Many people begin the new year with a resolve to improve their health. A tangible way to track your workouts, nutrition, and even how you're feeling from day to day, a fitness journal may be for you. Research shows that for people interested in losing weight, keeping a journal can be a very effective tool to help change behavior. The best way to get started on a healthier lifestyle or to meet a goal that you have set for yourself is to plan it out ahead of time, have a solid plan, and set your schedule. But what does tracking your fitness journey entail?
What is a Diet and Fitness Journal?
In general, a food journal is a living document that you use to keep track of everything you eat and drink - and that includes snacks, candy, coffee and anything else you have for and between meals. A diet and fitness journal is more than just a food diary; it's a comprehensive tool for monitoring your progress, identifying patterns, and staying motivated on your journey to better health. It depends on which you buy, but you can find fitness journals with sections for tracking your meals, workouts, moods, and more. Some journals are more detailed than others. For example, some include spaces for you to count your macros, as opposed to just your meals. If a fitness journal sounds like it's right for you, you should look for one that includes sections for what you personally want to keep track of.
Benefits of Keeping a Diet and Fitness Journal
Maintaining a fitness journal can be one of the most impactful things you can do for your own training. Keeping a log can make you a more efficient athlete. There are a number of great benefits to personal health journaling.
- Weight Management: From a weight management perspective, there is good evidence that keeping a food journal can be really helpful, but that’s not the only benefit of keeping a food journal. The classic example of this is to have people with a goal to lose weight, write down the total number of calories they consume each day. This way it’s easy to see if they are meeting the prescribed number of calories they should be eating to lose weight. This helps in two ways. The first, is the person gets familiar with how much food they are eating and what their daily caloric intake looks like. The seconds, is to prove whether the caloric prescription actually helped them lose weight that week.
- Identifying Patterns and Habits: Learning what you eat and how much you eat can be just as enlightening as learning how often you eat and what inspires you to eat. By writing your workouts down in a workout journal you will see how they affect your goals. The best part, is you can do it in a glance. Personal health journaling can be a great way to learn about your habits and tendencies. You can also keep track of energy levels throughout the day, how you felt before and after workouts, and stress levels.
- Identifying Trigger Foods and Food Sensitivities: Keeping a food journal helps you connect foods to symptoms. If you need to keep track of trigger foods because you have IBS, diverticulitis or a food sensitivity to ingredients like gluten or lactose, you might keep track of additional details that include:A description of your symptoms.When you experience symptoms and how long they last.How you feel when you eat certain foods and how you feel after.The severity of symptoms you experience.
- Recognizing Habits and Eating More Mindfully: The first step to changing and building better habits is to be aware of your existing habits.
- Improved Awareness: A food journal helps us see the connection between what we’re eating and how we’re feeling, how we’re sleeping, how we’re performing when we exercise or our ability to concentrate at work. If we’re not keeping track, we don’t necessarily make that connection.
- Accelerated Learning: Workout journals are important because they accelerate your learning. They help you troubleshoot a new workout routine. They can remember your coaches tips and remind you of new language.
- Guidance for Your Fitness Journey: With your workout journal you can help guide your own fitness journey. It gives you a broad picture of your progress. Different coaches, injury, rest, and over training can impede your goals.
- Help for Coaches: Your workout journal isn’t only helpful to you. Coaches can use your entries to determine how you are improving. What weightlifting program have you responded to the best? What types of cardio are your weakness? The ability to sit down with your coach and your workout journal is an essential tool to pinpointing training problems.
- Progress Tracking: One major motivational practice is simply writing down your goals and progress. Just seeing how far you are from where you started will give you the strength to go further. Logging the exercises, weight, number of repetitions, and rest time will help keep track of improvements made.
- Better Planning: A workout log, coupled with a food journal, keeps you planning better workouts and nutrition. You'll know which workouts worked most for you, when you felt your best, and what exercises helped you the most.
- Injury Prevention: By monitoring your training, you can detect overtraining or any warning signs of potential injury. This careful record keeping has injury prevention benefits, too. If you record how you feel with each lift-not only ‘was it hard?’ but how your body felt after-you can identify the lifts that may not be right for you.
