Read Online It Was Me All Along: A Memoir by Andie Mitchell - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Andie Mitchell
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taking a placebo. Neither group would know which pill they took: real or fake. Over the course of three months, the girls would meet every other week to be weighed and measured and to talk collectively with a team of registered dietitians.
At first, it seemed like a reasonable idea. At our first Saturday-morning group meeting, I met ten girls, each seated next to her mother, and our lead nutritionists. I scanned the room when we all sat down and immediately noted our similarities. We were all big, all squished into chairs with thin metal arms that dug into our thighs, all fidgeting and uncomfortable, all clearly wishing we were somewhere—anywhere—else. I looked around at each of the mothers and noted that none of them was thin. Like their daughters, each carried at least twenty extra pounds. I wondered if they hoped to lose as much weight as they wanted their daughters to lose by enrolling them in this study. I looked to our main nutritionist as she tugged at her gauzy muumuu, readjusting it so that it draped over her belly like a towel over a beach ball.
How can she be fat?
I wondered.
Just as I began to dive into the impossibility of a fat woman guiding me to thinness, the meeting began. In the first ten minutes,we introduced ourselves and our mothers. Then we moved on to what the mission of our group would be: to support each other while learning to eat well and move more. It was encouraging to feel connected and on the same path, but I felt embarrassed to have to be part of it.
Daily, outside of meetings, each of us girls was to take the prescribed dose of Meridia or the placebo and do our best to follow a set of healthy eating and exercise guidelines not unlike the food-guide pyramid prescribed by the FDA. The main guidelines, as I remember them now, included suggestions such as:
1. Drink eight 8-ounce glasses of water per day.
2. Eat five or more servings of fruits and vegetables per day.
3. Switch all white flour/refined-grain products to those made entirely with whole grains.
4. Limit sweet foods composed mostly of sugar (cakes, cookies, pastries).
5. Move your body for thirty minutes per day (walking, jogging, dancing, swimming).
After two weeks of diligence, my heart sank as I weighed in, having lost only half a pound. I forged on for another two weeks and when the nurse told me privately that I had gained a pound, I cried alone in the bathroom stall before our group meeting. I had failed. I could almost feel the pound of fat I’d gained, hanging low on my belly, next to all the rest, and I hated myself for it.
Reflecting now on the way I ate during the first two weeks of the study, I recognize the errors. The foods I learned to be healthy—the foods that are indeed healthy in proper portions—I munched with abandon. A cupped handful of almonds, which I thought tobe a light snack, tacked five hundred calories onto my daily intake. The yogurt I asked Mom to buy was the kind that came sweetened and topped with crushed Oreo cookies. The Honey Bunches of Oats cereal that I was certain qualified as health food wasn’t quite so virtuous three bowls in.
While the dietitians at our group meetings introduced me to a world of healthy food—even going so far as to take us on a field trip to Whole Foods to marvel at the rainbow of produce—they must have forgotten to mention portion sizes. Knowing all that I know now about nutrition, I see how easy it was for me to fail at this diet. As a girl who always ate self-determined, larger-than-large servings of whatever I wanted, I needed to learn that most things in life, like cereal and orange juice, shouldn’t be bottomless. Because few foods are healthy when eaten in third and fourth helpings. Calories should have been part of the conversation we had in those group meetings. Not to make us obsessive counters, but to make us aware that food has value and that too much of anything costs us something nutritionally.
By nightfall, I’d secretly eaten three
At first, it seemed like a reasonable idea. At our first Saturday-morning group meeting, I met ten girls, each seated next to her mother, and our lead nutritionists. I scanned the room when we all sat down and immediately noted our similarities. We were all big, all squished into chairs with thin metal arms that dug into our thighs, all fidgeting and uncomfortable, all clearly wishing we were somewhere—anywhere—else. I looked around at each of the mothers and noted that none of them was thin. Like their daughters, each carried at least twenty extra pounds. I wondered if they hoped to lose as much weight as they wanted their daughters to lose by enrolling them in this study. I looked to our main nutritionist as she tugged at her gauzy muumuu, readjusting it so that it draped over her belly like a towel over a beach ball.
How can she be fat?
I wondered.
Just as I began to dive into the impossibility of a fat woman guiding me to thinness, the meeting began. In the first ten minutes,we introduced ourselves and our mothers. Then we moved on to what the mission of our group would be: to support each other while learning to eat well and move more. It was encouraging to feel connected and on the same path, but I felt embarrassed to have to be part of it.
Daily, outside of meetings, each of us girls was to take the prescribed dose of Meridia or the placebo and do our best to follow a set of healthy eating and exercise guidelines not unlike the food-guide pyramid prescribed by the FDA. The main guidelines, as I remember them now, included suggestions such as:
1. Drink eight 8-ounce glasses of water per day.
2. Eat five or more servings of fruits and vegetables per day.
3. Switch all white flour/refined-grain products to those made entirely with whole grains.
4. Limit sweet foods composed mostly of sugar (cakes, cookies, pastries).
5. Move your body for thirty minutes per day (walking, jogging, dancing, swimming).
After two weeks of diligence, my heart sank as I weighed in, having lost only half a pound. I forged on for another two weeks and when the nurse told me privately that I had gained a pound, I cried alone in the bathroom stall before our group meeting. I had failed. I could almost feel the pound of fat I’d gained, hanging low on my belly, next to all the rest, and I hated myself for it.
Reflecting now on the way I ate during the first two weeks of the study, I recognize the errors. The foods I learned to be healthy—the foods that are indeed healthy in proper portions—I munched with abandon. A cupped handful of almonds, which I thought tobe a light snack, tacked five hundred calories onto my daily intake. The yogurt I asked Mom to buy was the kind that came sweetened and topped with crushed Oreo cookies. The Honey Bunches of Oats cereal that I was certain qualified as health food wasn’t quite so virtuous three bowls in.
While the dietitians at our group meetings introduced me to a world of healthy food—even going so far as to take us on a field trip to Whole Foods to marvel at the rainbow of produce—they must have forgotten to mention portion sizes. Knowing all that I know now about nutrition, I see how easy it was for me to fail at this diet. As a girl who always ate self-determined, larger-than-large servings of whatever I wanted, I needed to learn that most things in life, like cereal and orange juice, shouldn’t be bottomless. Because few foods are healthy when eaten in third and fourth helpings. Calories should have been part of the conversation we had in those group meetings. Not to make us obsessive counters, but to make us aware that food has value and that too much of anything costs us something nutritionally.
By nightfall, I’d secretly eaten three
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