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http://www.thekitchn.com/feedburnermain

Our Personal History series invites cooks and eaters to tell the stories of their lives through food. Arianna’s journey is one of learning (and relearning) food through the lens of numbers.

I know there was a time in my life when food was simply food and not just a bunch of numbers, but getting there requires some memory mining. I’d just turned 13, and was starting a new school in the fall. June through August were set aside for crafting a better version of myself — more mature, more outgoing, more popular — and the key to becoming this better self, I knew, was losing weight. This wasn’t a new endeavor. I’d been unhappy with my body for as long as I’d been conscious of it, but I’d never had success in changing it.

I knew if I wanted to shrink my tummy, which had only expanded as I got older despite my mother’s regular assurances that it was “baby fat,” I’d need to get serious and regimented about what I ate. I needed a reliable system.

And then, as if by magic, Atkins happened.

I discovered Atkins maybe six months before it would become ubiquitous, during my family’s annual summer vacation in California. Each year, we’d spend a week visiting my parents’ longtime friends, whose family mirrored my own (parents from the Bronx having settled out West, two daughters, two sons), and this year I was especially fixated on Sandy, who was a week older than me. I saw her the way I saw most girls in my orbit, which is to say she was the personification of everything I wasn’t: energetic, unrestrained, happy, and, most importantly, thin.

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