Personal Health Journal

 

HEALTH ISN’T A GOAL, IT’S A WAY OF LIVING

A personal health journal (health diary) is a complete record of your health. It is a journal you keep yourself. The journal helps you keep track of every aspect of your health.

Take a Pledge –

This is my journey, my body, and my mind. Only I can change my life. No one can do it for me. I believe in myself and I trust myself and I know I can maintain it.

My Goal / Vision – I want to gain self control and build / maintain healthy habits.

Remember : You are worth overcoming the challenge.

You are strong enough to reach your fullest potential.

I want to look in the mirror and see someone I am proud of.

I want lasting change for myself – Weakness, Strength, Happiness, Regret and Contentment.

Address challenges and make a game plan for how will you maintain yourself.

The most important thing is to make sure you set your goals correctly and then divide it into small actionable steps. By doing that you make it much easier on yourself to follow through and achieve your goals.

Another great tip would be to create milestones along the way, something that keeps you motivated and reminds you why you’re doing it all, to begin with. It also helps to program you that hard work brings amazing results.

You have to make sure you track your progress daily, so a good trick is to add it to your daily to-do list, at least for the first 20-30 days while you’re still working on making it a habit.

W – Workout

E –  Eat Less

I  – It all adds up

G – Gain Confidence

H – Healthy

T – Think before you eat

L – Little by little

O – Only eat if hungry

S – Start now

S – Success

Life is Tough but so are you

 

Click here for Reach your goals using personal health journal

A personal health journal is a complete record of your health.  It is a journal you keep for yourself. The journal helps you keep track of every aspect of your health.

A personal health journal is an easy way to keep track of your health. Keeping track of your health history helps you to be an informed patient. Knowledge allows you to take more control of your healthcare. A personal health journal also helps you stay healthy. Be sure to take your health journal to your doctor’s appointments.

Personal Health History (Health Diary)
Illness/Injury: Dates:
Hospitalizations: Dates:
Surgeries: Dates:
Medications/Supplements: Dosage & Notes:
Emergency Contacts: Phone & Relationship:
Family Medical History: Additional Details:

A personal health journal should keep track of your overall health. You can customize your journal to include any information that you want. Ask your doctor for recommendations of what to include. Some of the things you should include are:

  • illnesses
  • injuries
  • hospitalizations
  • surgeries
  • allergies
  • conditions that run in your family
  • medicines, vitamins, and supplements that you take. Include how much and how often you take them.

When you fill in your health history, be sure to include the dates. For example, if you were hospitalized, write down the date that you were admitted and the date you were discharged. You also can include notes on how you were feeling.

Why to maintain fitness journal

Keeping a fitness journal means you can plan ahead to achieve your goals, look back to see what’s working and what’s not, and have a clear idea of what you’re going to do today when you head to the gym. It takes the guesswork out of it and maximizes the results of everything you do, because when you keep a fitness journal everything you do has a purpose.

Keeping an exercise journal can also help to:

  • Clarify and focus your fitness goals
  • Break down goals into smaller, more manageable goals
  • Track progress towards goals
  • Plan future workouts
  • Record workouts done and progress
  • Record related non-workout information e.g. sleep, meals, overall energy levels & health
  • Gain a better understanding of exercise habits, helping you to troubleshoot and make changes.
  • Plan exercise rest days
  • Increase motivation
  • Prevent and manage injuries
  • Provide a factual record of successes

A fitness journal means you have all the information you need to assess your current workout, make changes when necessary, track your progress and continually move forward in your fitness.

Not keeping a training journal is akin to going on a journey without a map (or GPS) – you probably won’t end up at your desired destination, and if you do it’ll be by luck and only after a whole lot of wasted time and effort. By recording your training and using this information to plan future workouts, you will eliminate pointless “treading-water” workouts and make sure that each time you exercise you do so with purpose.

 How to keep a fitness journal

A fitness journal doesn’t have to be anything elaborate or complicated – a simple notebook will suffice or you can use one of many online workout trackers and apps. Whatever you choose, you can be sure that using a fitness journal will give you a training edge and help you reach your fitness goals quicker than you ever thought possible.

Ways of keeping an exercise journal:

  • Paper:regular journal, exercise book, scrapbook, folder
  • Computer:Excel spreadsheet
  • Online:App, website, forum, personal blog

Your fitness journal should contain the workout you are about to do as well as your past workouts. Whatever you did last time, try and do a little more this time to push your fitness levels forward.

