Julie Phillips
Age: 29
Before: 172 lbs.
After: 110 lbs.
Pounds Lost: 62
This bride-to-be had two excellent reasons to embark on a major weight-loss program. First, of course, Julie was getting married—always a prime motivator!—and second, she discovered she had an unacceptably high cholesterol level. At the age of 25, she realized she had to lose the excess weight in order to be healthy when she started her new life as a married woman. At her ideal weight of 110 pounds, she reached her goal.
The diet journey: At first Julie tried “extreme dieting,” skipping breakfast and eating nothing but salads. But she knew from experience that this method led to backsliding, so she joined Weight Watchers, picking the online option because she “didn’t like the idea of going to meetings or being weighed in front of everyone. I wanted to be answerable to myself alone.” Julie, who likes to cook, prefers eating her own food to prepackaged diet foods. “They just don’t fill me up the way homemade food does,” she says. The biggest eye-opener was what she learned about restaurant meals. “There are too many temptations, and also a lot of things you don’t realize. I’d assume I was making a good choice by ordering a chicken salad. But it would turn out that after they added the cheese and the dressing or whatever, choosing the hamburger would have been smarter!”
The dress: Her weight loss didn’t become real to Julie until she shopped for her wedding dress. She started by donning some big, poufy numbers. “But the women in the shop said, ‘oh, that’s not a good style for you—you’re so small.’ I was not used to being called small!” She ultimately chose a sleek strapless dress that suited her petite frame. Since the wedding, Julie has occasionally fallen off her regimen. But if she starts gaining weight, she nips it in the bud. “I always end up going back,” she says. “Eating well has become part of my life. And that includes between meals too—I stick to fruits, nuts and veggies for snacks.”
No more couch potato: At her heaviest, Julie had let exercise fall by the wayside. But, she says, “once I committed to losing weight, I committed to exercise.” As she got closer to her wedding day, she enlisted the help of a personal trainer to get her arms and shoulders in shape. After a while, she started doing The Firm workout DVDs at home, as well as Pilates. “Then I decided to start running. I figured, anyone can run for 30 seconds at a time.” Since that modest beginning, Julie’s vow to continue to exercise has taken her to places she could never have imagined: She’s now run the Boston Marathon once, and, she says, “I have every intention of doing it again!”
Julie’s Tips
Plan your meals and stick to them. If you do get off track, it’s OK as long as you quickly get back on.
Avoid artificial sweeteners. They leave you wanting the real thing, and they taste gross!
Realize that you need motivation. The scale helped me. Little by little it went down instead of up, and people started to notice my clothes were too big. Savor every little loss and compliment you get.
Next: How Janet lost 17 pounds >>
Janet Walker
Age: 34
Before: 167 lbs.
After: 150 lbs.
Pounds Lost: 17
Janet’s weight reached an all-time high of 205 before she got it down to the 167-pound range. But when she got engaged to Fernando Bravo-deAcha in February 2007, something clicked. Call it a bikini moment: “We were getting married in Cancun,” says Janet, “and our guests were planning to spend the week with us at a beach resort. So not only did I want to look good in a wedding dress, I also wanted to feel comfortable in a bathing suit and shorts the rest of the time. I just knew, in my heart of hearts, that no matter how happy I was to be getting married, I didn’t want to look back at my photos and wish I’d lost weight before the wedding.” Janet signed up with Jenny Craig, and by the time she and Fernando exchanged vows on the beach, she was down to 150 lbs.
The no-guesswork diet: Not having to weigh, count, measure or even cook was a boon: “All you have to do is eat the food you’re given,” says Janet. “I travel a lot for work, and it was great to be able to bring the program’s prepackaged snacks with me so I wouldn’t be tempted by airport food.” Janet also made good use of Jenny Craig’s workout DVDs, and a guide for managing eating on the road (it lists hundreds of restaurant menu options so you can make smart choices when you’re out).
The gym connection: Diet alone didn’t do it for Janet; she took step, yoga and conditioning classes at a gym. The upshot: Janet was more toned, and she lost inches, not just weight. So addicted was she to her workouts that she even took a spin class at the resort on the morning of her wedding. “It was a great way to burn off nervous energy,” she laughs.
