Brand New Girl - Book 1

Chapter 2 - The Start

The lunch bell echoes throughout the girls bathroom, signaling the end of the school day, or in shorter terms: freedom. I wait for the Clique to leave, then grab my bag and tiptoe out the door, checking to make sure they're completely out of sight.

I make a covert dash for the pickup lane, where my Mom is waiting in her silver Highlander. She asks me how my day went. I lie and say that it went great, that I made a couple friends and the classes were easy. Well, I guess that's only a half lie. The classes were pretty easy.

15 minutes later, we rolled up to the driveway. I still haven't quite gotten used to the huge, brick mansion I'm supposed to call home. It feels like it should belong to some congressman and his family, and it probably did at some point. It's so different from the bright, Spanish style home we left in Florida.

As soon as I get to my half unpacked room, I rush to finish my homework. An hour later I submit the last practice quiz and head to my bathroom, reluctantly stepping on the scale.

It screams 148.6 pounds. How did I get this huge?

I pull at my sides, gripping every inch of blubbery fat. My head falls in shame. I got this way by stuffing my face everyday, obviously.

Halloween and Thanksgiving replay in my mind. The mounds of chocolates I inhaled in one night, not even considering how much sugar I was consuming. Not to mention that colossal Thanksgiving dinner. Greasy butter chicken and several pieces of fatty cheese naan were on my plate, devoured in minutes. I didn't eat much better outside of the holidays, either.

I take a deep breath. That's all in the past now, I try to tell myself. I recall weighing 133 in 8th grade, when I actually looked half-decent. I decided that's my goal for now. To be 133 pounds by New Years, in 3 weeks. So all I have to do is lose 5 pounds every week! Can't be that difficult. I'll just cut out snacks. And eat those protein bars mom always buys! That'll do the trick for sure.

But come Friday morning, I realized that did not do the trick. I'd been cutting out all of the snacks I usually ate and having an Atkins Bar for breakfast everyday. Yet the scale said I had only lost a measly 2 pounds!

It just didn't make sense. What was I doing wrong?

I googled how to lose weight online, and several commercial fad diets came up. I was smart enough to know most of those are scams, so I scrolled past to nutrition articles, YouTube channels, and... MyFitnessDiary.com?

It was a dieting and fitness site. You could search for any food item, and it'd tell you the nutrition facts. Then you could log it into your own cute little food diary! There were also dieting articles and a Forum. One of the top contributors is a user named BigRedHead, with over 1000 posts!

I searched for 'chicken biryani' and 'chickpea curry' (last night's dinner).

691 calories...Is that a lot for a diet? I answered the site's weight loss questionnaire to get my recommended caloric intake, and reality slapped me in the face as I saw the number and realized it really, really was. There's no point in just cutting snacks if the meals are the problem!

I skimmed through the diet articles and read about volume eating and the importance of drinking water. I also read about appetite suppressants like coffee and green tea.

I decided to start over again. Now I knew what I needed to do to lose weight.

Right after school I go with my dad to the grocery, and of course it's a super upscale market with organic everything. Fortunately though, that's exactly what I need. I exchange the junk I would usually throw arbitrarily into the cart with carefully selected fruits, vegetables and teas, along with some low-cal snacks and mint flavored chewing gum, which is apparently great for dieting.