Many of us have a fitness goal at one time or another. Tracking your fitness journey through using fitness journal ideas is a great way to keep track of your progress.
While it’s understandable to want to lose weight or to take exercise, we need to keep a healthy balance.
If you say you need to lose weight or need to exercise, there could be an implication here that in some way you are lacking, or falling short of the mark. It’s great to want to live a healthier life, but you need to feel great as well as look great. Your emotional journey is as important as your physical one.
What this blog post will do is show you how to use your fitness journal ideas to create a healthy lifestyle. A lifestyle where you look great and feel great too.
A healthy lifestyle
When were you last really healthy? Are you healthy now? When did you last go on a diet? Do you think that by depriving yourself of eating you are correcting a thought in you which is incorrect? In other words do you feel you are to blame for over eating or not eating enough, or eating the wrong foods? Do you think that being on a diet that is the normal way to exist in this world?
What about fitness. Do you think you have to be totally exhausted and crawl into bed with aching muscles to prove your fitness? Do you want to spend more time taking exercising but prioritise everything else over your own wellbeing?
I never really thoughts about those things until recently. My weight was yo-yo-ing. I was stressed at work because of some personnel issues. The days are shorter so there’s less time to get outside and less sunlight. I have a really busy schedule with children and dogs and I parent on my own.
And so I solved this issue by firstly deciding to eat only one meal a day. My rationale was that I just needed to take a break from eating. I was emotional eating like I had never done before.
My other decision was to double down on work in order to get the word situation resolved. This meant long days and little exercise.
And guess what? At the end of one month I was ill. No surprises there, right? It was a textbook case of doing all the wrong things for the right reasons!
So where did that leave me?
Firstly, although one meal a day sounded extreme, I actually felt really well on it and taking a break from feeling like I had to eat my emotions was truly helpful. I did one meal a day for six days of the week and had a day off on Sunday.
I only did this for a few weeks. Not exercising has been a big mistake, but honestly, I’m struggling to get all my work done, run the house and find the time to fit in exercise for myself.
So this is the point at which I decided that I need to use those fitness journal ideas for myself and create a truly healthy lifestyle. A lifestyle where I have healthy habits and which I can use as the bedrock for my day to help me live a full and fun life each and every day.
So read on for how I am doing it for myself and how you might want to take my fitness journal ideas and create the perfect protocol for yourself.
Your fitness routine
This is the overall protocol that you will use to establish your fitness goals: What exercises you will undertake, what days you will exercise and keep track of your progress.
Your fitness routine tracks all the ways in which you move your body. Going for a walk with a friend or walking the dogs or taking the family ice skating are all included as part of your fitness routine.
Your workout routine
Your workout routine is the specific way in which you are going to tone and strengthen your body. Strength training, spinning classes, swimming, running, cycling. Try and balance out your workout types so that you are targeting different areas of your body with different exercises, so that the whole of your body is well exercised.
Your food intake
Because of my recent experience I want to monitor my food intake along with my mental health around eating and being a good weight for me. I want to lose weight in a positive environment. Create a food intake section which looks at what you are going to eat and how you are going to feel while you are eating it in order to lose weight in a positive environment.
Your mental health
It’s a really great idea to track your mental health as part of your fitness journal ideas. We know that physical activity has a direct impact on your physical health: if you work out your muscles become strengthened.
And we also know that increased physical activity and physical health leads to rising energy levels. And not only to rising energy levels, but the dopamine triggered by physical activity also has a positive impact on your overall health which includes your mental health.
Monitoring how you feel over time as you use activity trackers to monitor your physical activity is a great way to monitor your overall health journey.
Your monthly calendar
Creating a calendar for yourself helps your brain in two ways. Firstly as you create your monthly calendar you can work out if it is feasible given the time constraints and responsibilities that you have in the rest of your life. Secondly you can also see at a glance that what might have seemed like a lot of exercise actually seems quite do-able when viewed over the month.
Thirdly, it’s important to write a rest day into your weekly schedule so you should be able to mark in at least four days when you rest. For most of us rest days are not necessarily an issue as we may only be working out three or four times a week.
