Help Wanted

We love Vionna. She is a wonderful personal trainer and a she has become a friend to boot, but there is a problem. Vionna's studio is in Bethesda. This rocks if you live in DC, Silver Spring, Chevy Chase, Kensington, Takoma Park* or anywhere around there.

It kind of stinks if you live in Northern Virginia.

The traffic in this area is just too bad. Vionna's studio is probably less than 15 miles from my house, but they are a slow 15 miles. A one hour work out ends up being about 3 1/2 hours round trip.

To make a long story short, Devra and I are on the hunt for a personal trainer somewhere in Fairfax County. Drop us a line if you are interested.






* I couldn't remember the name of Takoma Park so I honest to God Googled "Maryland hippies live" and it came right up. Awesome.

I'll Miss You Most of All

Yesterday I posted a few of my pictures from BlogHer on my personal site.

This morning I had an e-mail from one of my very best friends that due to geography I haven't seen in a few years.

She was wondering if I had gotten a boob job.

You see, I have spent most of my life being tormented by my "friends" about how flat chested I am. It isn't even that I am a late bloomer. It is just that after breastfeeding twins, gaining 40 pounds and buying a couple of Wonderbras I finally have some cleavage.

In fact, when I was at BlogHer one of my favorite BlogHers (I'll let her choose if she wishes to be named here or not) told me I had a "magnificent rack".

I have never been so flattered in my entire life.

Well, that isn't exactly true. One time a girl told me that she wished she were a man so that she could make love me to. THAT is the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me.

Anyway, as much as I find it fascinating that for the first time in my life men are talking to my chest I still want to lose the 40 extra pounds.

And I am going to do it.

But I sure am going to miss these breasts.

Possibly the picture she was asking about. Oh how I love that dress.

On Tea, and Diets and Mysteries*

I know when you are on a quest to lose weigh one of the most important things is drinking lots of water. I know from weight watchers meetings of yore and diet blogs of today that a lot of people have trouble with drinking water. They think it is boring or gross.

I love water (if it is cold) and I could drink it all day, but there is one big problem with water.

Water lacks caffeine.

This is a problem for me.

So I have been brewing my own iced tea at home. This way I feel like I am drinking something with flavor, it has zero calories and it is yummy.

This is all assuming you like unsweetened tea which I do.

Another bonus of tea is that it is easier on the stomach than drinking vast quantities of coffee, it has far less sugar than an energy drink, less carcinogens than diet soda and less empty calories than regular soda.

Of course you have to keep in mind that you still need water to counteract the caffeine, but it still helps me eat less.

* The mystery can either be the fact that I never wrote anything about a mystery so why didn't I change the blog title or you can just know that I keep misplacing my iced tea and it turned out not to be interesting enough to talk about.

Double Shame

I didn't want to talk about this but I'm not seeing a way around explaining the extra weight.

I quit smoking about eight months ago.

Yes, I know. There is no reason that a grown woman with children should have been smoking cigarettes in the first place. I quit a long time ago before the twins were born. Then one thing led to another and I found myself sneaking smokes in my garage when the kids were napping.

Anyway, that is not the point. The point is that I quit.

That was the good news.

The bad news is that quitting smoking wrecks havoc on a diet.

So I am fatter than I was last year at BlogHer time and I HATE that.

Can anyone recommend a good detox or cleanse of some sort? I need a kick start.

While You Are Reading that Other Post

I may, at some point, write a post about my discomfort with my body and how that affects me when I am around large groups of women (read, like at BlogHer), but I am not ready to do that right now.

A couple of weeks ago I was the heaviest I have ever been when I was not pregnant.

It was not a pretty place for me physically or mentally.

Since then I am down three or four pounds. Not much, but it turns out that they were three or four very important pounds and the shedding of them has made me feel much better. I think I am not quite ready to say more about it than that right now.

In the meantime (I warned you in the title that something like this was going to happen) go read Maggie's post at Okay. Fine. Dammit. about body image and weight and BlogHer.

You won't be sorry.

Another Great Post About Weight

I wish I wrote this post, but I didn't. Anna from ABDPBT wrote it.

Personally, I don’t have a lot of anxiety about BlogHer in particular and weight: I figure that most people there will be Moms and we all probably have a little extra poundage here and there. There is pretty much zero chance that I’m going to walk into BlogHer and feel more self-conscious about weight than I do when I visit Fred Segal. But her point stands: most people don’t care about how much you weigh because they are too worried about how much they weigh. I do think this is, for the most part, true. I do think that nobody gives you as much thought as you give yourself.

Go read the whole thing. It is brilliant.

Advice Needed

It is so hard to eat healthy when I am on the road with my kids.

They want to go to McDonalds for every meal. I am convinced that they don't care much about the food but that they love the toys that come with the Happy Meals. I suppose it really isn't important, because I find that while driving 1000 miles with two 5 year olds the deciding factor on where to eat is always what makes them the quietest.

So internet, please tell me, how do you eat healthy (and/or low fat) on long car trips?