We did it!

Yep, we got married.  Yes, I married the love of my life.  Yes, yes, we had a helicopter wedding and it was amazing.  But none of that is the ‘it’ of the ‘did it’.  The important thing to note is that we actually made it on the helicopter for the ceremony.

“Um, yeah, duh, we know.” you’re saying to yourselves.  But seriously, this is a case of there’s more to the story.  Do you know how hard it is to actually get married in a helicopter when you are, ahem, over a certain weight?  Did you know that there even was a weight limit?

This past Christmas, Michael surprised me with an awesome gift.  He had purchased the helicopter wedding package that we had talked about and thought over for months.

“There’s just one slight issue,” he said.  “We have to lose 100 pounds.”

“Ha ha, ho ho.  Good one,” I said.

“No, I’m being serious (for once!).  In order for us to get married on that helicopter, the two of us and the preacher all need to be under a certain weight limit. Together, you and I need to lose 100 pounds.  By January 21st, if we want to get married on our dating anniversary.”

This was on December 25th, mind you.

After I picked myself up off the floor, stomach hurting from laughing so hard, we quickly renegotiated and decided April 21st was a MUCH better date to get married.  Four months to lose 100 hundred pounds between the two of us?  No problem! And it would be the 1 year anniversary of when he proposed.  So poetic and fitting.

Turns out, it actually was a problem.  I’m sure you’re not shocked.  That’s a dog awful lot of weight to lose.

We worked hard.  We ate low carb. We excercised and drank protein shakes. We did it together and supported each other.  We denied ourselves for months like we had never denied ourselves before.  Yet, even though we had lost a lot of weight, with weeks to the wedding we were nowhere near 100 pounds.

I had mentally given up. “We’ve done really well, it was just an impossible goal. We can just get married on the ground and then take our celibratory flight without the preacher.  And anyway, why doesn’t HE have to lose weight, too?

“Yeah, we’re the paying customers!”

“But it’ll be just as nice getting married first and then taking the helicopter ride.  It will still be amazing,” I tried to convince Michael.  “The important part is we are getting married!”

I then wasted no time in quitting the low-carb diet and happily stuffed my face with fruit…until a few days later, when, with a fresh banana in my fist, I answered the phone to Michael’s gleeful, “we’re getting married on the helicopter!” He had spent the week in back-and-forth with the helicopter company and the great negotiator had secured us a wedding ride.  I heard something about a lighter pilot, dumping fuel, a shorter trip, and losing a little more weight, as I sadly put the banana back in the bowl.  Low carb, here we go again.

And I mean really low carb.  Fat fasting kind of low carb.  Look it up if you are curious.  It’s not a long term plan, but for desperate folks like we were, it works surprisingly well.  Somehow by the morning of our wedding, we had lost almost 80 pounds between the two of us.  Not 100 pounds, but definitely enough to take a wedding flight. And it was worth it.  I couldn’t have known until we experienced it, but tying the knot in the helicopter was so much more magical than getting married on the tarmac would have been.

So that’s the story.  We did it!  We made our weight and got married on that ding dang helicopter 🙂

And they lived lightly ever after.  (We hope!)