Your to-do list
You could create a weekly to-do list which highlights everything you need to do that week. Tick each item off as you do it so that you can track your progress for the week. This could be a great way to keep track of your progress especially on busy weeks where time is of the essence.
If you can see at a glance that you are eating this particular meal and performing these particular exercises then you are less likely to be overwhelmed by what you need to do and therefore more likely to stick to your daily goals, which leads on to your weekly goals, and then ultimately achieve your overall goal.
Your daily planner
Exercise plans
I decided on this plan for myself:
- Firstly I would plan to take most of my exercise at home for now. I don’t have time to commit to going to a gym or for signing up to go to a class. TIP: decide for yourself what is practical for you right now
- Secondly, I want to include the following into my regime: yoga/stretching; ballet fitness (specifically Sleek Technique); a weights programme; and running outdoors. TIP: what do you want to include in your routine? You are more likely to do your exercise if it is something that you wnat to do.
- Then I worked out when and where my preferred time of exercise is: I like running outside in the light, I don’t like running in the dark. I like to start my day with yoga but at the moment I’m so busy that I feel impatient starting with yoga as I’m just bursting to get going.
I love the ballet exercise but need a fixed time and place to do it, it’s not light dependent. Same with the weights routine, which I have as a video. I prefer to do weights in the morning if possible. TIP: Decide for yourself when your preferred time to exercise it - I create a grid for myself with my week and slotted in when I think that I have time to exercise. TIP Create your own grid in excel, or Canva.
Fitness challenges
One of the best ways to achieve anything is go have a specific goal. Can you give yourself a fitness goal? Some fitness challenges you can do are:
Couch to 5k, Run for Life, The London Marathon, The Boston Marathon, any marathon, trail runs in the Lake District UK, or go massive trail running in the US.
You could do a 30 day yoga challege (with Adriene who I love, she is really amazing, check out her course in the link), a Pilates challenge, or a 30 day dance challenge.
To make it more interesting and monitor your progress you could create a bullet journal fitness tracker specifically for each challenge that you do. In that way you personalise the challenge. Whenever you make a project personalised, you increase your chances of achieving it.
Your weight loss plan
Your weight loss plan is going to be your really powerful tool to not only lose weight safely and healthily but also to understand your mental triggers around losing weight.
One of the liberating things about your weight loss journey is that it is entirely your own. It doesn’t belong to anyone else. Noone else even needs to know about it, it is entirely yours.
What you do need to do is track your journey faithfully. We know in all areas of plans and planning that people who keep track of their progress stick to the plan, work the plan and achieve the plan much better than those who do not use a weight loss tracker of some type.
Your diet plan
What you are going to eat is your decision entirely. What would you like to eat? I realised that you could lose weight on any diet because there are so many diets around. And they all work, if you stick to them. This made me understand that it’s not the diet, it’s the sticking to it, that will cause you to lose weight.
Then, being able to take your diet plan and create a diet for life is what will keep the weight off. But not only keep the weight off, best of all, help you to be free from having to think about food all the time, or thinking that in order for you to be happy and for life to be ok you have to be on a diet all the time.
This is what I did to create my perfect diet plan:
- I decided what I did and didn’t want to eat
- I started meal planning in advance each week
- I weighted myself and I also took my body measurements.*
- I created a water chart to measure how much water I was drinking
- I decided what treats I was going to allow myself each week
- I created a list of what to think of when tempted to eat outside of my self-set parameters
- I created a habit tracker section in my journal to track repeated behaviours: when I feel most hungry, when I feel like eating off-plan, monitoring what I was eating each day.
- I created a rewards list
* I hated taking my body measurements. I didn’t want to do it I think because I knew that I was a little larger than I was a year ago. For some reason measuring myself had more of an impact on me than weighing myself. I need to work out a way of removing myself emotionally from taking my body measurements.
So, how are you feeling? Are you feeling motivated and ready to create your own fitness journal? I hope so!
If you like this post you may also like:
How to make a weight loss journal and drop unwanted pounds
How to create health journal ideas that inspire your life
18 goal journal ideas to create a life plan you love