The New Indian Bride

While Brides may romanticize the days and months after the wedding as filled with domestic bliss with you and your new Groom setting up your new home and settling into a routine together, The New Indian Bride is learning one hidden little secret about the post-wedding journey. All that settling down translates into extra, unwanted pounds settling all around your body!  Simply put, getting married makes you fat! 

After spending months leading up to the wedding squatting, crunching and running to get myself ten pounds lighter for the wedding, I have spent the almost six months since my wedding not having a care in the world when it comes to food.  If I felt like an extra helping of dinner, I indulged.  If I felt like a bit of ice cream for dessert, I indulged.  If I felt like a pastry for breakfast, I indulged. Before the wedding I watched my portion sizes like a hawk, stayed clear of dessert and processed foods, forget about it! I wouldn’t even come near it. 

Now it is officially time to make a change. 

The New Indian Bride is getting back on track and returning to her good eating ways.  The plan is simple. Eat more good stuff, eliminate the bad stuff, no more sweets, no more desserts, no more pastries, reduce carbs, increase proteins and reduce portion sizes.  Oh and workout more – walking, yoga, other forms of fitness at least 3 times a week (hopefully more). 

I want to get rid of these extra pounds and get myself into the best shape of my life.  That is my committment to myself and that committment starts now!  Every Monday I will share with my fabulous TNIB readers my weekly food and workout journey.  Watch me shed the pounds and even better join me in the process.  We can do this together!

Are you ready? I am.

The New Indian Bride is fresh from a fabulous and intimate Indian wedding in Southern California.  The wedding itself had approximately 50 guests and the wedding reception was 150 easy-to-manage, fun-loving, dance-the-night-away fans of the Bride and Groom.  It was a lovely wedding for a beautiful couple. 

My favorite detail of the wedding were lounge style cabanas on either side of the dance floor where guests gathered with drinks to mix and mingle.  A unique, beautiful and functional detail!

As I converse in the Twittersphere with fellow Indian wedding bloggers, vendors and brides-to-be, I think we are in the beginning stages of a new trend.  The pendulum on huge, over-the-top Indian weddings is beginning to shift (be it just a little bit) and we are now beginning to see smaller more intimate Indian weddings.  This is not to suggest that 600+ guests at Indian weddings are a thing of the past.  Rather, we are seeing more Indian brides opting for a smaller affair. Just like Miss Bride-to-Be and her 150 guests and my 250 guests, Indian Brides are inviting fewer people and opting for more personal and more intimate weddings.

This is one trend that is completely New Indian Bride APPROVED!  I hope to see a lot more smaller, intimate, detail oriented Indian weddings in 2011.

What trends are you expecting or hoping to see in 2011?

When I am not blogging, I am tweeting!  I tweet with a talented array of photographers, wedding planners, decorators, designers, other bloggers and brides-to-be about my favorite topic – WEDDINGS!  A few weeks ago I realized I enjoy so many Wedding Tweeps (aka Twitter peeps) that I would love to meet them.  Yes I know that is insanely old fashion when I could just Facebook, gChat, Skype or Twitter with them but there is a certain magical connection created when people meet in person, especially like-minded people all passionate and excited about the same thing.  In this case weddings.

Soooooooooo The New Indian Bride and Jigar Champaneria of Samay Studio are proud to host an SF Bay Area Wedding Tweet Up on Thursday November 11th at Blanc et Rouge Wine Bar in the Financial District.  The event is open to any and all SF Bay Area Wedding Vendors, bloggers, brides-to-be or anyone else who loves weddings (especially Indian ones!). 

Please RSVP by commenting to this blog post or at twitter/newindianbride or just show up!

Hope to see you there!

TNIB is excited about today’s topic – Destination Weddings!  I love the idea of taking your nearest and dearest to a far away place to celebrate your wedding in an intimate, romantic and scenic way.  Today our guest blogger is Ruhi Rastogi who recently attended a destination wedding in Bali, Indonesia and fell in love with the concept as well.

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Is there anything that compares with inviting your wedding guests to their own vacation?  Now that is my personal definition of a “destination wedding.” I am not the most selfish person in this world or at least I don’t believe so but every wedding and every newlywed couple leaving for their honeymoon leaves me drooling!  But thanks to whoever invented the idea of a destination wedding, one doesn’t bless and leave just the wedding couple to go on a new journey for an untouched experience!   All the loved ones join as well.  It’s an exploration together.  It’s a honeymoon for the very many.
 
I had promised my Russian darling, Tatyana, to attend her wedding wherever on the globe it might be at and so I did. I was there in the sunlight where one eye was focused on how amazing they both looked and the other on the beautiful black sand beach overlooking a turquoise ocean. 

Each guest had the freedom to design their own itinerary and yet, each of us were pulled in for several events, including an “in-sourced” dinner at the villa (the chefs were in-sourced from a top-notch restaurant), early morning yoga, a playful day at the beach, and unlimited dancing, drinking, and lounging… and not to forget, the spa day!  To support all of this, each friend was requested to ‘in-source’ a litre of alcohol into Bali, ending up with a joint effort towards 30 liters of shared bliss! 
 
Thanks to my darling, I have now put a check-mark across the largest python of the world, a komodo dragon, kopi luwak coffee, island of the Gods, flying fish, international friendships, and a destination wedding! 
 
Tips for the ones who want it all just perfect:
 
~ be kind & make it affordable for the people who would love to join.
~ give fair warning – ‘save-the-date’ cards are crucial – mine came 6 months in advance!
~ know the system – visa requirements, quick fixes, the best deals, what to wear and what not to wear, top restaurant, and a playful list of what-you-must-do’s…
~ visit at least once to prepare for details – a pre-honeymoon, I’d say…
~ utilize the phrase “what are friends for?” and make them mini-managers for small events!
~ organize activities that are suitable for everybody or plan several to cover the whole group…
~ design an information packet with little gifts like sunblock  for Bali , underwater camera  for New Zealand, warm socks for Alaska, straw hat  for South Africa or a margarita glass for Mexico!
~ don’t forget to take advantage of a dedicated website for all of this: www.destinationweddings.com 
 
A destination wedding  where the entire guest list elopes, where there is no stress of the groom running away and where the biggest wedding gift  is an affirmative reply to your ‘save-the-date’ card!

About Ruhi: Ruhi is an engineer residing in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is married to one of My Leading Man’s best friends.  In fact her husband and My Leading Man had quite a bromance before us ladies entered their lives.  So in that respect you might call Ruhi and I the spoilers of a beautiful bromance. But boys, all good things come to an end, even your love affair with one another.