It Was Me All Along: A Book Review

By her early twenties, Andie Mitchell weighed 268 pounds. 135 pounds later, she wrote It Was Me All Along, a memoir about her relationship with food. But this is not your typical weight loss success story… and that is why I find it so inspiring.

Throughout Andie’s entire life, food served as her best friend, babysitter, and comforter. She ate voraciously and obsessively with little to no regard for her health or appearance. The crunch of bowl after bowl of sugary cereal drowned out her father’s yells, a dozen cupcakes rising in the oven gave her something to watch and look forward to in a lonely apartment with no one to watch and enjoy her. Food was the only constant growing up in a tumultuous home and Andie clutched to it like a life preserver in the storm that her childhood often was.

An emotional eater myself, I related to Andie’s childhood relationship with food. Food is also my comforter. I’m only beginning to understand the extent of my ENDOS (eating disorder not otherwise specified) with the help of psycho and cognitive therapy. Andie’s testimony is an honest one and I appreciate her courage in writing it.

I imagine it’s extremely difficult for anyone who has not had an unhealthy relationship with food to understand or feel sympathetic toward someone who can eat with reckless abandon such extreme quantities of food. But addiction is addiction. And if you’re not interested in a story of overcoming addiction and odds, and your relationship with food is a healthy one, then this book is not for you.

My relationship with food is not healthy. Nor was Andie’s before her incredible 135 pound weight loss, nor was it after. And this is what makes her story so powerful in my opinion. With the same honesty and emotion, Andie wrote about breaking down in a restaurant after feeling pressured to order meatloaf instead of a salad, and her obsessive calorie counting and running despite despising the activity. She wrote about becoming withdrawn and feeling alienated when the entire world felt they had the right to comment on what and when and how she ate.

When eating is a coping mechanism, removing that mechanism often leaves you feeling anxious, depressed, and exposed. Without a healthy substitute, we often latch on to another negative behavior, or crumble under the weight of the emotions we masked for so long.

I think all of us who struggle with our weight have the same fantasy that once we lose the weight everything will be right in the world. We make statements starting with, “If only I could lose this weight, then… (insert any success story and fulfilled dream here.) But the truth is that without therapy, instead of being a screwed up fat person, you’ll just be a screwed up thin person. And after Andie lost all her weight, she was a screwed up thin person: depressed, anxious, and still obsessive.

But then she got help.

And now she’s living the dream, the dream being BALANCE (and being a successful writer and blogger [okay, fine, that’s MY dream]). Andie still eats decadent, rich chocolate cake – she just savors one slice, rather than polish off the whole thing. She still orders a burger and fries. The difference being she eats a salad first, takes half the burger home and shares the fries with her boyfriend. She works out doing things she enjoys. She cooks and bakes every day because she LOVES food and it excites her and she enjoys eating so she keeps doing it – she just makes the right choices and practices restraint and control. Control without being controlling. It’s a beautiful thing.

Andie and her story has inspired and energized me. She is living proof that weight can be lost, there still can be cake, and balance is achievable.