Bride's Guide: Q&A for the Big Day

May 11, 2010— -- In four days I will be walking down the aisle in front of everyone I know and love, and like most brides, I want to look and feel my best on the Big Day.

Part of being a beautiful, blushing bride will hopefully result from the countless beauty appointments I have in the next few days for everything from a manicure/pedicure to a massage to make-up on the wedding day.

But another part of it comes from feeling fit and fabulous in your dress.

If you go to enough weddings and watch enough wedding shows on television, you can feel pressure to lose weight during your engagement and arrive for your first dress fitting a few sizes smaller. As soon as I changed my Facebook status from "in a relationship" to "engaged," I started to get bombarded with ads for wedding diets.

And I kept meaning to go on a wedding diet. I had the best intentions to start six months before the wedding or three months before the wedding. But it never really happened. I'm a pretty healthy eater to begin with and I just wasn't disciplined enough to do anything beyond that.

I'm also not that disciplined when it comes to exercise, so I did sign up for some personal training sessions at my gym to get my upper body in shape for my strapless dress.

Wedding and event planner Mindy Weiss says that's very common.

"Whether your goal is to shed a few pounds or spot-tone specific areas like your arms or torso, if you set realistic goals it's certainly doable," she writes. "The added benefit of exercise, of course, is that it's a terrific stress reliever!"

And hitting the gym is much better than going on a crash diet, according to Mindy.

"It's more important than ever at this time to eat a healthy diet, keep your energy up, and build strength to fight stress," she writes in "The Wedding Book."

She recommends a healthy diet based around high-energy food and plenty of water.