Michele~when your DH is in China, where is he? Seeing those photos of Shanghai today are horrible! The air quality is so bad they even had to cancel flights!

Loved the podcast, Jen (CherryPie99)! My new favorite phrase is "suck it up, princess!"

Shannon, very interesting stuff from Steve Troutman here, in fantastic trainerese!

Yes, it's all about food - or nutrition as we call it in the weights world. No matter how silly I think the expression 'nutrition' is, actually it works for me. When I was weight training I ate accordingly. That was the aim: to fuel the body to build muscle. I remember quite clearly that three meals a day + two snacks (or perhaps five mini-meals) worked really, really well. And I also remember that having or not having supper (here, I mean something after the evening meal) made all the difference to losing weight or not. Shannon, we talked about that at the time - that was when you were in the heyday of working out.

I did try giving up M2 and M4 but that backfired, in that I ate more at M3 and M5 and felt slightly off-balance during the day. So I'm now back with 5 mini-meals. M2 and M4 are good old cottage cheese and apple, standards which serve me well (as gardenerjoy puts it). If those two meals are firmly in place (and eaten slowly and chewed well) then everything else seems to flow quite smoothly from that.

Re. training itself. Yes, I wave a few dumbbells about. I'm just embarking on a new programme which I worked on with my trainer. I am so injury-prone now that I'm taking it very slowly indeed. (This week it's my foot. But I'm taking courage from this. The whole chain is pushing the injury through and out from the SI joint to the hip, to the knee, to the ankle and now the foot. I treat each bit as it comes along but I think it should be out and in the bin by the New Year. Overall, I think I'm much, much better at injury and how it all fits together.)

So, the takeaway message to me is to clean up the nutrition! And, even if I'm not going to lift heavy for a while, to act as though I'm a lifter.

I call myself agnostic, as my own definition of deity has grown so broad that nobody else will have me,

Jen, very cool! I will listen to the podcast tonight.

shannon, thanks for sharing what the trainer said. It totally makes sense to me, for whatever that's worth.

kisskiss, carpeted bathrooms were a thing back in the 70's. While I understand the desire to not stand on cold tile, bathrooms tend toward the warm and moist. Mix that with males ... nah, I am not going to take that any further! I informed the designers that the new floor absolutely must be something that can be wet-Swiffered and did not require annual sealing. Leaves me with a big selection of engineered wood and laminates, or the high-end sheet vinyls. I think I can work with that!

Allison, good luck fighting off that cold.

Michele, I hear you loud and clear on the pout 'n' eat. I am sure you'll successfully duck the goodies - you're a pro!

Crisis du jour has to do with finding a local tailor who can do complex (at least to me) work, and do it fast. The pants that go with DS's swing choir suit are well over two inches too large in the waist. Since October, I was told (and believed) that the correct size was being ordered. Nope. And he needs to wear them next Tuesday. We tried a belt and it looks worse than ridiculous. They'll need some serious work to look halfway decent. Found the right person ... now need to get kid and pants together with seamstress tonight. I can only imagine what this is going to cost me. More than the pants did, I'm sure. Grr.

Shannon, it's definitely true I have found that if your diet isn't what it needs to be then you can't lose weight. However, I find that doing exercise -- including cardio -- motivates me to eat better, so they do go hand in hand.

Michele, I think yoga in general is a weight-bearing exercise so I would count it as strength rather than cardio, unless you're doing "power yoga" or something that involves moving quickly rather than holding poses.

My diet is kind of all over the place. On the one hand, giving up dairy and soy basically means giving up all processed foods and desserts, so I'm effectively on a whole foods diet now. On the other hand, I do end up eating quite a lot of bread and corn products (like the corn chips I bought at the vending machine because I didn't have enough food from home with me today and the corn chips were the only non-dairy non-soy item there), and I used a goodly amount of olive oil cooking my dinner last night. I need a lot of food to keep producing milk for these two babies, but sometimes bread is a lot more convenient to grab than trying to find the time to cook more, since any time I spend cooking is time I'm not spending sleeping. I think I ate two dozen bagels this week.

Birchie - I remember when we first started talking about the mini meals, and they worked well for me for a long time. Then exercise got less consistent, I just wasn't always hungry. Now I'm trying to get back into my exercise pattern, and I find I'm doing 3 mail meals, and two snacks. The snacks are usually something like an orange or some beef jerky or something. I've been starving at about 5-5:30 every day lately, that is when I usually have the jerky and then get to exercise. I'm not willing to let go of my wine or beer with dinner and sometimes scotch after dinner, so I'm keeping the rest of the day in line to allow for that. Have you ever used resistance bands? Would they be lower impact for you?

