Food Journaling Results

After a near-perfect record for my Tuesday/Thursday posting schedule in June, I seem to be having some trouble keeping up in July… Work is busy, life is busy, and the summer weather is nice so I don’t really want to spend my time inside writing blog posts… I want to be outside playing my sports, enjoying my garden, and visiting with friends…

So I’m sorry for dropping off the regular posting schedule, but I’m sure for the next month or two it will be a struggle to keep it up.  I hope you will stick around and keep reading when I do post, and hopefully I will find some down time to write up all the post ideas that are bouncing around inside my head.

About a month ago, I posted about my grumbly belly and how I was going to start food journaling to try and narrow down what it was that was causing the issues.

I started very detailed with my food journal for the first week:

But, then I wanted to find a way to include it in my weekly spread of my bullet journal, so I added a small spot to each day to mark down food:

Advertisement

I’m Going for Another Half…

This post was supposed to be published yesterday… but life got in the way… 

While I was trying to come up with a post for today (which I was struggling with… again…) I decided to go over the goals that I made for the year and see which ones I hadn’t made any progress on lately, or hadn’t done any updates on…  I realized that so far this year, I have only run in 2 races, not the 5 races that I had as a target.  I did mention that in my last fitness update, but I didn’t actually do anything about it…

So, I took a look at the list of races that I put in my old bullet journal and realized that there aren’t really any races over the summer…  How am I going to make progress on my goal if there aren’t any races to run?  Well, I have decided that I am going to go big and sign up for another half marathon in the fall.  I have completed 4 half marathons in my lifetime, but I haven’t ever beat the 2 hour mark that I set as a goal last year.  If I train really hard and make that 2 hour goal in October, I have made a deal with myself to count that as two races towards my 5 total, so then I’ll only be looking for 1 more race to squeeze in.  But, if I don’t beat the 2 hour mark, then I have to find 2 more races before the end of the year.  Am I crazy?

The Plan

If I am going to do this half marathon in 14 weeks, and do well at it, I better get training!

Grumbly Belly = Food Journaling

On Monday, Cait (formerly Blonde on a Budget – now CaitFlanders.com) did a blog post about mindful eating and her results from tracking what she ate that was perfectly timed for me.  That morning I had been talking to my running buddy about my grumbly tummy after eating some ice cream the night before.  And the week before I had actually started tracking some of my food because my tummy had been upset by something…  but got sidetracked by the weekend and stopped…

Cait’s blog post was just the right inspiration to start again and really take a serious look at what I’m eating and what my body feels like based on what I’ve put in it.  So starting on Monday, I have been doing some food journaling.

Habit Tracker Check-In – June 2016

For goal #2 of my 2016 goals, I wanted to work on some basic good habits that would help keep me healthy and on track…  Or help me improve myself  (you know, a “better me” as my blog name would indicate).

Last check-in (in March), I had 12 habits that I was working on for March… Let’s just say that they didn’t really go as well as I had hoped…

And since I started the month of April while I was on my honeymoon, I didn’t even make a habit tracker for April.  But I did start my new bullet journal with a habit tracker for May, so let’s go over how that went…

For May I again had 12 habits that I was working on, but they were slightly different from the ones in March.  Most are pretty self explanatory, but I’ll go over them anyway…

My New Bullet Journal

I hinted a couple posts ago that I might be starting a new bullet journal sometime in the near future, but it turns out that my old notebook was pretty much out of pages.  Setting up my monthly layouts for May just would not fit in the remaining pages… So, I used a few of those pages to plan out my new bullet journal and started fresh with my brand new Leuchtturm1917 for the month of May.

I promised that I would share my new bullet journal when I got going on it, so here it is… My new bullet journal!

The first thing I did was start a pen test page in the back so that I could check on how things write in the new book.  I was disappointed to find out that even in this new book some of my pens still ghost and soak through.  I also did go and buy myself a couple new pens… (even though I said I would wait until I win the biggest loser competition with my husband before doing that…)

March Habit Tracker Check-In

I’m going to continue with my monthly check-in on my habit tracker in my bullet journal (see last month’s post), as that is where I am keeping track of the various smaller goals (in the form of my giant Goal #2) that I’m working on…

How did I do in February?