- Motivation and Accountability: It’s easier to stay motivated when you can see your progress. You can use your fitness journal to set milestones and track statistics. Even if you’re not seeing results in the mirror, your journal may show more subtle changes, such as increases in the number of reps or the amount of weight you’re pushing. While a fitness journal can help you identify areas of success in your training, conversely, it can also show you areas where you need work. If you start to slack on your workouts or are skipping the gym altogether, your journal will show that. It’s a good way of keeping yourself accountable.
- Consistency: Writing down your workouts, along with what you eat on certain days, sleep intervals and stress levels will allow you to find reasons for why you feel at your best on some days, while on other days your interest in your workout is running on fumes. All that data right at your fingertips can allow you to see where routine is hindering you so that you can maximize the days where you feel like you can conquer your fitness, and minimize the ones where you don’t feel as able to meet your goals.
- Reflection and Gratitude: Some journals include space for mindfulness exercises. There’s a space for you to think about what you’re thankful for. “For me, it helps me keep gratitude at the top of mind all day,” says Erin Bailey, trainer at Burn Fitness in Boston, MA, and fan of gratitude journaling. "It helps me be more giving in the little moments, and those little moments add up to a really wonderful life.”
What to Track in Your Diet and Fitness Journal
So, what should you record? Here's a breakdown of key elements to include:
- Food and Beverages: Write down the specific food and beverage consumed and how it is prepared (baked, broiled, fried, etc.). List the amount in household measures (cups, teaspoons, tablespoons) or in ounces. If possible, it is best to weigh and measure your food.
- Timing and Location: Record when you are eating and where you are eating.
- Context: What else are you doing while eating? Who are you eating with?
- Emotions: How are you feeling as you're eating?
- Workouts: Your workout plan should, first and foremost, have every single exercise written down. Don’t forget reps, sets, tempos, rest breaks, and weights or equipment settings. You know your log is detailed enough when you can recreate the workout a year down the line without missing or forgetting something.
- Progress and Milestones: Track your progress for 140 days using this sturdy journal, which customers rave about for its durability. It also features space for you to record sets, types of exercise, rating, body measurements, progress, and diet preferences.
- Nutrition, Sleep, and Hydration: The pages have space for writing down your workout as well as tracking things like sleep, hydration, and alcohol intake. The journal also includes summary pages for the end of each week, where you can note your accomplishments, rate your nutrition, and track how you’re feeling (physically and emotionally).
- Mindfulness: Includes space for mindfulness exercises.
- Daily Ratings and Mood: Track daily ratings, meals, and mood.
- Body Measurements: Track your progress for 140 days using this sturdy journal, which customers rave about for its durability. It also features space for you to record sets, types of exercise, rating, body measurements, progress, and diet preferences.
- Goals: This journal is great for beginners, as its focus is helping you learn how to create SMART goals, which stands for specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. The journal is great for building SMART-oriented habits you can build upon to meet any lifestyle change.
Choosing the Right Diet and Fitness Journal
When you're on the hunt for a fitness journal, you'll notice that some are undated, allowing you to manually fill in dates. Others are dated and stretch for the whole year, or just a few months or weeks. Figure out what you need before you purchase a journal because you don't want to end up building extra makeshift pages if you run out while you're tracking your progress towards a goal.
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Think about where you'll be using your journal. Are you just writing in it at night to sum up your day or will it basically live in your bag and travel with you everywhere? If it's the former, something a little wider might not be too much of a biggie, but if it's the latter, you'll definitely want to skip anything too bulky.
Some journals allow you to track specific workout details like reps and sets, while others just allow space for a list of what exercises you tackled. Some journals provide space for body measurements from week to week, while others allow you to write about how you feel you've progressed that week.
There are some journals that even put a focus on mental health, and others that don't. So you should really think about what sections you would prefer to see daily or weekly, and then shop for a journal according to those preferences.
Here's a look at some popular options:
- 12-Week Planner: This 12-week planner is a great way to dive into new fitness goals. Here's how it works: You set a specific goal to reach by the end of the 12 weeks (gain five pounds of muscle, maintain four-a-week workouts, etc.). Then, you fill in the blanks, like what exercise you performed or how many reps you did, to track your progress along the way. It includes a designated section to track cardio versus strength training, along with a full food log. You even have the option to write down a reward you’ll treat yourself to if you hit your weekly goals.
