My weight loss efforts over the last postpartum year have felt largely experimental. When I’m sure I should be shedding pounds, my weight either stays the same or edges up slightly.  How could this be happening?  And how can I lose the weight without weird diet plans or gym memberships?

Luckily, I discovered Sparkpeople and Babyfit and began to unravel where I could be more effective in my eating and exercise.   Both of these sites are free online communities with tremendous support for people wanting to make a healthy lifestyle shift.  (Babyfit is specifically for pregnant and nursing mothers and Sparkpeople is for anyone wanting to lose weight.)  There are recipes, online chat rooms, videos, exercise plans and more.

In Sparkpeople, I use the “My Nutrition” option to record what I eat everyday and see my overall calorie, fat and protein intake.  Is this a bit of a pain?  It can be since it does take time to record every snack and meal.  But I am astounded to see the calorie count of foods I thought were healthy and to actually get a sense of what small changes I can make that will have a big impact on my weight loss.  You can also enter your exercise and the program will subtract those calories from your total.  Honestly, it’s tricky to search for the foods and exercises from the list and it can make me feel tied down to do it every day, but it has really affected my choices.

With Sparkpeople you can skip those gym fees, artificial weight loss foods, and make your way towards healthier living on a daily basis.  And if you’re still battling those last few pounds, you’re not alone!  Please share your weight loss stories (victorious or otherwise) with the rest of us!

I have never bought a roll of paper towels in my life. This is perhaps my greatest claim to greenness. I only wish I had more opportunities to tout this little detail about my life, along with the fact that I’ve never eaten a Twinkie. But I digress.

So how do I wash windows and mirrors, you ask? With crumpled up newspaper, of course. A single sheet of newspaper can serve as my window-washer for a good six months before retiring to the recycling bin.

Would you like to try this green cleaning technique yourself? It’s easy. Just fill a spray bottle with a mixture of one part water, one part white vinegar. Spray a bit on the mirror or window, then wipe clean with the crumpled up newspaper. Voila! You’re done. And congratulations—you saved a paper towel.

For the last year, my body has doggedly clung to ten pounds of baby weight.  I could blame it on nursing, but more likely it was caused by the stress induced eating habits and lack of exercise.  Now that it’s summer and I’m officially a SAHM, I have the time to make some major shifts toward a healthier lifestyle. This week’s posts are dedicated to the pursuit of green, budget weight loss!

1. Eat whole foods.
   

Isn’t this totally obvious?   Maybe, but I seem to have to relearn this tip when life becomes hectic.  Food processing requires energy, packaging, and preservatives—adding a huge carbon load and calorie count to our meals and making our grocery bills far more expensive.  If we stick to foods fresh from our gardens, farmer’s markets or the produce aisle, we can slim down our bodies and our budgets.

2.Don’t wait until you’re hungry.

I keep crisp celery soaked in cold water on hand and load up with carrots or nuts when I know I’m going to be out of the house.  My body is designed to avoid starvation and if I wait until I have no reserves left, I can’t make great decisions about what to eat.  (Also, my parenting skills tend to suffer…)  Furthermore, packing food for myself also leads me to remember to have snacks with me at all times for my children.  We can then victoriously cruise past fast food joints without being lured in by desperate hunger.

3. Plan your indulgences.

In my green pursuits, my thrifty lifestyle or my weight loss, when I decide to strictly limit anything, there is an inner backlash.  Instead I plan some rewards into my grocery list so that I won’t feel tempted to scarf down a half bag of chocolate chips at 11pm.  Also I find that spending money on fresh fruit or fantastic yogurt tends to feel like a treat when I pull it out of the fridge.

In the one week that I’ve been working on eating better and moving more, I’ve lost one pound!  To be honest, I’ve lost a few pounds during the course of this year but they’ve crept back every time.  I’ll keep you posted on my fledgling progress!

We’ve posted quite a bit about organic gardening over the years. Our own organic gardens and lawns have had their ups and downs. What do you do to “green” your garden?

These were my tomatoes last year. This year’s tomatoes need some help. . . .

During my first pregnancy, I didn’t know the difference between a pocket diaper and a prefold, but after much exhaustive research, I finally decided on the ultimate cloth diapering system for our family.   Unfortunately, I didn’t have the diaper diagrams and descriptions in The Eco-nomical Baby Guide to refer to because we simply hadn’t written it yet!

Four years and another child later, I have been given a huge assortment of absorbent and adorable diapers.  My daughter Jovi often sports cow print happy heinys, homemade hemp diaper liners, prefolds with various covers, and even colorful fuzzibunz pocket diapers.

