Woohoo!

Please don't hate me. . . It's because I have good genes and take synthetic thyroid hormone. But I want to announce that I've averaged a 1/2-pound loss every day for the past couple weeks, for a total of 6 pounds since I vowed to lose weight (which was shortly before signing on to this blog). I'm now within one pound of my pre-pregnancy weight (also an unhealthy BMI).

How did I do this? Pretty much I gave up my favorite dishes: cheese enchiladas, quesadillas, and cheese tortellini with pesto. Yes, my eating habits are cheesy. And I've also been trying to walk some more, though still not as much or as fast as I'd like, as I'm usually pushing a stroller containing a frequently demanding 10-month-old.

Inspired by Seeking Solace's post, I took the Real Age Test. I took it some time ago and discovered I was pretty much my calendar age.

Since I'm a new mom who's also revising her dissertation, I expected this time to register as, oh, a 55-year-old chain smoker doing hard time at San Quentin. Instead, my Real Age is 26.7, much lower than my actual age of 31.1.

WTF?! That just doesn't seem right.

I think it's for a number of reasons:

- I've switched cars--thanks to the idiosyncrasies of infant car seat installation, I now drive mostly a mid-size sedan (a Camry) instead of my beloved little compact (a Subaru Impreza).

- I snuck through the breast cancer test on a technicality. It asks if my father's mother had breast cancer, but didn't ask--at least as I read it--about my mother's mother. Cancer is definitely in the family. We all die from cancer or heart disease sometime between age 70 and 95, averaging in the 80s. It just doesn't happen to always be breast or ovarian cancer, which are the two kinds asked about in the women's quiz.

- I take vitamins daily. It's a habit I picked up when we decided to try to conceive, and I continued it through pregnancy and motherhood. I take a Flintstones Complete Multivitamin because I hate swallowing those horse pills that pass for swallowable multivitamins. The Flintstones taste gross, but I've gotten used to that--and Mr. Trillwing is kind enough to take all the especially nasty orange-flavored ones. :)

- I change my eating habits with the seasons. I always eat more fruit during the summer than winter (because the fruit is sooooo much better). Had I taken this quiz in the winter, my results would be not so good.

- I hardly ever went out drinking before I was a mother, and now it's friggin' unheard of. Since Mr. Trillwing is, as he puts it, a retired drunk, we don't drink together, either. So I keep very little alcohol around the house, usually just a couple bottles of wine in case I have guests (which, again, is rare because helloooo? I'm a dissertatin' mama).

Spaces for improvement: potassium, omega-3 fatty acids (I'm vegetarian), exercise of all kinds, BMI.