- Trackable sections: Food, weight, steps, workouts
- Duration: 12 or 6 weeks
- Size: 6.3 x 0.8 x 5.8 inches
- Pros: Includes both daily and weekly planning pages, Also includes trackers for nutrients, vitamins, water, and sleep
- Cons: May be too detailed for some
- Ban.do Planner: There's no better planner to help you chase your fitness goals than one that will motivate you. This one from Ban.do features encouraging tear-out cards, activity trackers, and paragraphs of inspirational advice, like one about embracing growth. With it, you'll be able to track your overall wellness, including physical and mental.
- Trackable sections: Fitness activity, nutrition, period cycle, daily intention and affirmation
- Duration: Undated (you can download more pages if needed)
- Size: 8 in. x 6.5 inches
- Pros: Made with a colorful and pretty design, Features pages with inspiration advice
- Cons: Not the best if you want to track all of your workout metrics
- Detailed Workout Planner: Training for a competition, race, or just like keeping track of new PRs? This planner has detailed daily fitness logs that let you record your training type, and even the specific exercises in your routine. There are weekly check-ins for you to reflect on how you feel after the past week and weekly planning pages to help you think about goals and dreams for the week ahead.
- Trackable sections: Workouts, meals, progress and milestones
- Duration: 16 weeks
- Size: 7 x 10 inches
- Pros: Customers say its durable, Great for keeping track of your deadlines
- Cons: Doesn't come with a band to keep journal closed when not in use
- Sturdy Journal: Track your progress for 140 days using this sturdy journal, which customers rave about for its durability. No matter where you lug it, the living room or the local park for an outdoor workout, the journal is resistant to wear and tear. It also features space for you to record sets, types of exercise, rating, body measurements, progress, and diet preferences.
- Trackable sections: Exercises, body measurements, goals, diet preferences
- Duration: 140 days
- Size: 8.6 x 6.4 x 0.8 inches
- Pros: Customers say its durable, Great for keeping track of your deadlines
- Cons: Doesn't come with a band to keep journal closed when not in use
- Mindfulness Journal: If you want to track your fitness regimen but also add a little more mindfulness, gratitude, and reflection into your life, check out this 16-week journal. Similar to the 12-week planner, this one helps you set a specific, shorter-term goal to focus on. Whether that's related to physical or mental health, this fitness journal will help you take the steps to get there.
- Trackable sections: Daily ratings, meals, mood
- Duration: 16 weeks
- Size: 6.5 x 8 x 0.8 inches
- Pros: Includes space for mindfulness exercises, Helps you reflect on what you're thankful for
- Cons: Not the best if you're looking to track specific workout metrics
- Productivity Planner: This 16-week productivity planner will allow you to meet your goals at your own pace. It's undated, but you can fill in the dates yourself. It includes some of the basics like spaces for you to fill in your schedule and make a to-do list, but there's also room for you to regularly reflect on your personal growth.
- Trackable sections: Progress notes, habit tracker, to-do list
- Duration: 16 weeks
- Size: 6 x 8.5 inches
- Pros: Pretty design, Includes a meal tracker and shopping list
- Cons: Not the best if you're looking to track specific workout metrics
- Erin Condren Wellness Planner: This wellness planner from Erin Condren is perfect for tracking all parts of your physical health from your steps taken to your fitness activity, meals, and water intake. The planner includes 80 pages and a motivational and health-themed sticker sheet.
- Trackable sections: Water intake, steps, body measurements, sleep, meals
- Duration: 6 months
- Size: 5.7 x 8.3 inches
- Pros: Comes with inspirational notes, Helps you keep track of your water intake
- Cons: Only comes with 80 pages
- Fitness Journal Developed by Experts: With nearly 3,600 positive reviews, this fitness journal is perfect for detailed tracking of your goals. The journal allows you to keep track of your measurements and exercises (like where you're at with a one-rep max move) and there's a space for you to jot down your daily affirmations.
- Pros: Developed by fitness experts, Comes with an exercise guide
- Cons: May be too workout-detail heavy for some
- Military-Inspired Journal: The pages have space for writing down your workout as well as tracking things like sleep, hydration, and alcohol intake. The journal also includes summary pages for the end of each week, where you can note your accomplishments, rate your nutrition, and track how you’re feeling (physically and emotionally).