If you have been doing the same workout for more than eight-weeks or notice that your training progressions have stalled, it’s time to plan a new workout to kick yourself out of the training rut you are in. If you are still making progress, stick with the same (and currently effective) workout you are doing for a little while longer but be ready to change if progress comes to a halt.

Fitness tracker journal

You already know that starting a Bullet Journal is a serious life changer and that this simple system can be used to organize every part of your life. My absolute favorite part of having a journal though is that it is the best way to succeed in your goals and dreams.

I don’t know about you, but one of my constant goals is to get healthier, fitter and usually to lose a few pounds.

The great news is that there are a few hacks, tricks and spreads that you can use in your Bullet Journal to help you achieve your health and weight loss goals.

Bullet journals and trackers are pretty much  synonymous. I think most people who use a bullet journal use a tracker in some form! Some bullet journal trackers to improve your health are simple. For instance, tracking water consumption in your bullet journal is pretty easy! Others bullet journal trackers are much more complicated; they span multiple pages and require a lot of detail. An example of this would be a yearly workout tracker.

But the whole point of a tracker, for the most part, is to ignite positive change. Whether you are kicking a bad habit or trying to make better choices, your aim is use bullet journal trackers to improve your health.

Use bullet journal to improve your health –

To put it simply, bullet journal trackers to improve your health  are some of the best ways to create positive change and be healthier.

Why is that? Here are some of the reasons :

  1. You get to set the pace! A lot of programs or other planners tend to have a specific program and pace to complete.  And if this pace doesn’t match your needs, it’s potentially setting you up for failure.
  2. They are easy to adjust if they aren’t working well. You can easily change or remove from week to week or month to month.
  3. No pressure. It’s easy to get down on yourself if you fall off the bandwagon for a while. However, there’s not really a specific commitment.
  4. You get to create it! I mean, what is more fun than getting your creative juices flowing for a positive project? You can go all out, or you can choose a minimalist style.

You know yourself better than anybody else. And if you like to plan and organize on your own terms, you’re going to find creating your own health trackers to be a powerful tool in your bullet journal.

Keep non workout records as well

There is some non-workout information that is valuable and worth recording. It can help you connect the dots between your lifestyle, exercise and how you’re feeling, helping you to achieve your fitness and weight loss goals.

After all, exercise positively impacts many areas of our lives – often more than we ever imagined possible. Better sleep, improved mood, greater stamina, an improvement of chronic health conditions are often just few of the ‘side-effects’ of regular exercise. Keeping a record of the positive changes can be very motivational. But also, many of these same factors affect how hard we exercise or whether we exercise at all (e.g. sleep deprivation, fatigue, poor mood/ PMS, long working hours). Keeping a record of this allows you to find patterns that are holding you back, and helps you to plan your workouts around things you know are going to impact your exercise performance or the will to exercise.

Extra non-workout information for record:

  • Body weight (or body fat percentage)
  • Hours Slept
  • Appetite (good, average, poor)
  • Mood (good, average, poor)
  • Energy (good, average, poor)
  • Motivation (good, average, poor) 

 

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Click here for Trackers to check your health status -

If you don’t know yourself, you can’t change as easily. Without understanding your typical health habits in the first place,  it’s more challenging to determine what you need to change. You don’t need a lot to create a tracker. We suggest very few things to manage tracker like notebook, ruler, stencils and a sturdy pens of different colors.

Here are some types of trackers that fall under this category:

Goal tracker – Goal trackers are a lot like the observational habit trackers. But instead of just monitoring your habits, a goal tracker is a list of accomplishments you intend to make on a daily/weekly/monthly basis. Set goals for yourself before starting to plan and track various activities and by writing goals to achieve about various activities like workout, food intake, smoking habit, mood Etc.,

Once you have your SMART goal it’s a great idea to set up to succeed. This means making sure you have everything in place that is going to help you make those big dreams come true. Have a serious think about what is realistic for you… and also what you enjoy. The key to making your goals happen is to be realistic and to follow your joy. If you don’t enjoy something, you won’t stick to it.

Let’s say your first goal is to improve overall health and fitness so break it into smaller parts like –

  • Move body every day ( Walk, Dance, games with kids Etc., )
  • Reach 10,000 steps a day ( buy fitbit for yourself )
  • Drink 8 glasses of water daily
  • Practice self care ( do something nice for yourself )
  • Meal plan and preparation for the week

Number your bucket list – Whether it’s reducing weight, improving food habits or family time Etc., adding a bucket list page to your bullet journal will give you big-picture goals to start working toward. Sleek option is a sweet way to start jotting down your dreams.

