Pyrrh’s beginning measurements / ending measurements:

Weight: 170 lbs / 165.5 lbs
Stomach: 33.75″ / 33″
Hips: 41.5″ / 40″

This was with half-an-hour of aerobics and weight training every day but Sunday.   Looks like it all came off of my hips!

Mom lost a pound, with no increase in her activity.

Overall impression and review:

The way that the menus are published makes it hard to view conveniently; a printout results in strange columns with awkward page breaks, and each day’s soup recipe is on a completely different page.

The diet premise is sound. Whenever we did Weight Watchers we always made up a big batch of our favorite vegetable soup. We just added two more vegetables to our recipe to better match the Good Housekeeping version, and we like the improvement. Most of the soup variations would be better judged on individual tastes. We’ve got favorites, and will try new ideas.  After seven days of soup, it does leave us craving a steak or some spaghetti and meatballs!

I love strawberries, but there were so many of them; more fruit variety would have been great.

I personally prefer to have three snacks as well as three meals, and didn’t like when the menu didn’t allow for that. Admittedly, that wasn’t often; there was enough variety that I was able to save something from nearly every meal to eat a bit later on. The meals never left us hungry, either.

We liked the ideas well enough that we will try another week of it, with Good Housekeeping’s “Web Exclusives” variations. (After taking a couple days’ break for aforementioned steak and spaghetti!)

Pyrrh’s favorite meals:
Breakfast Day 4 – Honey-Cinnamon English Muffin
Breakfast Day 6 – Mexican Scramble
Lunch Day 5 – Waldorf Chicken Salad
Lunch Day 4 – California Turkey Pita
Dinner Day 1 – Minestrone Soup
Dinner Day 5 – Thai Shrimp Soup

I had been trying Dannon Activia yogurt, which has the same Bifidobacterium culture; they just give it the fancy name Bifidus Regularis, which honestly makes me feel the company takes its customers for idiots. Apparently it worked, though; Dannon’s sales of Activia and Danactive soared to three times the expected projections. But I digress; that is the subject of a future review!

Armed with a fistful of coupons, I picked up eight packs of Yo-Plus yogurt at a substantial savings. The flavors are fantastic; Yoplait has always been great on using real fruit and creating tasty combinations. The whole family loves them; we usually eat yogurt every day.

We all started to experience some stomach pain. Even my one-year-old was in distress. We honestly couldn’t figure it out and didn’t attribute it to the yogurt until three days later. We have many food allergies and have learned from experience that it is best to re-read ingredient labels every time you purchase a product, as well as when we get ready to eat it (in case we missed something). What I hadn’t noticed before was the fiber added to the yogurt, called inulin. Our family is on a carefully moderated food plan and we get a good amount of fiber in our diet already. The extra fiber shouldn’t be an issue; but apparently the type of fiber is.

On the package itself it states that inulin wasn’t normally found in yogurt. I’ve recently dug a little bit deeper and found some disturbing facts:

Inulin feeds bad bacteria in your intestinal tract (which are normally inactive and fine) as well as the good bacteria. Depending on what is present in your system, it can cause a lot of problems when you consume too much in a super-refined form!

Inulin is found to cause mild to severe gastrointestinal issues in people depending on the amount consumed.

Inulin is yet another super-refined food substance like high fructose corn syrup. We’ve found that HFCS is linked to all sorts of health problems, as are many other naturally-occurring food substances that have since been refined down to chemical additives. Inulin is naturally found in onions and garlic and is good for you when you get it in whole foods and in reasonable amounts. We get plenty of it every day in our house already!

Yo-Plus could have been a great product had they not tried to boost sales with additives and claims on how this could “naturally boost your digestive health”. I’m sure they were lured in by Dannon’s success; now they are following in their footsteps with their own class-action lawsuit against false advertising. (Dannon has already settled theirs for $35 million, the biggest settlement ever to be made over false advertising of food products.)

I think that companies should quit messing with the food! I eat yogurt because I want milk and good bacteria in my system, and like the taste of fresh fruit added to it. Don’t add a bunch of sweeteners (milk and fruit both are naturally sweet), don’t add artificial flavors (what is wrong with just using the fruit?), and definitely don’t add stuff that supposedly makes up for my supposed diet deficiencies! Don’t add fiber to my yogurt, calcium to my juice, nor artificial sweeteners to my non-diet gum that has REGULAR sugar in it. (Surprise! Take at look at those the next time you’re in the checkout lane!) And, for the love of people who hit the top two allergens in the country, QUIT adding soy products to absolutely everything! (Another thing that you find in all that gum!)

Yogurt IS good for you. It is on the Better Homemaking Network’s Top Foods List (article coming soon). Plain with active cultures is best, of course; if you get fruit flavors, try to avoid artificial sweeteners or flavors and a lot of added sugar. Our family will be going back to making our own yogurt, mixing in fresh fruit purees. We still like regular Yoplait, and Dannon Activia, although it is a bit too sweet. We often mix in some homemade plain yogurt and they taste even better. Greek yogurt is the yummiest way to buy a plain variety, although it is a bit more expensive. It also makes a great starter to make your own!

The bottom line: Enjoy your yogurt, and get your fiber from the real thing; in other words, other healthy choices throughout the day. Fresh vegetables, fruits, and whole grains are all great sources.

