How I Started Fitness Tracking

You guys. It has been three weeks and I am STILL doing my fun planning in my planner! It has been another busy week around my house, as I have continued to do district curriculum trainings. I worried that when I started working again, I wouldn’t be able to keep up with the more fun elements of my planner, but so far, so good! Here is a look at last week:

As you can see, I did real good with my Bible readings this week.

*face palm*

But even when I don’t complete the tasks, it is still helpful for me to see what I did and didn’t get accomplished. It helps me set priorities for the following week.

Do you see the bottom square where I have that little sticker for fitness tracking? I really love that part of my planner, but the more I track that information here, the more I realize that there is so much more I can and should be tracking related to my fitness. That little sticker just wasn’t cutting it.

I’ve learned by keeping my planner recently that if I write it down, I am more likely to actually do it. So, I decided to apply that concept to my fitness tracking. You can buy fitness tracking notebooks and planners, and there are lots of apps and online options (I use MyFitnessPal), but I like the idea of writing it down myself. This weekend, I sat down with an iced tea and some blank planner paper and decided to create my own fitness tracker.

I put it in a section of a Happy Planner notebook that I already had laying around. You can’t tell from the picture, but those little ice cream cones have dates on them. The row of stickers below those are little scales to write your weight in. I ran out of these stickers, though, so I’ll probably just write in my weight from now on.

Most of this information for the next section can be found in my Activity app on my iPhone and Apple Watch, but I like having to look it up every day and write it down. I track whether I closed my rings or not. Does anyone else have a hard time closing your Move ring??? I can’t ever get that ring to close!

I have also started tracking my water during the day. My weight loss has stalled a bit on keto in the past two weeks and I read that drinking more water can help. My goal is 120 ounces of water a day. Oy. I got pretty close yesterday, which was the first day I started tracking, but it was TOUGH! That’s a lot of water!!!

Lastly, I move my carbs over from my MyFitnessPal app into my tracker every day. This helps me keep a record of carb intake on a daily basis so that I can compare days. Mostly, though, it’s just a way to make me pay attention because I have to look it up and write it down.

And that’s it. Just making that one chart has helped me become so much more accountable for my fitness in the past week. I’m learning the power of WRITING IT DOWN!