What have I realized after gathering up this diverse collection of cloth diapers?  You don’t really have to choose just one type!  Of course paying full price for all this loot could be prohibitively expensive, but if you’re open to buying gently used cloth diapers, you can try an assortment and know that you don’t have to rule out any one kind.

What is your cloth diaper philosophy?  Are you strictly loyal to one brand or style, or have you too build up a variety of diapers?  Have you been lucky enough to inherit hand-me-downs?

I decided to kick-start summer by hanging my laundry to dry in the attic. Here I confessed that I’d been tossing my clothes in the dryer, but now that the temperatures are in the seventies, I got motivated to drag out those drying racks.

Hanging one load took fifteen minutes, two drying racks, five hangers, the side of the laundry basket, and a chair—but I saved at least a pound of carbon emissions and $.50. If I hang a load of laundry a week, all summer long, but the end of the summer I’ll have saved . . . $6.00. Okay, well, I’m doing it for the planet, not for the cash.

What green deeds are you more motivated to do when the sun is shining?

For the last four years I have clumsily struggled as a working mom. But here’s the secret: all along my heart’s desire has been to be at home folding cloth diapers and whipping up homemade delights.  In fact, my yearning to get home with my baby is what started me on the journey towards being a published author and a blogger.

So was it our massive profits that finally earned me the freedom to take a one year leave of absence from teaching?  Hardly. (Although we do expect our book to become wildly famous and translated into sixty four languages one of these days.)  A robust savings account combined with my husband’s new job allows me to finally take a break from thirteen straight years of teaching adolescents.

Maybe I crave the opportunity to stay at home simply because it wasn’t an option all this time.  I’m a highly extraverted person and a bit worried about how I’ll fare without structure or schedules, but so far it’s just sheer joy.   If I still had a newborn it would have been harder, but since my oldest is nearly four and my one year old is now sleeping through the night, it’s glorious to be at home with them.  (Note, although their ages are just about right, the photo is not of us!)

Am I torn about leaving my job?  Nope.  Because although I adore working with middle schoolers, I love this grand and humbling task of parenting even more.  I know that I’m still in the honeymoon stage as a stay-at-home mom and that sometimes the tantrums and endless dishes will nearly defeat me, but for now I’m grateful that our lifestyle of voluntary simplicity has provided us with the opportunity to take this leap.  If you are aching to work less and spend more time at home, read The Eco-nomical Baby Guide for tips on how to save thousands in the first year alone.  It worked for us!

Let me get this out of the way: I am going to recommend a plastic product! Egads! I searched high and low for a non-plastic bento box for my daughter, but I ended up with this Sassy baby bento box, which is BPA-free. For the last year or so, I’ve been packing her lunches for daycare in these little containers:

Colors may vary

I love it! Here’s why. Before I broke down and bought this, I was packing her lunch in various containers, which was unwieldy. The main reason I like it is because it makes creating her meals easier. Something about having three little containers helps me focus on food options. I might put apple slices in the big compartment, cheese cubes in one of the small ones, and crackers in the other one. Or half of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in the large container and small carrot sticks in one small container, raisins in the other.

Downsides: The spoon is flat and useless, so I don’t use it. Some reviewers on Amazon complained that the containers are leaky if you put pureed foods in them. I have never put leaky things in the box, so this isn’t an issue for me.

The box is perfect for a small child with a minimal appetite. My daughter rarely finishes everything in her lunch, but an older or bigger child would probably want a more substantial lunch box. But I highly recommend the Sassy bento box for the preschool set!

It hasn’t been a banner year for organic food at my house.  Overwhelmed by rutabaga and kale, I quit our CSA while I was eight months pregnant.  My son needed interaction, my feet needed rest, and the idea of peeling and sautéing veggies after a full day of teaching made me want to weep with exhaustion.  With the birth of our second child, the sleep loss continued and seemed to wipe out all my dreams of canning hundreds of pounds of peaches and growing all my own produce.

Finally, we’re back on track!  This summer I plan on picking heaps of local produce and freezing and canning up a storm.  Our garden is already in and I have dreams of adding a raised bed if I can find a way to get more cedar planks home in our small cars.  Since I’m hoping to cut way back on work next year, I hope to also do a fall garden and extend our growing season as long as possible.

We even join a CSA again too.  It was a wonderful way to get our whole family eating better and to support local farmers.  What are your summer dreams for beautiful, healthful food?

We have a lot of self-professed cloth diaper fanatics on this site. Lurking in the background are those who . . . prepare yourselves for a shock . . . USE DISPOSABLES! Considering that 90% of the population uses them, we shouldn’t be so surprised. But today’s Friday question allows the disposable diaper users to come out of the woodwork. Why don’t you use cloth diapers? Is it the convenience factor? Aversion to disgusting laundry? Or something else?