Food Blogger Andie Mitchell on Losing Over 100 Pounds, Accepting Herself

— -- Andie Mitchell’s weight loss journey began when a night of celebration turned into a rude awakening.

“I made this chocolate cake for my 20th birthday party and I ended up eating the entire thing, slice by slice, by myself,” Mitchell told ABC News. “[I] felt such tremendous guilt afterwards, all this shame.”

Mitchell, now 29, said the fact that she weighed 268 pounds at the time and the fact that she had “only ever gained weight” throughout her life led to her see a “sobering” future for herself.

“The number was just terrifying to me,” Mitchell said. “…I just felt like, at some point, I’d weight 300 pounds, 315, 350, and that was just sobering.”

“I loved anything sweet, any desserts, cakes cookies,” she said of her favorite treats. “And I ate them for fun, for comfort. I ate them when I was sad, when I was happy, and they meant everything.”

Mitchell, a writer, began her weight loss journey at that moment and found success on the scale.

“I started eating better. I started running,” Mitchell said. “And eventually just got into this practice of trying to eat mindfully.”

Though Mitchell was losing weight, her struggle to find balance was just beginning. The “Can You Stay for Dinner” blogger says that with each pound lost, she also lost part of her identity.

“I wanted to make peace with food,” Mitchell said. “I had to kind of find a new balance, a new way of life."

Mitchell’s journey towards acceptance, chronicled in her new memoir, “It Was Me All Along,” has struck a chord with women everywhere.

Supporters have called the book “life changing and powerful” and called Mitchell “truly inspiring.”

In a three-part blog post after her weight loss, titled "What I miss from 135lbs ago," Mitchell wrote about embracing both her overweight and thin selves.

"I will always know that the grass, though it seems emerald and glowing in that field on the other side, it isn’t. Flowers grow here; they grow over there. As weeds do, too," she wrote in the May 2011 post. "But both are wide and they’re open. And I can lie and cry in one and move and spin in the other. Just knowing this: they’re the same field. And they’re both mine."

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