A "fat bride-to-be" is refusing to diet ahead of her wedding and says her weight is just a "small part" of who she is.

Hannah Attewell, 36, hasn't always felt confident about her body and started dieting at the age of 12.

She spent her 20's wearing just black clothes but finally "had an epiphany" aged 30.

Hannah, a size 24, found the confidence to throw herself into dating and went on "26 first dates" before meeting her fiancé Charles Anderson, 32, a council administrator.

Now she loves herself and and her body and is refusing to diet for her upcoming wedding.

She hopes to encourage others to feel confident in their bodies.

Hannah, a wedding photographer, from St Albans, Hertfordshire said: "This assumption that you need to lose weight for your wedding is old.

"What if there's another way to feel good that doesn't involve going on a fad diet and weighing yourself every morning and letting yourself be dictated by this?

"The average UK woman is a size 16 but the most commonly stocked size in wedding dress shops is an eight.

“Our bodies change all the time, it's normal, especially as women.

"Before I wouldn't date. I wouldn't go on holiday, and I wouldn't have met my fiancé if I hadn't changed my opinion about myself.

“I do all the things I wouldn’t do before, there’s nothing I wouldn’t do now."

Hannah grew up feeling insecure about her weight.

She said: "I went on my first diet at 12.

"It was so instilled in me. I remember trying on a pair of trousers and them not fitting anymore and thinking I was fat when it was probably just a growth spurt.

“One girl in drama class said: 'Why are your knees like that?' in front of everyone sat in a circle, which I hadn’t noticed until that point so it gave me a new insecurity.

“I was acutely aware I was the fattest person in my whole school and my friends were all thin.

“We’d go to Topshop together and I couldn’t have the classic teenage girl experience of clothes shopping on the weekends because nothing fit me.

“I felt like their mum trailing around after them chaperoning, and it felt very exclusionary because fashion is such an important thing as a teenager.”

In her late teenage years and 20's she would only wear black so she “merged into the background".

She said: “I used to just wear black all the time. I remember wearing black on a beach in Australia.

“I wouldn’t wear anything that had any sort of personality.”

Hannah says she didn’t go on any dates for the majority of her 20's, but when she got to aged 30 she “had an epiphany” and changed her perspective.

She said: “I was sitting on the sofa in my house watching The Handmaid’s Tale, thinking about how many pounds I could lose a week until Christmas and I thought 'I can't do this anymore'.

“I realised I can't be 45 and still feeling like this. I’ve been obsessed with losing weight for half my life.

"All the things I could’ve just done but didn't because I thought I had to wait until I’d lost weight.