (Keep in mind we can't actually book or confirm anything until that 16-month mark!)

All the cool girls are doing it

There's something fairly new in the realm of wedding planning: The Style Board.  (Well, new since I planned my first wedding back in the dark ages!) It's basically a collage of elements that you like or plan to use.  They generally show colors and themes and make it easy to give sort of a one-glance idea of what the wedding will be like.  I've been collecting stuff for, like, ever and so I put together one of these new-fangled thingamabobs myself. 

There's a lot of red there, right?  Funny.  I wanted red just because it's striking, romantic and Prince Charming's favorite color.  A couple weeks ago I was watching a webcast of an event at DFTW where David Tutera declared that red would be the big color for weddings in 2012.  So much for my life as a trendsetter! 

Here's what I hope this little collage gives clues to:  we want the wedding to be a celebration.  Because of the kids and the second marriage thing and the destination wedding element, we want our wedding to be a big, silly, whimsical party with hints of Main Steet USA and 1950's ice cream soda shoppe sweetness.

As for the tone.  Formality shmormality.  We don't want any of it.  It's a P-A-R-T-A-Y!  I want to dance with my Prince Charming and our kids to every goofy participation dance the DJ can dig up. I want to look back on the day and remember feeling loved, laughing my head off and having an amazing time. I need to start brushing up on my Cha Cha Slide and Time Warp, I guess.

The Rules, according to Walt, part 1

There are lots of rules to this whole Disney wedding thing. I'm going to start at the very beginning (a very good place to start!)

I'm not actually allowed to start planning our wedding yet.  Disney Fairy Tale Weddings (DFTW is so much easier to type) is all hard core about their planning rules and how things work.  It's truly all weird and odd and strange to me that they won't actually let couples start planning (or take any money from them) until a certain number of months before the wedding.

I really, really hate her already

I've been using this website to track my calories and exercise and all that stuff to help me with the weight loss thing. Some of my friends have had tremendous luck using just the site and watching what they eat.  Me?  I'm falling far short of my goal of six pounds per month.  Here we are, four months deep into the year and I've lost eight pounds total.  I haven't been particularly dieting or exercising, so that's not so hard to believe.  Actually, I'm quite shocked it's that much. I need to do better.

So, I did something drastic. I drove myself over to Target and bought Jillian Michael's 30-Day Shred.

I felt like I needed to be sneaky about the purchase, like the rest of the Target shoppers would point and snicker when they saw the fat girl putting a workout DVD in her cart.  I was careful to hide it under some Special K Red Berries and some socks.  I picked a cashier who was a bit on the chubby side too.  At least I can point and snicker at myself, right?


The DVD sat on the shelf in my living room for two days.  I put it in today and HOLY COW, the basic level-1 workout totally kicked my butt.  I mean really.  REALLY.  The sweat was pouring down my face and back and toward the end I just couldn't keep going. And of course, Jillian was berating me for not being able to finish.  She kept pointing to the incredibly fit chick to her left that was doing the "modified" (read: fat person) routine.  She mentioned how she's had 400 pound people do these exercises and they did it and she knew I could do it too. I wanted to throw something at her. Prince Charming might kill me if I threw something at his new tv.  I'll have to restrain myself.  Anyway, my heart was pounding and my boobs hurt from jumping up and down because I didn't think to put on a sports bra.

It hit me about five minutes after I was done. I sat down and I felt good.

Isn't that weird?

I loved that tight muscle feeling and being a little winded.  I kinda can't wait until tomorrow.  It is kinda cool to know that I can switch the DVD to music only and not listen to Jillian but for now, I need her to be mean to me.

So what's this all about anyway?

I never thought that I'd be starting all over in my thirties.  Dont' think that it's all about the griping though.  The bad stuff is behind me.  Things are pretty sweet right now because there are three things I'm sort of dealing with all at once.

The first is a lifelong struggle- the pounds.  That's so big, I'm going to put it in capital letters: THE POUNDS.  Right now, my weight is way too close to 300.  For my health, for my appearance, for my life, they've got to go.  Last year, I went all through the work up for gastric band surgery.  I received my approval two days before my insurance policy changed from allowing such surgery and paying for it, to specifically excluding it.  It SUCKED and I was really upset, especially after having gone through all the horrendously embarrassing parts of the work up.  Like having to poop in a Tupperware container and bring it to the hospital.  Yeah.  It was bad. Thinking about it now, the gastric band is very limiting.  It would allow for a rapid weight loss quickly but really changes everything about a person's relationship with food, especially in ways that I don't want to deal with.  So I'm going it on my own.  My goal is to lose at least 6 pounds a month.  I think it's doable.

The second issue is wedding planning.  A re-marriage.  I've been down the aisle before. Wedding planning at 23 was stressful and insane and every detail had so much gravity and importance.  This time around there are children involved - two that I birthed and two that belong to my fiance.  That changes things.  Also, this time around, my focus is way more on the marriage part of the wedding than the party and while I'm hoping the party will be epic, I have faith that the marriage will last.  I'm not so naive as to think that everything is perfect through my rose-colored glasses, but I think maturity and those lessons I learned will serve me well going into this.  The fiance and I have been living together for several years now so we feel a smug sense of "we rock at this relationship thing." So all we have to do is get around to getting married.

The third thing, and first on the list is The Mouse.  Come on, you have to know what mouse I'm talking about. Mickey.  Em- eye-see...kay- eee- why... Em-oh-you-es-eeeeeee!  We are Disney nuts.  Disney dorks. Disneyphiles.  Whatever word you use to describe the obsession, that's us. As soon as the idea of getting married came up, we knew it would be a Disney wedding. And my fiance, Prince Charming that he is, somehow managed to surprise me with a one-day trip to Orlando so he could propose in front of the castle. A Disney wedding with a Minnie and Mickey cake topper at our local hotel ballroom was never going to be the plan for us.  No!  Not Disney enough!  We are planning our nuptials in Florida at the house of mouse and we want it with all the Disney-ness our money can buy.

So that's what I'm here to type about, planning my Disney wedding and losing the pounds at the same time.  The wedding's the deadline.