The dress: Like a lot of brides, Janet went dress-shopping soon after she got engaged. “At first I was shocked. Wedding dress sizes run large, and I was being told to order a dress in a size even bigger than I thought I needed.” But by her first fitting, she had a happy surprise. “The seamstress had a lot to take in. What was really fun was that she had to keep adjusting the hem—as my hips got smaller, the dress hung longer,” she says.
The post-wedding update: Janet now uses healthier ingredients when she cooks. She says, “My Mexican husband, who loved fried dishes, has started adjusting his favorite recipes, too. And we exercise together. Now he’s also lost weight.” Turns out marriage can be inspiring in more ways than one.
Janet’s Tips
- Plan ahead. As a bride-to-be you have so much to do, so carry healthy snacks with you (fruit and other nutritious foods). Otherwise, you’ll eat junk food, which will only sabotage your weight-loss goals.
- Have a good support system. My three friends met me every day at the gym to work out together. This kept me motivated, pushing me to work harder in my step class and to add extra weights to my routine.
- Create a vision of how you want to look on your wedding day. And think about it every time you’re tempted to have dessert or fast food or to skip your exercise routine.
Photography: Arturo Ulloa with Funever Photos.
Next: How Lora lost 33 pounds — and her groom lost 125! >>
Lora and Jason Brys
Jason before: 346 lbs.
Jason after: 221 lbs.
Pounds lost: 125
Lora Before: 200 lbs.
Lora After: 167 lbs.
Pounds lost: 33
Lora Brys says she was never model-thin—nor did she want to be. But when she and Jason got engaged in May 2006, she started worrying about how she’d look for her wedding. “I knew I didn’t want to be a big white meringue of a bride,” she admits. In the first flurry of engagement excitement, the pair made the rounds of family. “We ate out a lot, and we both gained even more weight,” Lora says. By August of that year, with eight months to go until their April wedding, Lora told Jason she wanted to take off some weight; he suggested they drop pounds together.
Getting with the program: Lora and Jason settled on the Nutrisystem diet. “It looked like it would be easy since the portion control is done for you, and both of us are bad at that.” Knowing that sweets and chips were her downfall, Lora cleared the kitchen of anything salty, crispy, sweet and gooey. That’s not to say that the couple had an easy time of it. “When we got the first shipment of food from Nutrisystem, we thought, ‘are you kidding?’ It didn’t look like enough, and it was hard to adjust. But we actually found that we weren’t hungry, because on the diet you’re eating three regular meals and two snacks, and the meals were ‘regular’ food, like lasagna or burgers, that we’d have with green salads and fat-free dressing.”
Food habits makeover: “Eating this way got us into thinking about nutrition and health in a way we never had before. When we went food shopping, we starting checking out vegetables we’d never tried and looking carefully at labels.” One useful trick: food shopping as a team. “That way, if one of us was tempted by potato chips, the other could steer the cart down a different aisle,” says Lora. “It also helped that we lived in a pretty rural area. The market was a half-hour away, so it was easier to avoid junk-food runs.” The couple also began taking nightly walks after dinner—a mile at least, sometimes two or three—using the time to hammer out wedding plans. On weekends, they’d drive into Washington, D.C. “and just spend the whole day walking around the city.”
The dress: When Lora went for her fitting on a wedding dress she’d bought early in the engagement, she’d already lost 25 lbs. “But that meant a loss of three dress sizes! My seamstress actually told me I could ‘only’ lose another 5 lbs., or the alterations would end up being too complicated and expensive. That was a little deflating, but it was still great to know that the whole bodice had to be redone.” On her wedding day, Lora zipped up her A-line gown and thought, “I don’t look like a meringue.” The real surprise was Jason: He lost a whopping 125 lbs.
The aftermath: The Bryses spent their honeymoon on the Caribbean island of Antigua and agreed to temporarily suspend their diet. “Still, we only gained back a couple of pounds each.” Back home, they incorporated leftover Nutrisystem food into their meals until it was gone—then went off on their own. Turns out, the habits they forged while dieting have stuck with them. “We don’t keep junk food in the house, and we know what a healthy portion size is. We cook together and try new recipes. It’s become part of our married life.”
Lora’s Tips
- End every meal with a glass of water. If you’re too full to drink it all, you'll know you've eaten too much.
- Go for daily walks with your fiancé. You'll be getting exercise and you can plan your wedding while you walk.
- To learn what a serving size really is, use a kitchen scale or measuring cups for accuracy.
Photography: Randall Studios