It’s me, your friendly neighborhood Couch Tomato. I’m sorry I abandoned you. I’m going to go ahead and blame it all on Covid-19, because what else is it good for other than horrific chaos and scapegoatery? Is scapegoatery a word? The squiggly red line that’s appearing underneath it in my word editor tells me that the answer is no, but I like it. I’m going to go with it.
Anyway, I thought I’d share a little bit about what kept me so busy that I seemingly had no time to keep up with my fledgling blog when I was furloughed from my job for three months, Yep, that’s right. I was home all day, everyday for three whole months and too busy to write a single blog post.
For starters, I’m proud to say that I did manage to come out of the jobless fiasco relatively unscathed. You might even say that the time off did me a lot of good, and not in the eat-bags-of-chips-and-binge-watch-everything-on-Netflix-and-Hulu type of way. Not that I didn’t do any of that, because I did. In fact, I wallowed in my self-pity for a good month after I was first furloughed from work. Being home for a few months sounds great, sure, but the uncertainty of returning to said job and the knowledge that there are few other work opportunities out there if I was truly laid off led me into a bit of a downward spiral. I ate, I watched, I drank.
I earned my badge of, uh, honor, otherwise known as The Covid-10.
Yes, I gained close to 10 pounds in the first month of being home. I was depressed and lacked motivation. So, on top of already being overweight thanks to severe IBD, I was now even more out of shape and couldn’t fit into anything other than leggings. That’s fine if you never again have to leave your house and wear your work clothes, but I knew that eventually, one way or the other, I’d have to go back to work in some capacity. And as lovely as it was for my husband to tell me that I looked beautiful whenever I complained about not fitting into any of my clothes, I knew what I looked like.
Time to really do something about it. No, really this time.
And do something about it, I did.
Now, I used to be in fantastic shape once I got over my fat childhood years and started falling in love with exercise around age 20. And I kept that large amount of weight off for almost twenty years. The last few years, I’d been in the best shape of my life. I entered Crossfit competitions regularly, for crying out loud. I looked and felt GOOD. So, I know what I’m doing with diet and exercise.
But IBD took all the wind out of every sail there ever was in my life. I mean, it was pathetic. I let that disease take over and I started to make every excuse in the book.
And put on 50 pounds in 2 years.
Yes, FIFTY!
So combine that with my Coronavirus gain, and the situation became dire. But what could I do differently that I had failed to do in the last few years? I wasn’t being my usual disciplined self. Why would that change now?
You know how sometimes things just happen and they were meant to be? You don’t know why or how they are, they just are.
I was looking online one day, about a month into being a stay-at-home-dog-mom, and I saw a social media post from a friend of mine that had been diagnosed with Stage 3 Colon Cancer the year before. Right after giving birth to her first child. She posted about how she too had fallen into the throes of depression after Covid rendered her unemployed. She lost her health insurance and could no longer continue her treatment or get scans, Luckily, she had just completed Chemo for the time when this hit, but still. Anyway, she said that she was down and she started to sit at home and eat. She was the heaviest she’d been in her life. (She’s never been a big girl, like I was, so it must have been an even bigger shock.) But then a friend of hers told her that nutrition was the best healing cure for anything and that she could help this girl feel better and get healthier. I’m sure my friend was skeptical, who wouldn’t be. But I”m so very grateful that she took a leap of faith and said yes to getting healthy, because when I was reading her story, I just knew this was going to be the one thing that worked. The one thing I actually stuck to. I had no idea why I thought this way, I just did.
And so I forked over the money I didn’t exactly have (Unemployment wouldn’t last forever), and waited for the box to arrive that was going to turn my health around.
And turn it around, it did!
I leave you here for now, as this is getting to be way long-winded. Part 2 soon. I promise.
Couch Tomato 