Hey Beth, welcome! Good for you for quitting smoking. I know you have your hands full right now, trying to figure out your body, caring for your hubby, fibro, etc. But it's great that you are taking care of yourself because...as I always like to say (since I'm a mommy and care for my elderly mom too) if I'm not taken care of, NOBODY is. (It's a spin on the "if mommy ain't happy, ain't nobody's happy" saying. heh) So are you waiting on your PP books or something else? If you have any questions we can answer as to "how" while you're waiting, let us know. We can always look something up.

Ruth, I'm so sorry you're dealing with fibro flairups. My good friend dealt with that (we used to walk and do water aerobics together) and it's so tough. And you're right, your body has NO intent of letting go of fat while it's otherwise occupied dealing with pain and discomfort. I wish you luck in figuring out what's setting you off.

Things my way have been super, super stressful with our business (wedding season is ramping up, we're doing engagement shoots, and we're dealing with some troublseome clients, which is a bummer snice they are usually so great) and home life (my Mom got Poison Oak or something like it, so I'm nursing her in addition to everything else). Needless to say I'm not sleeping very well, which creates a whole new set of challenges. So I've really been searching out good things to combat the stress and I'm concentrating even harder on eating well and exercising while attempting to find that proper balance again (of calm and rest...so difficult to do). And one of those good things is working out consistently. It's my "escape" in many ways. And I thought between that and eating well things should be moving along weigh-wise but as always it's slow going. I got a little nervous recently because the scale popped up and hovered a bit. But I reassured myself, as did my friends, that is was from muscle development. I'm not only doing a strengthening form of cardio ("Zumba" - Latin dance aerobics) but also high resistance Pilates (details in gym log) which is an all-around strength training. So I can truly feel my strength coming back. All the more reason it's important to get sufficient protein, that's for sure! Anyhow, the inches are coming off so I'm worrying less about the scale as a result. I just want to see some kind of downward trend over time and so far that has happened.