It Was Me All Along: A Memoir by Andie Mitchell

Author:Andie Mitchell [Mitchell, Andie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780770433260
Publisher: Ten Speed Press
Published: 2015-01-06T06:00:00+00:00

The next day came and, with it, the gym. Kate and I pulled into our spot, the one inconveniently facing McDonald’s. I stared in lust.

“I should just keep driving straight ahead. Keep going ’til we’ve broken through the golden arches and the deep fryer is in the front seat with me and the McFlurry machine is in the back.”

Kate lifted her eyebrows and smirked, knowing the idea wasn’t the worst I’d ever had. The scent of french fries wafted through our open windows, hot and salty as the summer air.

Sitting still in the driver’s seat for a moment longer, I thought back to the most touching of all weight loss stories I’d ever come across. Two years before that summer, I was in the waiting room of my doctor’s office thumbing through O, The Oprah Magazine (Oprah, if you’re reading—because I know you like to read—I adore you always and forever). Midway through the thick issue, I found a piece written by a woman who’d lost one-hundred-plus pounds. She credited much of her transformation to the support of Overeaters Anonymous. For the first time, I had felt connected to someone who shared her struggle with weight and the grieving associated with trying to eat less, to limit yourself. The writer was honest; she was vulnerable line after line in a way I hadn’t heard before. The part that stood out to me, as if highlighted in neon yellow, was when she recounted a night she felt particularly weak in her resolve to not binge-eat. She called her sponsor in desperation, feeling herself slipping off the ledge of her willpower. Her sponsor paused, considered her pain, her anxiety and lust to binge, and said:

“Can you do it today? Can you make it through today without bingeing? Just today, and tomorrow we’ll reconsider?”

The writer was struck, as was I in reading it over. “Uh, yes. I mean, yeah—yes, I can get through today,” she stumbled out in concession. In that moment, she realized that this phrase would be her mantra. It would be the question she’d ask herself, day in and day out, when she felt herself falling back into old habits. Can you do it today? The notion of just trying to take each day as it came. The commitment to the present moment, and only the present moment, without worrying about the big and daunting picture of all the days that followed. The mustering of strength and dedication for now, if not later.

That question stayed with me after having read her article. And at that moment, sitting in my car outside the YMCA at the beginning of my own weight loss journey, it floated into my head like a banner attached to a blimp in the sky.

Can you exercise today, Andie? Not tomorrow, not the next day, not even a month from now. Today? Eat the best you can, work your plus-sized heart out … today?

And, I found, I could.

The first three days—when I sobered to the fact that my

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