"I need to lose it fast for the wedding"

Some fresh starts have a date on them. The wedding in six weeks. The holiday. The reunion. The diet isn't a way of life, you'd say, it's a sprint to an event, and a sprint is different.

It's different in one way, which is that it's honest about ending. Every other diet on the envelope pretended to be permanent. The wedding diet admits from the start that it stops on the day, and what happens after the day is what happens after every diet, only faster, because the restriction was harder. The photos are taken, the rules are off, and the fortnight after the wedding is the fortnight after any diet, with the same eating in it and the same feeling.

What the sprint gets you in six weeks is mostly the first week's water and then a few pounds of the rest, and what it gets you on the day is a person who's been hungry for six weeks at a party with a buffet. I've watched people spend their own wedding reception eating with an intensity that had nothing to do with the food, and the reason was the six weeks before it. The NHS's short list says don't lose weight suddenly with diets, and it says so because sudden loss is the kind that comes back, and because the state a person is in at the end of it is the state chapters 3 to 8 describe.

There's a quieter thing under the wedding diet, and it's that the event has become a deadline for your body. Everyone in the room will be looking, and the diet is the answer to being looked at. I'd say only that nobody at a wedding is looking at anyone's weight except the person who dieted for it, and that the person who dieted for it is the one who won't remember the day, because they spent it hungry and then spent the evening in the write-off. If you want to look well at the wedding, sleep, and wear something you like, and eat breakfast.

The ordinary week doesn't have a date on it, and that's the point. A wedding in six weeks is six weeks of three meals a day and what you'd feed a friend, and on the day you're a person who isn't hungry at a buffet, which is the only person at a buffet who eats normally. Chapter 16 is about what to do if you'd like your weight to move, and it's slow, and slow is the one speed that survives the reception.