It Was Me All Along is a memoir about a young girl that turned to food for comfort, parenting, homework help, and to fill the empty hole she had deep inside herself. Andie Mitchell's struggle is not just with food, but also with turning her unbalanced childhood world into one she could live in normally.
After Andie's father lost his job, he slept all day and ate and drank all night. Before Andie started school, she stayed up with him participating in the eating--gorging on unhealthy fat- and calorie-laden foods before falling asleep in front of the television. While Andie's father was out of work, her mother worked a lot to pay the bills. She worked at cleaning houses, mostly at night, and sometimes during the day as well. Although Andie's mother and father loved each other, her mother couldn't face what her husband had become. In the meantime, Andie just kept gaining weight, never slowing down.
Andie was a lovely girl with a great personality,but she was overweight. Andie was a good student, but along with her studies she had to learn to ignore the cruel remarks made about her weight at school. Unfortunately when Andie's father died, she ate to help herself cope with the loss, and with the fact that the mother she loved so much wasn't there enough because she had to work. Andie's brother was naturally thin and, like his mother, always busy. When they visited their grandmother, she would feed her brother lots of delicious high-calorie food but give Andie diet frozen dinners. While she meant well, it was also hurtful and certainly didn't help Andie lose weight.
While in college, Andie visited an exercise room and stepped on a scale. The pointer just kept going round and round, and she thought it would never stop. At the age of 21, Andie had ballooned to a weight of 300 lbs. If she didn't stop, she was going to be like the people on TV that never left the house, or couldn't get out of bed, because they couldn't carry their own weight. This was her wake-up call. Andie began exercising and counting calories.
It Was Me All Along is the story of Andie Mitchell's struggle with being overweight and learning how to overcome food addiction. She is now a freelance writer and recipe developer who uses her obsession with food as inspiration for her writing and recipe development. She created a successful blog called Can You Stay for Dinner?, which has now been folded into her eponymous website. Whether obese or thin, she was still Andie all along.
This is a book for anyone who has ever struggled--only to become stronger and more confident.