Free It Was Me All Along: A Memoir by Andie Mitchell

packages of Little Debbie Swiss Cake Rolls. I plunged the empty wrappers deep into the trash can, below a wad of paper towels so that Mom wouldn’t find them and become as disappointed in me as I already was with myself. If she noticed the missing boxes, she never said anything. In the week that followed, I put in a halfhearted healthy effort. I craved all things sweet so intensely that I continued to eat them, lots of them, in secret. Guilt and Oreos sat heavy in my stomach.
    I wanted badly to be smaller, to be less painfully aware of my size, but I just wasn’t ready to stick to an apple when cookies were the afternoon snack my friends enjoyed. I didn’t feel like movingmore. It wasn’t fair that I needed to exercise when my best friends simply walked around the mall en route from Orange Julius to Auntie Anne’s Pretzels. I resented having to live differently just so I could be the same.
    My best friend, Kate, was a bodily enigma. All her life she’d been very, very thin—a lean and bony waif in all the pictures I’d ever seen of her from birth through adolescence. With her long blond hair, she looked like Gwyneth Paltrow—beautiful and delicate. The way she ate seemed no different from the way I ate. If we spent a Saturday together, fresh off a Friday night sleepover, here is how our eating played out: In the morning we’d sit at her kitchen table, and Kate would place two bowls, two spoons, a jug of 1% milk, and the box of Honey Bunches of Oats with Almonds in front of us. The very acknowledgment that Kate adored cereal as much as I did, and that she ate it every morning, was enough to tell me that there was nothing wrong with how much I craved it. In turn, I assumed cereal wasn’t anything to avoid and that my eating it was perfectly fine.
    But setting the whole box on the table was contrary to what I’d learned in group. They’d told us we should serve ourselves from the kitchen, take our plate to the table, and eat. If we were still hungry, we could go back for more. The dietitians explained that having the full box there led to mindless overconsumption, that we’d probably serve ourselves more just because it was there. Kate and I poured equal amounts of cereal into our bowls, about a cup and a half. We splashed milk on top just to cover the flakes. And then we ate, chitchatting through the crunchy bites. What I didn’t recognize then—what I failed to notice—was that Kate stopped after one bowl of cereal. She ate so slowly that I was able to fill a second bowlful by the time she’d made it halfway through her first.
    When lunchtime came, we convinced Kate’s mom to take us to Taco Bell. There, Kate would order two crunchy tacos with “beef and cheese only, please,” while I got two Beef Supreme Chalupas. The only difference for our orders, we both acknowledged, was that Kate disliked sour cream, zesty sauces, and soft taco shells. A mere matter of preference, I was sure. And though each of us had ordered two, I now know that Kate’s tacos clocked in at 170 calories each, while mine were a whopping 370 calories each.
    Late in the afternoon, back at Kate’s house, after we’d tired of creating binder collages of Leonardo DiCaprio and watching recorded episodes of
The Real World: Seattle
, we’d head into her kitchen for a snack. She always had Pepperidge Farm Milano cookies, and for that, I worshipped her cupboard. Kate pulled two from the package, set them on a napkin, and ate them as slowly as she’d eaten breakfast. I pulled out two at first, but when I finished and noticed she still had one left to eat, I reached into the bag for two more.
    As dinner approached, Mom would come and pick Kate and me up from Kate’s house and take us to dinner and a movie, a tradition we held on Saturday nights. Pizzeria Uno was almost always the chosen spot. There Kate ordered the chicken fingers and french fries from the kids’ menu while Mom and I ordered the same thing in adult versions. Each of us