Becky - hope you find a tailor. Eek.

Jen - going to check out your podcast this weekend! Woo!

Michele - I call yoga strength training, absolutely.

Jessica - have you had to give up dairy and soy because of the breast feeding?

Ew on carpeted bathrooms! I spent a year and some months living in Great Britain as a kid and one of our rentals had carpeting in the bathroom. It was gross enough, until someone threw up and missed the toilet. My mom was none too pleased with that!

We'll just say on the religious point that I'm a conservative, reformed Christian. I do much prefer Easter to Christmas, though

Shannon - I believe that diet advice 100%. In my experience exercise is helpful for all sorts of things, but bodies are made in the kitchen. I am another one of those who finds I stay on plan better with food when I'm working out, too, but food much be the primary focus if my weight is up.

Jenn - cool on the podcast! And you run like a madwoman, which I knew from your blog already but it is still impressive

Traveling Michele - baby showers are TOUGH! Socializing plus finger foods can be a big temptation if you don't have a plan or snacks in place. Good luck!

Alinnell - feel better! We're fighting sinus crud in this house and it makes doing things like putting up lights or, heck, even going out into the cold, sound quite unappealing.

Silverbirch - I never did so well with the small meals things - makes me graze. I'm more of an intermittent faster who then grazes in my five or six hour window. But spaced out meals make me food obsess. It's good that you identified what patterns work for you body and schedule, though! Bummer on being prone to injury, taking it slow can be frustrating.

ICU - good luck on the pants! Believe it or not, reducing fullness through the thigh and waist circumference is not actually an overly difficult alteration, and don't let them tell you differently. You could have even done it yourself with just basic sewing skills. If they charge you more than $25 for it I'd be raising an eyebrow, as it's maybe an hour of work for an experienced sewer.

Paperclippy - good luck with the diet! I always have to have things like nuts, hardboiled eggs, cooked meats, sardines, avocados and the like on hand - nursing makes me SO hungry and snacking on the wrong things just exacerbates it. A little prep work in the morning or on weekends goes a long way to keeping me out of the breadbasket

Nothing much going on with me today. This is my husband's flex day from work, (he works nine hour days and gets every other Friday off) so he's doing computer work and hanging out with the kids while I slept in a bit and finish my bible study. As I mentioned above we have cold'/sinus junk so I'm sneezing my rear off and running through tissues like mad, but what can you do?

My plans today involve not slacking too badly on the homeschooling for the kids. (always tough for me when my husband is helping, I am much less lazy when it's up to me alone ), then I have to finish sewing a test pattern for a cloth diaper for my three year old son. If the fit is good I get to make five or six more. If it stinks I get to redraft my pattern. Then it's onto the drafting and sewing for the medium size for my daughter (9 months, that went fast!). I am thinking I can churn all these out by the end of the weekend if I work diligently and use my crockpot for the main meal for everyone (thus giving me a longer afternoon block of time before our evening routine). That's the big undertaking at the moment - I was in the middle of knitting a snow hat for my son but am short on yarn and had to order more, so it's on hold.

Today will have slightly less working hours than normal - my older two girls have a group piano lesson/open house tonight, and it's across town about 45 minutes away. This is not a big deal, but the ice rink the roads have become is! We had several weeks of hard freeze and now a warm period with sleet and rain, so it freezes on contact with the the ground and makes ice. I spend most of my year driving inclement weather conditions and this is still the very worst. I'll take a snowstorm over an inch of ice on everything, bar none.

Time to go be a responsible adult. Adios!

Well, it is mostly strength training but because of the extreme heat and humidity, it becomes cardio as well. That's why it is supposed to be such great exercise.

My dh is usually in Beijing (the most polluted city in the world) but travels throughout China, including Shanghai this week. It sounds terrible and I have no desire to join him-- thank goodness we decided against moving.

I'm wondering if I need to shake up my diet plan.... anyone do the Ideal Protein diet?

Shannon, yes, I don't have conclusive evidence because who knows what changes from day to day with babies, but they have seemed to have less gas and less severe reflux on my current diet. Every time I've said, "Things are good, let's try dairy again," things have gotten worse, but like I said it might be coincidence too so who knows? Supposedly if it's a milk protein intolerance they should grow out of it pretty soon anyway, so I guess I should just keep retrying dairy every so often.

Jessica, . I gather holding a baby upright to feed and afterwards for about half an hour really helps. I can see that might be difficult with twins. Also upright breast-feeding seems a bit challenging.

