Excerpt from the Introduction
"Wedding Dress Woes"

Our mission is this: With our safe and sane diet and exercise plan, we will help you, the soon-to-be-married woman, accomplish your weight-loss and shape-up goals without sacrificing your skin or your hair or your energy or your sanity for, say, your thunder thighs. In addition, our advice will keep your immune system healthy and strong so you can survive all of the stress of getting to the church on time.

The corollary to this is you will have the foundation for a varied and healthy eating style for life. You have probably heard the statistic that "95 percent of all diets fail." This is misleading; it implies you can't lose weight on a diet. The truth is that most people do lose weight when they go on a diet. But 95 percent of them put the weight back on within a year. That's mostly thanks to the rigidity and monotony of the majority of diets. Sure, you can eat nothing but steak and oranges for a couple of weeks--but think about staying on that diet for the next year. You couldn't. You would go absolutely mad. You would crave the forbidden so much that one day, like a rabid animal, you would wrestle that package of Wheat Thins from your new husband's hands and--cramming and snarling--eat the entire box without even bothering to sit down. Sooner rather than later, you would balloon just like Fergie, and you'd become a card-carrying member of the Ninety-five Percent Club.

That won't happen here. There is nothing monotonous about The Wedding Dress Diet. Our philosophy is that you can eat anything you want . . . in moderation. Moderation meaning that if you split a dish of chocolate mousse with your best friend at lunch, then don't have dessert after dinner. Because in our book, calories are king. It's not the proverbial end-all and be-all--Robyn is, after all, a dietitian with some very hardcore beliefs about good nutrition (as you'll learn in Chapter Four). But we live in the real world, too. We know the odds of finding a bag of baby carrots in your office vending machine as opposed to a Snickers bar or bag of Doritos. So you won't get a lot of finger wagging from us. You blow it occasionally? In our book, the day is still salvageable--you'll have no excuse to say, "Well, since I blew it at lunch I might as well go all out at dinner, too."

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