In a world saturated with health fads and diet trends, discovering a sustainable path to weight loss and overall well-being can feel like navigating a minefield. Many dangerous diets of the past caused serious harm to women’s bodies. But don’t let that scare you off. Just because a health trend sounds silly or tough, doesn’t mean it won’t work wonders.
This article delves into the weight loss journey of Andie Mitchell, who recounts her experiences in her memoir "It Was Me All Along." It explores the challenges she faced, the strategies she employed, and the profound lessons she learned about food, body image, and self-acceptance.
Andie Mitchell's Story: From 268 Pounds to Finding Balance
Andie Mitchell's weight loss journey is a testament to the power of perseverance and self-discovery. At her heaviest, Andie Mitchell weighed 268 pounds. From a difficult childhood in Medfield, Massachusetts, she developed a habit of using food for comfort, fun, and to alleviate boredom. "I only learned to use food in ways that were unrelated to hunger," she explains.
Like many, Mitchell started dieting in eighth grade. She tried Atkins, Weight Watchers, Slim Fast, the South Beach Diet. She realized, “So much of it is not just finding a plan that works, but just being ready and committed.”
At 20, Mitchell decided she had to change. "I was prepared for a big number, but 268 was startling because it was so close to 300," she recalls. "Having known that I’d only ever gained weight up until that point, I could just see that I would eventually be 325 or 350 pounds and it would never stop. I just knew at that moment that it was now or never."
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The Weight Loss Process: A Combination of Diet and Exercise
Mitchell embarked on a journey to lose half her body weight, setting a loose goal of 140 pounds. She began by making healthier choices, cutting back on sweets and soda, and incorporating more fruits and vegetables into her diet. She also joined Weight Watchers for about five months. She said that it really helped her to get a handle on serving sizes and portions and taught her about nutrition.
Mitchell finished the rest of the weight loss on her own. She kept counting calories, aiming for 1,600 calories a day. "It’s like a game," she says. "I’m a numbers person and I also really liked that sometimes a calorie is just a calorie. I like trying to eat in the most healthy way - but sometimes you just want 250 calories to be a cookie."
In addition to diet, Mitchell incorporated regular exercise into her routine, jogging six days a week. "Running was something that I never thought I’d be able to do because it was always such torture, but it was something that I really got into," she says. It took 13 months to get down to 133 pounds.
The Psychological Challenges of Weight Loss
After slimming down, it was a really hard process for me to get acclimated to my body and figure out, OK, so this is a new normal, and to try to find a way of eating for the long term. Mitchell was surprised to find she was more depressed than happy. She thought problems that had existed in her life would be better once she lost weight, but she was still the same person. She had the same fears, the same hang-ups about herself, and life was still coming with its own challenges. Now she couldn’t turn back to food, which had always been her comfort.
Mitchell had to recognize she won’t be able to emotionally eat for the rest of her life if she want to maintain a healthy body. Coming to terms with that was kind of like grieving and that was really hard. She had to find ways to fill her time or things to do, like going out with friends more, in order to feel OK without food. Writing became a big thing for her.
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She also felt this pressure because she just became more visible to everybody. "I felt like more people were aware that I lost weight and I didn’t want to fail them. I didn’t want to fail myself," she explains. "It felt nice to receive attention and to be thought of as attractive. But at the same time, I realized I’ve only changed this one part of my physical being and that’s getting me all of this praise. That’s very sad; it’s a sad truth of our society." She felt a lot of anxiety about food and she was just so scared that eating anything beyond what she had set as her calorie range.
Strategies for Maintaining Weight Loss and Finding Balance
Therapy helped for a bit. She also met with a nutritionist who really encouraged her to learn to re-integrate slowly the foods that she once loved. She feels good now and she weigh 150 pounds. She eat healthy during the week and then maybe go out to eat on the weekends, or get a great dessert or bake something that she love. She don’t count calories anymore. She really believe in everything in moderation. She never wanted to stay in some sort of dieting mode or cut out food groups.
For exercise, she love walking. Being in New York City, she walk everywhere. She weigh herself once a week. Mitchell's advice to people is to become more aware of serving sizes. "What is a serving of chicken? What does a cup of grains look like? What are servings of your favorite foods?" she asks. "That was eye-opening for me. I never knew any of that." For weight loss, counting calories was everything. She believe what you eat is almost all of the equation. The exercise piece is really helpful because she felt good and you start this healthy cycle of, “I’ve just done something good for my body, I’d like to continue that by eating well,” and food becomes this nourishing fuel. But she think so much of it is just what we eat.
"You really have to take it one day at a time and just do your best," Mitchell advises.
The Importance of Self-Acceptance and a Balanced Approach
Mitchell's journey highlights the importance of self-acceptance and a balanced approach to weight loss. In her memoir, "It Was Me All Along," she chronicled her lifelong struggles with food, weight, losing 135 pounds, and the journey to find balance. Now, in her first cookbook, she’s giving you the dishes that helped her reach her goals and maintain that balance. “Eating in the Middle” is about finding the middle ground between being healthy and feeling happy, between eating wholesomely and indulging in some of what you crave. Her memoir, It Was Me All Along, shares her journey to lose 135 pounds and ultimately find balance with food, weight, and body image. It was recently chosen as one of Amazon’s Top 100 Books of 2015, picked as People Magazine’s Book of the Week (Jan 9, 2015), one of Amazon’s Best New Books of January 2015, and a finalist in the 2015 GoodReads Choice Awards.
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Mitchell emphasizes that it's possible to live a life where you’re not constantly battling food and your body. This book is about courage and changing your life, but it’s also about recognizing that all of our flaws and failures, all of the hindrances we perceive ourselves to have-these things shape us. They make us strong, brave, and wise. They give us empathy and compassion.
All her life, Andie Mitchell had eaten lustily and mindlessly. Food was her babysitter, her best friend, her confidant, and it provided a refuge from her fractured family. It Was Me All Along takes Andie from working class Boston to the romantic streets of Rome, from morbidly obese to half her size, from seeking comfort in anything that came cream-filled and two-to-a-pack to finding balance in exquisite (but modest) bowls of handmade pasta. This story is about much more than a woman who loves food and abhors her body. It is about someone who made changes when her situation seemed too far gone and how she discovered balance in an off-kilter world.
Overcoming Plateaus and Maintaining Momentum
Almost everyone who has ever committed to a weight loss routine long term has run into the dreaded problem of the plateau. You’ve At one point or another, you’ve been chugging along, following your meal plan and hitting the gym while seeing success every week and then, all of a sudden the scale starts refusing to cooperate. The most important thing to note is that weight loss isn’t linear. When you lose for a long time, you will notice that sometimes weight loss will slow down and then suddenly you’ll be losing a pound a day for a few days. You aren’t in a plateau until you have gone 3+ weeks with no weight loss while carefully tracking what you eat. Regardless, plateaus do occasionally happen and they can be incredibly frustrating. If you are positive you are doing everything right, the best advice is probably just to stay the course. You will lose the weight eventually.
Additional Tips for Healthy Weight Loss
Here are some additional tips for healthy weight loss:
- Prioritize sleep: If you aren’t getting enough sleep your body isn’t going to be functioning at its best.
- Consider increasing calorie intake: Sometimes if you are restricting too much for too long your hormones can get out of whack. Assuming you don’t have a serious problem that would require a doctor, eating more and focusing on better complete nutrition could get your body functioning better.