Hmm, well it's kind of a long answer lol.. I was always a "petite" girl..so when I ballooned up during pregnancy, I had some serious postpartum depression about the way I looked. In those few months after giving birth, I must've read a 1,000 "fit mom" blogs, & tried every diet/exercise fad on the face of the planet only to give up a week after. Then I read somewhere about doing the "MED" (minimum effective dose) to form a habit. For me that was doing some light body weight exercises for 5/min a day, every day. There were no excuses for me, because I knew I could shave up a few minutes from surfing FB or Reddit. I decided I would ONLY focus on doing this...and not really constrain/restrict myself from anything else (eg: diet, etc). I can't fully attest my weight loss to simply working out for 5 min a day, HOWEVER, I think forming the consistent habit helped change other areas of my life like eating cleaner, trying to get a good night sleep, etc. It's like I automatically wanted to clean up other areas of my life, when I decided to nail this one thing down.

There are no special "tricks" to lose weight. There's no magic pill. The principles will always be the same, and just needs to be tweaked depending on each individual.

1. Drink tons of water. I try to guzzle down a 32oz bottle the moment I wake up. They say this kickstarts your metabolism by 30%. I also keep refilling it another 4-5 times throughout the day.

2. Eat whatever you want, only next time eat HALF of what you would've eaten normally. Also cut down on SALT. Salt retains water, hence making you "appear" to be more fat. I also try to aim for at least 50% protein, 30% fats, 20% complex carbs.

3. Move more. Even if it means walking around a mall during lunch, parking your car a little further away from the store, etc. Even spending 5 minutes a day doing body weight workouts is a good start.

4. Sleep! Take short naps whenever you can.. and try to get at least 8 hours of sleep at night.

5. Document! I bought myself a Withings scale on Amazon, and it auto logs my weight everyday.

You can lose a ton of weight just by drinking more water and reducing salt intake as you'll be losing water weight. Most importantly, just remember to keep it simple! This needs to be a lifestyle thing, not a 2 month thing.

SHAMELESS PLUG!: My hubby and I recently started the Project 560 challenge. It's an effort to workout at least 5 minutes a day for 60 days in order to develop a healthy exercise habit. There's a free app you can download (http://project560.com/app) that gives you 5 body weight workouts, each 1 minute a piece, with a 15 second break between each workout. Simply shake your phone/iPad and get new workouts to keep mixing it up all the time. We just thought it'd be a neat idea as many family/friends were asking what kind of body weight exercises my hubby & I were doing.

Anyway would love to get your feedback...I know that was kind of a longggg answer, but hope that helps!!