This is my symphony

It Was Me All Along (Blogging for Books)
Andie Mitchell
Clarkson Potter

Food.

It’s memories of family–weekday meals of tuna casserole or Sundays at Grandma’s with her special golumpki. It’s the comfort of ice cream after a bad break-up or chocolate chip cookies after an trying day at work. Food is the Saturday night entertainment of a new restaurant, the brats and beer at a baseball game. It’s Christmas and Easter and the dinner you request Mom make for your birthday  every year.

For those of us in the U.S. it’s rarely just a means of sustenance.

Andie Mitchell recounts how the emotional weight food carries played out in her own life. For Andie food was synonymous with family and happiness until her father started drinking heavily when she was seven. After his death food lost its place in her family life … but she still craved the taste of love and comfort and home. She found herself eating compulsively. Boxes of Little Debbies in a sitting. Cartons of ice cream. Super-sized drive-thru snacks. Like so many of us she also found herself on an unpredictable diet mood swing–watching and counting calories one minute, drowning her sorrows in Oreos the next.

Her story of recovery is one we know well, but usually fail to follow: moderation, exercise, portion control. That Andie lost weight after she followed her passion into a satisfying career should surprise no one. She found that when she was truly Herself, relationships, as well as her clothes, no longer fit.

Andie’s story resonated with me. I’ve gained and lost the same twenty pounds for a decade now. I admire anyone like Andie who has the discipline to lose half their body weight. Her relationship with food is more balanced now.

But what will stick with me after reading this weight loss memoir is the title. It is me all along.

Because in the end, a few pounds more or less is not going to be the deciding factor when it comes to happiness or contentment. In the end, all we’ve got is ourselves–and loving the little girl inside might just be more important than whether or not the woman on the outside is a size 4 … or a 14.