MIMM: One More Day

G’morning, y’all! I hope everyone had a lovely weekend — preferably one filled with R&R, laughter, and general shenanigans.

‘Round these parts, I’m counting down the days until my fibroid surgery. One more day, people! One more day, and then I’ll (knock on wood) hopefully be on the road to recovery. One more day, and I hopefully won’t have to rely on hardcore meds to keep the pain in check. One more day, and hopefully I’ll be able to go back to regular, normal life. It’ll be marvelous!

Before getting into the other marvelous things going on in honor of Healthy Diva Eats’ Marvelous in My Monday, I figure I should be honest about getting a little somethin’-somethin’ off my chest.

Among the various things that have been seriously craptastic about this experience is that between the hormones gone awry (side note: Provera is the devil!) and my forced exile from exercise, I’ve gained 30 pounds. My eating habits haven’t changed — but I almost wish they had, since that’d provide a straightforward explanation for this nonsense.

I know I shouldn’t be as upset by this as I am, what with all my fervor about positive body image — but in the interest of being honest here, it’s driving me mildly insane. I’ve never weighed this much in my life, and I can’t stand how I feel. In addition to the fact that I barely recognize my own body, the extra weight leaves me feeling slow, sluggish, out of shape, and totally uncoordinated.

I feel like I don’t understand my own body, simply because my body has never been like this before. I’ve always been active and athletic, and although I’ve never been particularly skinny, I’ve always felt healthy — and, in my opinion, being healthy is way more important than being skinny.

Now, though, I don’t feel even remotely healthy. All the extra weight and the forced inactivity makes me feel like my body is only capable of moving at a snail’s pace — if that snail happened to be navigating through a river of molasses. I’ve never been so sedentary in my life, and I feel like I’ve been gorging on Doritos and donuts, even though what I’ve really been eating is stuff like GF oatmeal, avocados, chicken breasts, and fruits and veggies galore. With apologies for the swearing (my Mom reads this blog, so I try to keep my language clean — but this is the only thing that sums up my feelings, soooo…apologies in advance, Mom!), this is what I feel like whenever I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror:

So, between the persistent, acute abdominal pain and the ridiculous weight gain, to say that I’m incredibly eager to get back to normal life would be a gargantuan understatement. As soon as my doctor says it’s safe to exercise again, I’m going to throw myself into the loving embrace of the elliptical and the kettlebell. (What’s that, you say? Ellipticals and kettlebells, much like other inanimate objects, don’t give good hugs? Well, crap.)

In the meantime, though, I’ve been doing everything I can to perk myself up. For a nerdy-yet-girly gal like myself, this has involved three things: tea, books, and cosmetics.

Because my favorite type of tea, Celestial Seasonings, contains soy lecthin (seriously, Celestial Seasonings, I lurve you guys to the moon and back — how could you do this?! Why you gotta play me like that?), I’ve had to switch to Yogi tea. I was able to find a reasonably similar replacement for my favorite herbal tea, (Celestial Seasonings’ Bengal Spice): Yogi Tea’s India Spice. With some honey and a bit of coconut creamer, this ish is pretty darn good.

I also hit up the library this weekend for some entertainment reading. When my mind isn’t occupied by a bazillion other things, I tend to go for non-fiction or historical fiction books (nerd alert!) — but when the going gets tough, I go straight for the chick lit. Jennifer Weiner has long been one my favorite fiction authors, and our library branch had two of her more recent novels that I haven’t read yet. Entertainment ensues!

I also picked up some new bronzer; considering that I work in a windowless office and am naturally pale, I have the skin tone of a cadaver. To say the least, my skin needs some help in order to look like my veins aren’t filled with paste.

I also got some new nail polish, and I fully intend to go into tomorrow’s surgery with a fresh, bright pink pedicure. I specifically bought Essie polish because it’s free of some of the uber-heinous toxins — specifically formaldehyde, toulene, and dibutyl phthalate — commonly found in nail polish. (In the course of all my auto-immune research, I found that most cosmetics are filled with some seriously awful stuff. Formaldehyde, for example, is a known carcinogen, and dibutyl phthalate causes birth defects. And yet, it’s everywhere. No bueno!)

So, although I don’t have any grandiose designs for keeping myself going amidst the medical shenanigans and loathsome weight gain, I do find that the small things really do help. Whether it’s behaving like a total goofball with Brandon, daily phone calls with my mom, emails from Susie, the smell of clean linens (I’ve been known to bury my face in clean towels as I pull them out of the dryer, just to get a whiff of their happy scent), a pedicure, or a funny movie, focusing on the things I enjoy — the people, experiences, and things that make me happy — gives me just enough of a lift to make all this insanity feel a bit more manageable.

Those little things, and the mood-boosting benefits they bring, are quite marvelous indeed.

What do you do to lift your mood when the going gets rough?

Do you love the smell of fresh linens? (Please tell me I’m not the only one who goes bonkers for stuff like this!)

Did you do anything special this weekend?