How I Got Into That Dress

A handful of times a year I spill my guts in a monster blog, and this is one of them. Fitness and nutrition is something I'm passionate about and it's occupied a particularly large amount of my time this year, so it feels like the right time to write about it. Not least because most wedding fitness content is either crash diet territory or a twelve-week shred programme designed to get you down the aisle and no further. This blog is about working hard, navigating injury and burnout, and coming out the other side with changes that went well beyond the day itself.

Just a couple of disclaimers before I start this blog:

Firstly: I'm aware "getting into shape" is its own kind of controversy but I don't intend to delve into that here. Everyone's dream body is very subjective but for me that means lean and athletic..

Second: Please read with caution if you have or have had an eating disorder, or have a difficult relationship with food or your body. There are things that really helped me that I wanted to share, but my version of "balance" swings at a higher pendulum than most and might seem extreme to some.

The Injury

Last Summer during our tour with Combichrist was probably the fittest I've ever been. I was off the back of a couple of successful fitness challenges, and I was working out and running miles every day from the tour van. Then my ankle got injured and I could barely move for several weeks. I slowly recovered with physio but it happened to coincide with my move to Spain where I also now had a whole new environment and routine to adjust to.

For the next six months, every time I tried to get it back up to the six day workout weeks I'd previously been sustaining, something would happen - either I would be physically in pieces or I would burn out. Finally, on tour with Hana Piranha in February, I found myself doing as little as one workout a week. I felt awful.

The single resolution I'd made for 2026 was to get to my wedding feeling radiant in my own body - and already by February I felt like it was slipping away from me. I was terrified I'd reach the day and feel like I'd wasted the months I'd had. Something needed to change.

The Mind

Self-talk

Self-talk is something I've been chipping away at for years, but this year I doubled my efforts. I think the sweet spot is being happy in your body while simultaneously wanting to improve it - because if you negate the happiness part, all that's left is the striving. For me, this is the foundation of everything else in this blog. Every other point here is meaningless without it. Without some baseline of kindness towards myself, none of the rest of it works. 

Add, don't subtract

I've got this new thing: whenever I have habits I want to change, I try not to worry too much about them. Instead I add good habits on top, until eventually the good habits crowd the bad ones out and there's simply no room for them anymore. This has been a staple and recurring concept for me this year. (The same goes for food: when you add good meals to your day, there's less time and space for anything else.)

Know your non-negotiables

I have basically never stopped being a child and would definitely skip dinner for dessert on any occasion. So even when I cut my food intake right down, I still had not one but two desserts every evening. I'm usually buzzing round during the day so I don't think about food so much, but past 8pm my inner snack gremlin wakes up. Chocolate mousse and chia pudding every night ended up helping me hit my protein goals as a bonus.

Engineer your environment

One of the most effective things Dara and I have done is remove the temptation entirely. We don't keep anything in the house that isn't functional - no snacks or anything sitting in a cupboard waiting to be found by the snack gremlin at 9pm. Removing the friction from good decisions and adding it to bad ones has been one of our most powerful strategies. The effort required to actually go and get something becomes its own deterrent. Never underestimate the power of laziness.

No half measures

When I started building back up slowly, I thought I might just cruise at that level for the rest of the year. Then I read something that really resonated with me: "sometimes it's easier to work harder." Mediocre effort producing mediocre results chips away at motivation over time in a way that really going for it simply doesn't. (The person I heard this from is fitness coach Emma Gordon - she also has a podcast called Science Versus Bullshit, which is worth it for the title alone.)

The Body

Embrace the "soft girl"

Accepting that my old approach wasn't working was the first step, so the first practical change I made was taking a soft girl approach to exercise. I often joke that there's no soft girl inside me, but I did my best to find her. I did a lot of long walks and low-impact activities. For a while I stopped chasing gains entirely and just took everything slowly.

Walking in particular deserves its own mention. It is lower intensity by nature, but the calorie burn per mile is surprisingly close to running - your body is moving the same weight across the same distance regardless of speed. The physical toll of a long walk, particularly on hilly terrain, is nothing to dismiss.

A mental health-related side point: I have NEVER felt worse for going for a walk.

The evening walk

I promise this is the last thing I will say about walking. But. One of the habits Dara and I have built together is an evening walk, and I cannot overstate how much it has improved my nights. Sleep is something I've always struggled with, and getting outside and moving in the hours before bed has made a tangible difference. It also has the very practical side effect of occupying the exact window when the snack gremlin is at its most active - it's hard to raid the kitchen when you're halfway up a hill.

Set a goal

Six weeks before my wedding, I put together a comprehensive workout plan pulling in all the short targeted videos I use for different muscle groups. I set myself a goal of 100 workouts and shared it publicly. The number was kind of arbitrary, but I'm proud to say I saw it through. Having something concrete to aim for made a real difference to my motivation. The workouts ranged from an hour's run to a five-minute ab routine, averaging around an hour and a half a day in total. I mapped everything into my calendar around travel and the busiest days, which is where "snack" workouts earned their place - because even when you don't have an hour for a full session, a small arm workout where you don't even need a mat or equipment is almost always possible.

Work out first thing

Willpower is a muscle that weakens as the day goes on. I recently stopped taking quetiapine, which had left me drugged and feeling like a zombie every morning - and now I'm able to do a workout first thing without fail. As well as making it far more likely that you'll get it done, the secondary benefit of this is that it sets you up for the day feeling amazing in your body and you're way more likely to make good food decisions as a result.

