Andie Mitchell

I don't think I like memoirs very much.

Or maybe I just don't like the authors, that could be it.

I really wanted to like this book. As someone who also binge eats and has always had a volatile relationship with food, I wanted to relate to Andie, to see someone like myself. I wanted to see someone who had struggled but come out on top.

Some of it was there. Mitchell struggled with her weight for years; her emotional struggles fueled her food addiction, and at least in that respect, I could show more relate to the author.

Ultimately, though, there are a few things that I just can't get past.

First, the poor writing was really distracting. Mitchell has a communications degree and (I think) her primary "job" now is maintaining a blog and writing books. Still, though, the writing seemed forced and unnatural. It felt like she was trying too hard.

Second, and I hate to say this because she is a real person who could read this one day, but Mitchell did not present herself as someone who was very likable. She spends a large portion of the book talking about how hard her mother worked while she was growing up. Her mom clearly sacrificed a lot, yet Mitchell - at somewhere around 21 or 22 years old - felt okay with having her mom take out a sizable chunk of her retirement account to pay for Mitchell's skin-removal surgery. I know, I know, it's not my place to judge other people's life choices, but still... she was only in her early 20s. She could have worked for a few years to save up the money herself instead of relying on her mom yet again. She did say that she, her mom, and her boyfriend had a long discussion about it, but that seems to me like the kind of decision that could have waited until a time when her mom wouldn't have to dip into her retirement fund. It seems like quite a rash decision.

Other decisions that Mitchell made seemed very selfish as well. She got a degree in communications with no real idea what job she might want after graduation, and predictably, after graduation she sort of floundered for a while until she lucked into a job on a movie set. It worked out well for her, and she was offered a job on another set several states away. She told her boyfriend about it and seemed to have already made up her mind to move, so of course, he agreed to move, too. They moved again for Mitchell to take a third job on a movie set before deciding (rather randomly) to settle in Seattle. Mitchell’s boyfriend Daniel supported her throughout all of her moves, and during her dramatic weight loss. She describes the depression that she felt after losing weight. Perhaps Mitchell’s lowest point in the book, in my opinion, was when Daniel lost his job and his motivation, became depressed, and she broke up with him. (Those events weren’t presented as being directly related, but that’s the way it came across in the book.)

From what I’d seen on social media, I expected to really enjoy this book, but I just couldn’t see past Mitchell as being spoiled and selfish, and it made it really hard to be empathetic towards her. I was glad to come to Goodreads and see that there were plenty of others who felt the same way.

So maybe it’s not just that I don’t like memoirs.

Maybe I just don’t like bad ones. show less

Another book written by a blogger I follow. I read a lot of weight loss memoirs, but this one seemed to particularly resonate with me: the pain of getting fat without realizing it, the pain of being fat, the pain of losing the fat, the pain of being skinny and having people who have never been in your situation micromanage everything that goes in your mouth and make rude comments if it’s healthy and make rude comments if it’s not and they think they’re helping but they just make you show more want to quit. show less

I had a hard time rating this book because on one hand, I was able to relate to the author in many ways and I appreciate how honest and open she is about her family life and ever-changing struggle with her weight. But on the other hand, she appears to treat many of the people close to her very poorly. It is hard for me to understand that after years of her mom working multiple jobs just to make ends meet, she would even let her mom use $15k of her retirement to pay for a skin surgery. What show more about her mom's needs or future? Also, I felt really bad for her boyfriend Daniel, who after years of bending to her every whim, is kicked to the curb when times become hard for him and he no longer meets her expectations. It seemed like everyone in her life needed to provide her with something, yet nothing was ever reciprocated. There were also many instances where I felt the author was exaggerating or contradicting something previously stated. show less

A gut wrenching (literally) memoir about a young food blogger's childhood and life long struggle with food addiction. Always the "chubby kid," Andie turned to food for comfort when her home life was falling apart around her. She hated her weight, but she loved food more. When she turned twenty she realized that she weighed nearly three hundred pounds, something had to change. She set about changing her eating habits, working out, meeting a therapist, and re-evaluating the way she looked at show more food. It wasn't easy and it wasn't fun. Andie realized that even attaining her desired weight goal didn't make her happy. She had to work on the inside as much as she had to work on the outside. Her memoir is touching and really hits home.

I received this book for free from Blogging for Books in return for my honest, unbiased opinion. show less