The new year is approaching and if you want to really get on top of your fitness or begin a weight loss journey, you may even want to try a new approach to help keep you on track…how about a weight loss/fitness journal?
Why keep a weight loss/fitness journal?
Do you remember exactly what and how much you ate on Monday of last week and how many calories you consumed and burned?
Or do you remember exactly how far and how quickly you walked last month?
If the answer is no, then you could benefit from keeping a diary to plan and track your progress.
Even if the answer is yes, you too could benefit from keeping a weight loss diary because eating the same thing everyday and exercising for the same length of time and intensity is likely only to help you maintain your status quo, not help you lose weight and become fitter and stronger.
There ARE some brilliant apps out there but sometimes writing it down is more effective mentally and routinely. If you keep it at the side of your bed it’ll be better for your sleeping routine rather than staring at your phone’s blue light for too long too.
Here are some of the great things a weight loss/fitness journal can help us do:
- Clarify and focus our goals
- Break down our goals into manageable chunks
- Plan future activity and eating patterns
- Record our actual activity and eating patterns
- Record other important info
- Keep track of our progress towards our goals
- Better understand and manage our eating habits and portion sizes
- Break unhealthy and emotional eating habits
- Take guess work out of the weight loss equation
- See how balanced our diets and lives really are!
- Improve our nutrition
- Stay motivated
- Stop unconscious eating
- Understand the relationship between our eating habits, our exercise habits, our lifestyle habits and successful fitness improvements and weight loss achievements
- Understand which of life’s stresses impacts us the most
- Understand our sleeping patterns
- Provide a hard record of our successes
Things to record in a weight loss journal…
One of the reasons more people don’t currently keep a weight loss diary is because they think it needs to be complicated and time consuming to be effective.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Keeping a journal should be simple and shouldn’t take up a lot of our valuable time.
Like most things weight loss related, starting off slowly and as simply as possible and progressing gradually is the key to successfully starting to keep a weight loss journal.
A good starting journal might record:
- Our weight loss goal
- Our daily activities/exercise
- Our daily food and drink consumption
- Our current and progressive weight
- Our current and progressive body measurements
Later on, we can also start to record things like:
- The amount and quality of sleep we get
- Our daily energy levels
- Our daily emotions
None of the above need be complicated.
For example, recording our food and drink consumption doesn’t mean we have to start looking up the calories of everything we put in our mouths.
BEFORE YOU
Before you invest in a beautiful notepad and pretty pen, please consider the below very carefully…
- BE COMMITTED
- BE HONEST
- BE REALISTIC
An example might look a little like this…
…or this…
… there’s no right way, only the right way to suit you!
Good Luck!