Jen, on the podcast, you have such a vivid, energetic voice, with the Upstate NY accent that is so familiar and friendly-sounding to me, and the guy who's interviewing you has the "therapeutic" voice, that is, rather inflectionless, with the leading questions and neutral affirmations of what you're saying, that I started off by not liking him. He warms up as you go along, but you're the one whom I'd rather hang out with.

And I wanted to hug you when you talked about standing on the scale and seeing "119." Oh, honey. What an undertaking. Not everybody changes their life the way you have.

The interesting interview would be what has happened to our heads as a result of our self-reinvention. I still can't figure out where I am with regard to my mental health. My physical health is a lot better, yes, but with my mental health, I'd say it's a draw. I'm not abusing the food substance anymore but I'm still not quite right.

Oh, and the religious thing. Think of my background as a buffet. My father was Russian Orthodox but conflicted about his religious upbringing, so was willing to sign away his unborn children into Catholicism to marry my mother. And so I was raised Catholic, though in the folkways more than in the doctrine. I was part of a Catholic minority in a Protestant WASPy area, and vastly outnumbered by Presbyterians, Methodists, Lutherans, Episcopalians and many Christian fundamentalists in my school who, if female, weren't allowed to wear pants or dance & had other rules that astonished me.

I knew nothing of Mormons till I heard about Donny Osmond, only later learned that my region of Upstate NY had been very important in the origins of the Mormon church. (I think most of the Mormons got chased west in the 19th century because I never knew any personally while growing up -- it seemed to be a regional western thing.)

Now, in my day to day life, in NY, I rarely run into Mormons. They are probably all in line in Times Square to see "Book of Mormon." They don't knock on doors much around here; the 7th Day Adventists do, as they seem to have actively recruited among South American and Caribbean immigrants around here. Rather than conservative Christians, what I encounter are their Jewish counterparts, the Jewish fundamentalists.

Now I'd describe myself as a curious agnostic. I try to respect people whose faith is important to them. One of my very good friends is a female Methodist minister. Every other person I know seems to be exploring Buddhism. I know a lot of NY-area Catholic ethnic heritage people, Irish & Italian, but they are not good Catholics, they are kind of a la carte Catholics. I know a lot of Jewish people and several who describe themselves as "Jew-Boos" (think Jewish-Buddhists!) NY would not be NY without the Jewish culture and heritage it has.

I find religion to be a very fraught subject in conversation so I avoid it. This is all I'm going to say about it here, since I come to this forum for another subject entirely.

LOL - I literally say that OUT LOUD to myself many times per week. Is that weird? Glad you liked it!

He was really nice, but he seems remarkably - uninformed? - about morbid obesity for someone who is pursuing what he is. But he clearly is well intentioned. I was thinking the exact same thing about the emotional impact - realizing we never talked about it at all. I'm betting he never even THOUGHT about there being an emotional component that seems to be the gift that keeps on giving.

I did surprise myself by getting so emotional when I talked about hitting goal. It came out of nowhere.

Listening back - I did a lot of theater, musical theater, and other stage work when I was in high school and college and I realize I was using my "Stage Voice" for the interview. Hope it wasn't too annoying.

And saef - Accent? What accent??!!

Jen

Slow to catch up - giving my first dinner party tomorrow and I've forgotten how much work is involved. DH's and my few friends are coffee and muffin or, depending on the time of day, pizza and beer and chips and beer people.

I was schooled (and served) at a great many functions in my mom's house though. I am going a much less involved route and have DH to do a lot of chopping etc. The snag is that one of the guests is now a vegetarian so I had to do something that would work for her and for all the carnivores. I am eating the vegetarian meal to keep her company and because DH and I do vegetarian about 3X per week.

We are serving a quasi tex-mex meal. Two kinds of dip (guac and salsa) with blue and yellow organic corn chips, black bean and sweet potato chili as the main, with a green salad on the side, and tropical fruit w greek yogurt and honey for dessert. There is also a later coffee and cookies/cake component. I have no shame in offering some of the many delectable baked goods made by someone else, as opposed to my mom who made buttercream tortes etc.

Booze is going to be limited to wine and beer and liquer with coffee. I don't drink (except for the occasional beers) so I'm hoping there won't be a lot left over. Kinda weird to send people home with 2 bottles of beer or half a bottle of wine (even though my family are well aware of my bad history with booze).

I just did a bit of housecleaning and I still HATE it as much as ever. My cleaners really do deserve their Christmas cash bonus and other gifts. I am not particularly worried about the house - all my guests are older than I am so I imagine their eyesight is about as good/poor as mine and it will be kinda dark too.

Dagmar