A "fat bride-to-be" is refusing to diet ahead of her wedding and says her weight is just a "small part" of who she is.
Hannah Attewell, 36, hasn't always felt confident about her body and started dieting at the age of 12.
She spent her 20's wearing just black clothes but finally "had an epiphany" aged 30.
Hannah, a size 24, found the confidence to throw herself into dating and went on "26 first dates" before meeting her fiancé Charles Anderson, 32, a council administrator.
Now she loves herself and and her body and is refusing to diet for her upcoming wedding.
She hopes to encourage others to feel confident in their bodies.
Hannah, a wedding photographer, from St Albans, Hertfordshire said: "This assumption that you need to lose weight for your wedding is old.
"What if there's another way to feel good that doesn't involve going on a fad diet and weighing yourself every morning and letting yourself be dictated by this?
"The average UK woman is a size 16 but the most commonly stocked size in wedding dress shops is an eight.
“Our bodies change all the time, it's normal, especially as women.
"Before I wouldn't date. I wouldn't go on holiday, and I wouldn't have met my fiancé if I hadn't changed my opinion about myself.
“I do all the things I wouldn’t do before, there’s nothing I wouldn’t do now."
Hannah grew up feeling insecure about her weight.
She said: "I went on my first diet at 12.
"It was so instilled in me. I remember trying on a pair of trousers and them not fitting anymore and thinking I was fat when it was probably just a growth spurt.
“One girl in drama class said: 'Why are your knees like that?' in front of everyone sat in a circle, which I hadn’t noticed until that point so it gave me a new insecurity.
“I was acutely aware I was the fattest person in my whole school and my friends were all thin.
“We’d go to Topshop together and I couldn’t have the classic teenage girl experience of clothes shopping on the weekends because nothing fit me.
“I felt like their mum trailing around after them chaperoning, and it felt very exclusionary because fashion is such an important thing as a teenager.”
In her late teenage years and 20's she would only wear black so she “merged into the background".
She said: “I used to just wear black all the time. I remember wearing black on a beach in Australia.
“I wouldn’t wear anything that had any sort of personality.”
Hannah says she didn’t go on any dates for the majority of her 20's, but when she got to aged 30 she “had an epiphany” and changed her perspective.
She said: “I was sitting on the sofa in my house watching The Handmaid’s Tale, thinking about how many pounds I could lose a week until Christmas and I thought 'I can't do this anymore'.
“I realised I can't be 45 and still feeling like this. I’ve been obsessed with losing weight for half my life.
"All the things I could’ve just done but didn't because I thought I had to wait until I’d lost weight.
Hannah Attewell, 36, hasn't always felt confident about her body and started dieting at the age of 12.
She spent her 20's wearing just black clothes but finally "had an epiphany" aged 30.
Hannah, a size 24, found the confidence to throw herself into dating and went on "26 first dates" before meeting her fiancé Charles Anderson, 32, a council administrator.
Now she loves herself and and her body and is refusing to diet for her upcoming wedding.
She hopes to encourage others to feel confident in their bodies.
Hannah, a wedding photographer, from St Albans, Hertfordshire said: "This assumption that you need to lose weight for your wedding is old.
"What if there's another way to feel good that doesn't involve going on a fad diet and weighing yourself every morning and letting yourself be dictated by this?
"The average UK woman is a size 16 but the most commonly stocked size in wedding dress shops is an eight.
“Our bodies change all the time, it's normal, especially as women.
"Before I wouldn't date. I wouldn't go on holiday, and I wouldn't have met my fiancé if I hadn't changed my opinion about myself.
“I do all the things I wouldn’t do before, there’s nothing I wouldn’t do now."
Hannah grew up feeling insecure about her weight.
She said: "I went on my first diet at 12.
"It was so instilled in me. I remember trying on a pair of trousers and them not fitting anymore and thinking I was fat when it was probably just a growth spurt.
“One girl in drama class said: 'Why are your knees like that?' in front of everyone sat in a circle, which I hadn’t noticed until that point so it gave me a new insecurity.
“I was acutely aware I was the fattest person in my whole school and my friends were all thin.
“We’d go to Topshop together and I couldn’t have the classic teenage girl experience of clothes shopping on the weekends because nothing fit me.
“I felt like their mum trailing around after them chaperoning, and it felt very exclusionary because fashion is such an important thing as a teenager.”
In her late teenage years and 20's she would only wear black so she “merged into the background".
She said: “I used to just wear black all the time. I remember wearing black on a beach in Australia.
“I wouldn’t wear anything that had any sort of personality.”
Hannah says she didn’t go on any dates for the majority of her 20's, but when she got to aged 30 she “had an epiphany” and changed her perspective.
She said: “I was sitting on the sofa in my house watching The Handmaid’s Tale, thinking about how many pounds I could lose a week until Christmas and I thought 'I can't do this anymore'.
“I realised I can't be 45 and still feeling like this. I’ve been obsessed with losing weight for half my life.
"All the things I could’ve just done but didn't because I thought I had to wait until I’d lost weight.
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FunTranscript
00:00I never thought I'd get married to fat, and obviously it's not even because I didn't think
00:14anyone would want to marry me fat. The thing is, I thought that if someone asked me to
00:18marry them, I would say no. Because I was fat. Or I would say yes, but I wouldn't have
00:24a ring because I didn't want a ring that would fit my stupid fat fingers. And more importantly,
00:28I would definitely lose weight for the wedding. If we planned a wedding, and I didn't succeed
00:34in losing the weight I wanted to for the wedding, then I would cancel the wedding. That's a
00:38wild thing to think. And yet I was so convinced that being fat was this failure, this incredible
00:48moral failing, this humiliating thing, that I would rather have wasted 20 grand, or whatever
00:56the wedding cost, because I was too fat to be in photos, to wear my ideal dress, or I
01:03might have made it about my weight, just because I could not see that there was so much more
01:12to life than how fat I was. I am like so over wanting to lose weight for specific occasions,
01:19or thinking that I have to lose weight for something to happen, but it is really discouraging
01:26not seeing photos of fat people getting married when you are looking for stuff. Looking for
01:33dresses, looking at wedding photographers, just looking at all this inspiration and not
01:39seeing yourself represented at all is really difficult. If we can see more fat people getting
01:45married, that would be amazing. And I mean, as a wedding photographer, I haven't actually
01:50photographed that many fat couples, unfortunately, so my website is not full of them. But I am going
01:57to go and review my portfolio and make a conscious effort to put more representation of a variety of
02:04like shapes and sizes and colours in there, to make sure that other people don't feel like this
02:12when they are looking at my website.