The Proposal

25 September 2010

As proposals go, I've read and heard of far more romantic proposals than the one I received three and a half weeks ago. 'You may as well consider it inevitable that we're going to be married, so start looking into it and figure out what we need to do to make it happen.'

I looked at him askance, and asked if that was meant to be a proposal. He confirmed that it was. (He can be romantic, at times, he just has a very - um - unusual outlook on the world.)

Our situation is a little unusual. I'm English, he's American, we live in Germany because of his work. I grew up in Scotland, so we're planning on marrying in Inverness as it's easier for my family. Most of our guests will be coming from elsewhere in the UK or from Germany, with a few family members and a couple of other guests flying in from Florida and Texas, and possibly Louisiana.

At the minute, he needs permission to enter the UK for the purpose of getting married. This means filling in an application and sending it off to Frankfurt to the Consul there. After we have that organised, we have to find various documents that we need to send to the registrar along with our marriage applications. There's no residence requirement in Scotland, so we don't have to live there for a week or two before the wedding.

I started losing weight on May 22nd this year. This is my sixth or seventh time (I think) with WeightWatchers in - er - 21 years. I've never managed to stick to it for longer than about 18 weeks before. Today is the first day of my 19th week, and I've lost 42 pounds so far. My starting weight was 21 stone and I'm down to 18 stone, which is the most I've ever managed to lose. My eventual target (the one I am Not Thinking About if I can help it!) is 11 stone 7 pounds. So I have six and a half stone to go. Feels like a lot, but really it's not so bad. It certainly isn't as bad as having NINE and a half stone to lose! I'm 5' 8 and a half, so I don't want to lose too much weight. The lightest I've been as an adult is around 12 stone 8 pounds, if I remember correctly, the first time I did WeightWatchers back in 1989. I was comfortably into a size 16 then, so I think 11 and a half stone should see me into a size 14.

I have lost: 2 cms from my arms, 11 cms from my hips, 4 cms from my bust, 9 cms from my waist, 9 cms from each thigh and have dropped two dress sizes. I'm a Euro 50, which is a UK 22.