Adjusting a Waistline for a Wedding

Adjusting a Waistline for a Wedding, but at What Cost?
Published: April 20, 2012
A Field Notes column last Sunday (“Bridal Hunger Games”) reported on some diets that brides use to drop 15 or 20 pounds before their weddings: Weight Watchers and a personal fitness trainer, juice cleanses, the Dukan diet, diet pills, hormone shots and, new to the United States, a feeding tube diet.
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    • Field Notes: Bridal Hunger Games (April 15, 2012)
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Fox 29
A segment on a local Fox station discussing the feeding tube diet.
Readers began to respond as soon as the article went online and was posted on the Times’s Facebook page.

“If you’re with someone who wants a swimsuit model for a partner, then he is free to contact Sports Illustrated and ask to date one directly,” one woman wrote on Facebook. Or why not just buy a larger size dress, asked one reader, a man. Several commenters suggested that the solution to looking good in wedding photos wasn’t losing weight, but acquiring skills in Photoshop.

There were complaints about the commodification of marriage: “Just one more example of the disgusting spectacle weddings have become,” another grumped.

A man jokingly suggested reverse psychology: “I say balloon up so you look as big as a house on your wedding day (wear a fat suit if you have to).” Ten years later, he wrote, people “will say admiringly how great you look today.”

BluePrintCleanse’s Web site was mentioned in the column for suggesting that a bridal party cleanse together. “If a friend asked me to lose weight, or join her in such an awful venture, to be in her wedding, she wouldn’t be my friend any longer,” a woman wrote. (On the blog Jezebel, Erin Gloria Ryan was similarly incensed, saying: “Should I be mandating my bridesmaids tan in tandem and work out the same muscle groups to ensure uniformity?”)

But it was the anecdote about the “feeding tube bride” that was plucked from the dieting options and went viral as it...