- Trackable sections: Nutrition, sleep, hydration, fitness activity, mindfulness
- Duration: 120 days
- Size: 8.6 x 5.2 x 0.7 inches
- Vegan Leather Planner: This vegan leather planner combines gratitude, scheduling, tracking, and reflection. The daily pages have space devoted to writing down what you’re grateful for (and a few positive thoughts), planning your activity and meals, and rating how well you followed your plan. Plus, you'll find inspiring quotes and room to reflect on improvements you want to implement the next day. There are also weekly review and progress tracking pages to help you note your wins, insights, and potential improvements.
- Trackable sections: Gratitude, activity, meals, progress and improvements,
- Duration: 13 weeks
- Size: 5.5 x 8 inches
- Pros: Includes metrics for detailed meal-tracking, Comes with stickers, pen, and closure band
- Cons: Only has space for 13 weeks
- Sporty, Spiral-Bound Log: This sporty, spiral-bound log is meant to suit any fitness goal. It starts with a few pages for goal-setting and includes 127 daily pages for detailing your workouts, as well as sheets for weekly progress notes. In the back of the journal, there’s space for you to write down the nutritional content of various foods.
- Trackable sections: Exercises, sets, calories, body measurements
- Duration: 4 months or 126 workouts
- Size: 8.3 x 5.8 x 0.6 inches
- Pros: Comes in different color designs, Room to track 126 workouts
- Cons: Not for you if you prefer more of a mental health focus
- SMART Goal Journal: This journal is great for beginners, as its focus is helping you learn how to create SMART goals, which stands for specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. The journal is great for building SMART-oriented habits you can build upon to meet any lifestyle change.
- Trackable sections: Goals, body measurements, nutrition
- Duration: 120 days
- Size: 8.5 x 6 x 0.5 inches
- Pros: Comes with inspirational tips, Available in five color options
- Cons: Has less of a focus on nutrition
Digital vs. Paper
The pen and paper versus app debate ultimately boils down to which you’ll commit to using consistently. For some, writing down what you did is easier and allows for quicker note-taking. You’ve also got a ton more flexibility this way and if you’re a no-phone-while-I-sweat kind of guy, it’s a good tech-free choice. On the other hand, apps provide built-in structure-and many turn training-specific stats into graphs you can use to track progress.
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Tips for Effective Diet and Fitness Journaling
Most experts agree that the secret to successful food journaling is accuracy and consistency. Here are some tips for success:
- Record Immediately: Write down the food or beverage as soon as you consume it. Be as specific as you can with the food or beverage.
- Be Detailed: The more detail you include, the more useful your food journal will be. And you can make it as specific or as general as you like.
- Start Slow: Food journaling is a marathon, not a sprint. In the beginning, give yourself some grace and try to record what you’re consuming one meal at a time. You don’t have to have exact measurements, either.
- Record After Eating: If you’re going to keep a food journal, try to keep track of your foods as you’re eating them or right after you eat. That way, you don’t put it off or forget what you ate hours later.
- Try Different Tactics: If something doesn’t work, try a different approach. If you don’t find counting calories beneficial, try listing foods and drinks instead. If you don’t like physically writing out every detail, keep a tally of what you like on a scale from 1 to 10.
- Choose Your Platform: You can go the pen-to-paper route, but there are also a lot of apps that sync with smart watches, phones, fitness trackers and other devices that can keep track of things for you in simple and easy ways. A smartphone app like Lose It! or MyFitnessPal can support your efforts.
- Set SMART Goals: Once you've identified areas for improvement, set one or two healthy eating goals for yourself. In doing so, use the SMART goal format. That means your goals should be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-based.
- Analyze and Adjust: Keep checking your journal regularly to analyze your progress.
Who Should Keep a Food Journal?
Peart says anyone can benefit from keeping a food journal. “But,” she cautions, “if it adds to stress, then try making it more general. For example, start by simply noting your feelings.
“If you have an eating disorder, or a history of disordered eating, I don’t recommend tracking amounts and calories because too much focus on food and numbers and amounts can trigger disordered eating and potentially cause a relapse,” she continues. “But journaling about your thoughts and feelings is always a good idea.”
If you’re coordinating with a dietitian, it’s useful to share your food journal with them to talk about what’s working and what’s not.
“If you’re working with a therapist about stress and emotional eating, a food journal can help with that process as well,” says Peart. “If your doctor is monitoring a health condition, it can be helpful to keep track of your symptoms and what you’re eating in that situation, too.”
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