Talk About Tuesday - Food and Exercise Journal

Since my daughter will soon be a year old, I am starting to really work on losing the baby weight. I have managed to avoid the issue up until now because I have been nursing. To help me track my progress I have started keeping a food and exercise journal. I picked a cute small journal with lined pages, but any journal or notebook would do. I have seen books made specifically for recording your food and exercise, but I wanted something that I could customize for myself.

On the first page of the notebook I keep a record of my weights. I weight myself every Monday morning and record the weight here. This way it is very easy to see my progress from week to week. On the last page of the book I have my fee and reward schedule. All of the in between pages are for my daily records.

Each day gets its own page and on it I record the times and descriptions whenever I eat something. It doesn’t matter how small. Even if I only ate 2 cheese curls, it needs to be recorded in the book. I even record my vitamins in here. I also keep records of the exercise I do. This includes walking the dogs, time on the treadmill and so forth. I know a lot of people wouldn’t consider walking the dogs exercise, but I power walk and the dogs enjoy going with me. For my exercise I record the time, duration and a description of what I did. At the very bottom of each page is my total for my rewards and/or fees for the day. This makes it easy for me to total them up at the end of the week for the payout.

The fee and reward schedule is something that I came up with to help motivate myself. I setup dollar amounts for achieving different goals. There are also charges for when I do certain things or don’t reach those goals. For example, I have to pay a fee if I hit the candy dish at work. There is always lots of good candy around my office and it is a weakness for me. If I can go all day without munching on the candy at the office I get a reward. At the end of the week I total up the rewards and fees. The fees are deducted from my reward money. The reward money gets transferred to a special savings account I have and the fees get transferred to my daughter’s savings account. I’m saving up my reward money so that when I reach my goal I can buy something nice for myself. Right now I’m thinking about a new ring, but that could change.

Do you have any tips and tricks that have helped you lose weight? I’m open for suggestions.

Also, check out The Lazy Organizer to see what other people are talking about.