You're familiar with the vacuum-dried, dehydrated space food that you can pick up at REI to live out your astronaut fantasies ... and if you've actually eaten it, you probably understand why astronauts actually lose weight in space.

"I like to refer to our diet up there as the The Busy Diet," says Coleman, explaining the weightloss-friendly combo of a jam-packed work schedule in the name of science and the lack of 5-star restaurants. "The food isn't great enough that you'd gain weight. I lost 10 percent of my body weight while I was up there."

The lack of gravity has other perks in the vanity department: "You have a water weight shift right away, so that means anything that sags down here on earth looks really great up there in space," Coleman jokes. Plus, the lack of gravity pressing down on your spine causes you to sprout a few inches (Coleman came home 1.25 inches taller).

The downside? "The water weight gain also tends to settle in the lower half of the body," says Coleman. "We like to give the guys a hard time when they're complaining about the belly bloat." Welcome to our world, gentlemen.

So what do astronauts do when they're not conducting space walks, working out, repairing robotic arms, or in Coleman's case, talking to Sandra Bullock or playing the flute? "I talk to my family -- during my last mission, I talked to my family every day but three through Internet protocol on the phone or video conferences."

Coleman also took advantage of the time to relax and bond with fellow crew members. "Friday night after all the work is done, we're all pretty tired, so we'll sit around ... float around. Sometimes we'll get a chance to eat dinner together, which we don't get to do often, or we'll watch some TV. It was three Russians, two Italians and two Americans, so we usually revert to something easy to understand, and something physically comical. In most cases "The Big Bang Theory."

Although crew members miss their families during missions, Coleman says she'd go back in a heartbeat. "If I could've brought my family, there'd be no reason to come home. You're in this magical place, the mission is so clear every minute, how much good work there is to do. You're flying from place to place, you're living the life of Peter Pan. I love it," she says. Will Coleman be Skyping from space with other Hollywood A-listers any time soon? "I am in line to go back ... but the line is long, so we'll see."