Habit Tracker : Observation trackers are actually pretty simple to implement and generally easy to create.

These trackers are bullet journal trackers that solely track your habits. They aren’t so much a call to action but a way to monitor both healthy and unhealthy activities. For instance, maybe you know if you stop showering daily that can be sign of depression. Or maybe the habit tracker indicates you are drinking alcohol maybe a little more frequently than you should or your smoking habit.

Sleep Tracker – A sleep tracker tracks the amount of sleep you get. There are a variety of layouts to try. The two most important are :

This first one just tracks the time you sleep, time you wake, and length of naps if you take any. Write the data in little boxes of your tracker.

This second tracker is a full page tracker. Each day has the full day in hours written down, and highlight the time you sleep. It’s nice because this format is more visual than the list format.

Mood Tracker – Your mental health is just as important as your physical health! If you feel depressed or anxious all the time, you aren’t at your peak of health. By taking the time to observe mood, you can later determine if you are having troubles. Hopefully then you can seek out measures to help improve your mental health.

Your mental health is just as important as your physical health. Plus when you’re not at your best mentally there is no way you can do your best physically. So it’s important you track your mental health.

As a quick aside, your bullet journal will be a lifesaver for your mental health!

Symptom Tracker – Do you get migraines? Bad PMS? A symptom tracker is a great observational option to monitor more troubling concerns. But this list can help improve your health by allowing your doctor to have a better feel for your challenges. The hope is more detailed trackers can assist with more beneficial medical treatment. Health and fitness aren’t only about creating better living habits, it’s also about dealing with the existing conditions you have.

Workout Tracker – Create diets or workout plans, depending on your goals. The important thing here is to start small – don’t try to start from no gym to gym every day for 30 minutes. Plan it in phased manner so that it works within a week or two.You can just mark the days when you workout. This is the usual way to  do since you have already scheduled in your goals. Include running, yoga, steps Etc., in this tracker so that you have variation during weekly schedule.

Weight Loss Tracker – A weight loss tracker is relatively straightforward; typically it’s a method to chart current weight. Sometimes this will look like a chart, other times it may be a ‘color in the box’ as you hit various weight goals. Other weight loss trackers go into more specific detail, highlighting inches lost, fat lost, and other variable measures related to weight loss.

Food / Caloric Tracker – Studies have shown that tracking your food intake can actually help you with weight loss. Yes, a food tracker help you identify your weaknesses and assist with making positive choices. Tracker also states that it helps you to be more mindful about what you consume as well.

Tracking your food is very beneficial and will help you immensely on your journey to a healthier lifestyle. Tracking your food will help you to improve your eating habits and find your weak spots.

Water Tracker – Make sure you drink atleast 8 glasses of water which is not only beneficial for your health but it can really help you with weight loss.

Exercise Tracker – So how is an exercise tracker a bit different than the food and weight loss tracker?

Well, typically exercise trackers follow a specific routine that you intend to follow to improve your health.

Honestly, you can put your health trackers wherever you’d like.

However, I believe that there is a proper way to organize these trackers for optimization in your bullet journal.

Majority of the bullet journal trackers to improve your health will relate directly to your monthly or weekly layouts. I highly recommend that if your health trackers correspond to a specific month, then it’s easiest to maintain it in your monthly layout section. Same if it you decide to break a health tracker down to a weekly format, you’d instead make it a part of your weekly layout.

Period Tracker – As a woman, your period influences your health a lot, and it’s useful to see how your other efforts correlate with your period. That way you won’t feel too bad when you have a chocolate bar or if you can’t run as well as you usually can.

Gratitude Tracker – It’s important to stay mindful when life gets hectic. With a gratitude log,  you can remind yourself of what matters most to you in life and start truly appreciating what you have. Whether it’s a positive memory or a best friend, you can look back on it whenever you’re feeling down.

Motivation page – We all need some motivation sometimes. For everyone keeping up with fitness goals is the hardest thing to do, so you are craving for something motivational all the time!

Create a special page to remind yourself how amazing life will be when you achieve your goals. And of course, always remember why you set the goal. Soon you will  realize that you want to be healthy for the life share with your family. So every time you feel like skipping, remember why and drag butt to a yoga mat.

Review your month – Reflect on the past 30 days by creating your own monthly review. This assessment can help you look back on positive memories, monitor your habits, and point out which goals you’re still working toward, and which ones you’ve accomplished. 

 

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