While it's no secret that the American wedding is a big-money-making industry, its average price tag is now approaching $30,000, according to a recent article in Newsweek.

Women are investing more than ever in cosmetic treatments from teeth whitening to botox and undergoing extreme diets, spawning a "wedding weight-loss industry," one nutritionist said.

Today's bride-to-be "wants everything to be perfect," says Heidi Allen, who owns the bridal boutique Weddings Heidi Style, in Ontario, Canada, and is a wedding planner on "Rich Bride, Poor Bride." "They want their hair, nails and makeup all professionally done. They want a beautiful dress. And I hear from their mothers that they are almost all obsessed with their weight." Many customers order their dresses a size or two smaller than what they currently wear, she says, because they're determined to be thinner by the big day. Some go much further than that. "I've had to send some brides who ordered a size 12 to get alternations to make their dress a size 20," Allen says. "Luckily, I know a seamstress who's a miracle worker. But it's absolutely ridiculous, the denial I see in the salon." Ironically, she says, it's often the women with the least to lose who lose the most. "A lot of thin girls get obsessed with being even thinner," she says, "and end up coming in for their fittings looking like a rack of bones."

Researcher Lori Neighbors, an assistant professor of nutrition at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, recently took a more scientific look at the relationship between looming nuptials and weight loss. In a study recently published in the journal Appetite, Neighbors followed the dieting patterns of 272 engaged women who were, on average, six months away from their wedding day. She and her co-author, Jeffrey Sobal, professor of nutrition at Cornell, found that 70 percent of them were trying to lose more than 20 pounds and another 20 percent were closely tracking their weight to ensure that they didn't gain anything. "People take their bodies on as projects, and one of the times you want that project to be the most successful is on your wedding day," says Sobal. The study found that most engaged women choose healthy ways to achieve their goals: they cut the junk from their diet and increase their exercise levels. But the researchers were distressed that more than 20 percent of the women they studied used methods they characterized as "extreme," including skipping meals, going on liquid diets, fasting, or taking laxatives or unprescribed diet pills and supplements. A small percentage even started smoking as a weight-loss strategy, while others began vomiting after meals. "With the current high prevalence of anorexia nervosa and bulimia, the pressure of a wedding is one thing that may trigger this kind of unhealthy behavior," says Sobal. (The National Eating Disorders Association estimates that as many as 10 million women and girls in the United States suffer from a serious eating disorder.)

As one bride in the article noted, her fiancé doesn't care what she looks like on their wedding day. So why do we women put ourselves through this torture? The wedding album, of course! BTW, the photo is of me getting some primping of my own by my MIL's hairdresser in El Salvador. We were married in El Salvador the Thanksgiving of 2000.

Besides watching my weight -- no dieting though -- and getting my hair and nails done, I did no other prep work for the big day. How about you all? How far would you go to look fabulous on your wedding day?