I don’t even feel comfortable in giving the rest of this Yo-Plus away. No matter that I got it on the cheap; it burns me to have to waste food regardless of the reason or cost. But the best place for it is in the trash.

ETA:  Yoplait Fiber One yogurt also has inulin added to it.

Sources: Law Firm That Won Dannon Settlement Targets Yoplait

Inulin: Friend or Foe?

Yo-Plus for Digestive Health

This toy has downloadable options, the best of which is programming it to say and spell your child’s name. I only wish they had “Dot” as one of the name options; right now we’re using “baby” which is okay but definitely not the same. I’m hoping the squeaky wheel gets the grease, and I keep posting on the Leapfrog forums to get her name added to the list.

The first few days, Dot was obsessed with the “off” button/paw, and would get very frustrated. You see, that is the one with the bright red circle on it, and red seems to be most attractive to babies. It was a couple of days before I could convince her that the other paws were much more interesting. It is nice to have a quick silencing mechanism, but perhaps it could be a tug of the ear or tail instead of the paw button. What would really make this toy the best (and I would pay even more for it) is if I could load my own music or other mP3s on the fourth paw, with the two-, five-, and ten minute options similar to the lullaby paw.

Every morning after breakfast, Dot rocks Violet:

The lullaby music is a wonderful idea, although I found most of the tunes to be a little too upbeat. I always look for slow and gentle tunes, and nothing with harsh pitches in it. Thanks to a large selection, we have found five tunes that we love. It would be nice if there was a small white LED in her tag that would give a constant soft light during the lullaby music to provide additional comfort in a dark room. The red LED in there now just makes the tag look red instead of purple when it flashes.

The play and music paws are very creative! At first, Dot learned how to cycle through everything a split second at a time until she hit her favorite tune. Now she at least pauses for the “My Favorites” song and the one that spells her name. She also likes doing the animal imitations. She can’t talk yet but at fourteen months she could meow, bark, and moo! She is learning signs for all of the animals and likes it when Violet asks her about them.

Dot loves to pull apart the velcro on the back! If there was a small section in the middle that was a bit wider, it might preclude little hands from pulling it open so easily. At least it is very well made and safe even when she’s open!

For a little background on how My Pal Scout came into being, see this post by Jeff Katz, LeapFrog CEO:
Creating New Products Goes Beyond the Elves at the North Pole.

Along with the Alphabet Pal, this small LeapFrog collection of two items has me impressed with the company and I will be making more purchases in the future. I am EXTREMELY picky about Dot’s toys, opting for fewer, higher-quality toys that serve some educational purpose. She is a very bright and active 18-month-old who can read nearly 100 words, identify all of her body parts, identify many animals through sounds and ASL signs, differentiate ten different geometric shapes and 9 basic colors, manipulate shapes into a shape-sorter toy, and even find middle C on the piano. She thrives on learning and I am pleased that LeapFrog provides products to help nurture that very important aspect of childhood and help it develop into a life-long love of learning.

Note: This review is entirely voluntary and not paid for in any way!

The bar itself is a very nice and extremely useful piece of equipment. I’ll be using it for some of my Yourself! Fitness( My Fitness Coach) routines to help keep my balance and to take advantage of the mat.

As far as the workouts themselves, well… honestly I can’t believe she’s split everything up into three discs. You have three people doing all of the exercises in each video – she does the intermediate versions, with the ladies in the back doing either simplified versions or more advanced versions. The moves are quite intuitive and really do what she says they do – target muscles with minimal movement. Each time you work muscles, you stretch them afterward. The idea is very sound and the workouts very good. It is the delivery that is lacking.

The beginner workout (about 30 minutes) has tons of core work, with some lower body given that most of the exercises are standing. She is very detailed in describing exactly how to do each exercise without much room for error. One could wish for a couple more descriptions of the beginner version of the exercises, but is easy to figure out after watching the video once or twice as it pans over the lady doing them. However, even the first time through, she quickly gets irritating with the way she counts / leads the exercises. After a few more times, one wants a lot less detail, since you now know how the exercises are done.

The intermediate workout (about 35 minutes) is exactly the same workout as the beginner, adding a few upper body exercises using a resistance band, which is kind of fun. However, one wonders why the disc and case were wasted.

The advanced workout (about 40 minutes) picks up the pace slightly, using all of the exercises from the other videos, but adding in more core work, and some lower body exercises. We now use the little dodge ball, but really, it didn’t look that useful. Some of the moves we learn from the first two workouts have the ball added between the knees to up the difficulty, but usually she has you put it someplace where you don’t actually touch it during the exercise. This workout is quite tough compared to the other two.

With my current fitness level, I’m going to be doing the intermediate video, with the easier versions of the exercises. After another week or two, I feel I will be comfortable enough to make a list of those exercises, then add in some of the lower body exercises from the advanced video. It will be nice when I can do them on my own without having to listen to her count to 20 while describing the exercise itself 20 times. I will review the videos when I want to increase my difficulty level.

I’ll continue to use Yourself! Fitness for my cardio in addition to the Fluidity workouts. They really are good, but being minimal movement exercises, don’t really get your heart rate up much. It will still be worth the investment, even more so when I can ditch her videos altogether and do the workout on my own.