The boring bit

I spend quite a lot of my life bent over an instrument. That takes a toll on my back, my neck, my hips. I've always found stretching really boring and kind of a waste of time, but as I get older I'm forced to take this more seriously. One of my ballet teachers said something that has stayed with me: strength and flexibility are not just equally important, they're symbiotic. Making stretching and regular physio a non-negotiable part of my routine has been as important as any workout. Without it, I'm just one run away from injury.

The Fuel

Log everything

I know, I know, logging calories is boring and frankly don't we all have better things to be doing with our time? I couldn't agree more. But most of us dramatically misjudge how much we're eating, even with good education around it. It goes without saying, but I weigh all my food too. My rule when I'm being strict is that I don't put anything past my lips without logging it first. The way I make this manageable is by pre-logging my meals at the same time I'm prepping them each week. I have all my meals recorded on MyFitnessPal (or more recently, my own Notion organiser) and I don't deviate from the plan. It works surprisingly well - if I'm tempted to reach for the peanut butter tub, I'm like, can I be bothered to weigh and log this? Again: never underestimate the power of laziness.

One strategy that has made all of this significantly easier is eating the same meals every day. It sounds tedious but it removes an enormous amount of decision fatigue. Once your meals are pre-logged and prepped, the thinking is done. You're not negotiating with yourself at every mealtime, you're just executing the plan. It also means your logging becomes almost automatic, because you're entering the same things day after day.

The scales are not the enemy

While the number on the scales is not the goal, it is one of the most tangible ways to track progress, and I think it's worth separating those two things. Daily weighing gets a bad reputation, but if you understand what you're looking at, it's actually very useful. As a woman, your weight can fluctuate significantly day-to-day depending on where you are in your cycle, how much water you're retaining, and a dozen other factors. Weighing daily and looking at the trend over time, rather than fixating on any single number, gives you far more reliable information than a weekly weigh-in ever could.

A note on disordered eating

I'm aware that some of the behaviours described in this blog - weighing food, logging calories, pre-planning every meal, daily weigh-ins, and eliminating or reducing certain food groups - can also present as signs of disordered eating in a different context. For me, tracking has never been about eating as little as possible - in fact, sometimes it reveals I need to eat more. It's about understanding what my body needs. I want to be clear that this approach is not for everyone. There is a fine line between this kind of tracking being a constructive tool and it becoming something more destructive, and only you know which side of that line you're on.

Fuel appropriately

One of the great things about logging is that your macros become very clear, very quickly - and if you're struggling not to exceed your calorie target every day, you can see what your body may be craving. As a vegan, hitting protein targets requires attention, and tracking makes that straightforward. I completely optimised my diet in the run-up to the wedding by making simple changes - cutting out high-carb foods and switching things for higher-protein sources - changes I'm still using - and I can literally feel the difference in my body. The most impactful swaps right before the wedding were switching rice for cauliflower rice, dramatically reducing my oat portions, and keeping a daily smoothie going with ginger, spinach, and whatever other nutrient-dense things I might otherwise skip.

Fill the gaps

I've had ongoing issues with iron-deficient anaemia, so iron supplements paired with sufficient vitamin C to aid absorption have been a priority. I'm not a big fruit person but this year I've made a real effort to change that. Did you know that kiwis contain nearly twice the vitamin C of an orange per serving? This is now the kind of thing that fascinates me.

The real cost of eating well

One thing I want to be transparent about: fuelling yourself properly takes time, and I dedicate a lot of it - sometimes hours a day - to cooking and washing up, even when I've batch prepped. I'm aware that not everyone has that luxury, but I also want to be clear that for me it's as much a priority as a privilege.

This is also where eating the same meals every day pays off - the more you repeat a meal, the faster and more automatic the cooking becomes. What once took an hour takes twenty minutes because you've done it so many times. 

But even without that kind of time, there are ways around this…

Know your staples

Having a plan for when you're not at home and not in full control of your diet is essential. I always have a list of items I can reliably find in shops and pre-log those too. In England, my staples include M&S salads, M&S Punishment Juice, Huel (Lite and Protein varieties), Naked Bars, Alpro protein pots, bananas, and vegetables I can eat on the go - rocket, carrot batons, cherry tomatoes, celery, to name a few.

The modern approach

One of my big upgrades was working out my goals and how to realistically achieve them with Claude (my AI assistant) - looking at the lowest sustainable deficit for the six weeks before the wedding and where it would land me. Working out what I needed to change to hit my macros, and what foods I could substitute. We had a whole table going on and were constantly refining it together. It saved me a significant amount of time and optimised the whole process considerably.

The Win

Getting into my best physical shape before the wedding wasn't easy and required a lot of compromises. But nothing worth doing is ever easy. The discipline it takes to work towards a goal like this - accepting that you can't always have everything you want when you want it - is one of the most transferable skills there is. It's not just useful for fitness. It's useful for everything.

Despite a rocky start to the year, the push over the final six weeks before my wedding paid off. I arrived feeling amazing in my body and my skin, and that strongly contributed to making the day feel as magical as it did. I'm proud of the changes I made - not just because of how I looked, but because so many of them were sustainable shifts rather than short-term measures.

I've just come back from my honeymoon, which swung the pendulum wildly in the other direction. I completely over-indulged, and I have no regrets. But knuckling down again now feels so much more manageable because the habits and systems are already in place. All the tools I used to work towards that one non-negotiable day have ended up streamlining my life well beyond it.

(To conclude: I did get into the dress, but that was just the fun part 😉)