I started the month with 8 habits to work on… and then part way through I added a 9th.

February Habit Tracker Check-In

At the beginning of January, I introduced the habit tracker that I have in my new bullet journal.  It’s nothing original, so many bullet journalists are using the same idea or something similar, but I was pretty proud of it, and was motivated to keep up my new good habits… until I went on vacation…

Okay, if I’m really honest I never did have a single day where I fully did every habit… so I can’t really blame my vacation…  And I started this blog to keep myself accountable, so let’s take a look at how things went…

Here’s how the January habit tracked ended up:

#1 – Morning Routine: 8 half successful days… and 1 success… Basically, I have a really really hard time getting up at 5:30am.

#2 – Exercise: 16 successful days.  I was doing very well, and then I went on vacation.  It is true that while on vacation I did do a lot of walking… but didn’t count that… But I also don’t really count that as a failure either.  It’s just the way vacation is…

#3 – At Work by 9am: 10 successes.  2 half-successes. (I had planned appointments that made me get to work late.)  But I wasn’t expected at work on weekends, or during my vacation… so… really, there were only 2 days of the month that I didn’t do this when I should have… So, that’s a huge win.

#4 – Blog Posts: I did 6 blog posts in January.  If I was following my Tuesday/Thursday scheduled, I should have done 8… and they weren’t always actually posted on Tuesdays and Thursdays like I want either.  Some work to do here…

How I’m Making My Savings Goals Fun

Remember that post where I said I’d be back and have a post on Thursday (yeah, that Thursday was actually yesterday), well I guess I was wrong… but here I am.  Better late than never, right?  (That’s generally my motto, since I am late to almost everything!)  Anyway… 

A couple weeks ago I posted about my financial goals for 2016.  One of my goals (goal #4 to be exact) was to save for all my planned spending.  It totaled up to $70,000.  That is one big audacious savings goal!  How am I going to keep up my motivation to get all that saving done?  Well, I started by breaking it in to all the smaller goals, as I mentioned in my original post, since it is easier to see progress that way, but I’m also making it fun by taking it back to my childhood enjoyment of colouring!  And I’m doing that using my fancy-dancy bullet journal!

Based on a spread that Kara over at Boho Berry did for her savings goals, I put together a spread to keep track of how much we save, and how much each goal actually ends up costing.  Because any cost savings in the goal before can be used to boost up the one after it.  So here’s my bullet journal spread:

2016 Goal #2: Master Good Habits

On Tuesday I discussed goal #1 for 2016, which is to get organized with my bullet journal… it’s a work in progress… but that’s sort of the concept of the bullet journal… work at it until you find what works best for you… so I’ll have to post an update in a while once I’ve had more time to work through the kinks.

I had so many ideas for goals or things I want to accomplish, it was sort of overwhelming when I was brainstorming… but it is silly to try and get everything done at once, so I needed to pare down.  So, for goal #2 for 2016, I decided that I would start with a few specific habits to work on in January, and then each month I will add more based on the successes of the previous month.  Mastering these habits will help me have a good basis for completing other goals.

I’ve already shown you my habit tracker from my bullet journal on Tuesday, but I didn’t go in to any details about what habits were actually being tracked… so I’ll do that now.

Here is my January habit tracker in my bullet journal that I posted on Tuesday:

January Habit Tracker

And here is an updated close-up from yesterday:

January Habit Tracker Close-Up

I have selected 7 habits for January that are mostly attached to bigger goals, but are smaller tasks that I can work on…

1. Morning Routine (5:30am)

Last summer, I put together a morning routine or schedule in an attempt to get myself organized.  Unfortunately, I didn’t have any way to record how often I was doing it, and zero accountability, and I totally let it fall to the side.  So, with the help of my bullet journal, I’m going to try get up at 5:30am every morning and do the morning routine every morning.  Well, not Saturday and Sunday… those are my sleep in days.  So far, I haven’t done a full morning routine, but I did partial routines some mornings… Or I did get up at 5:30am, but I didn’t do a part of the routine… I have indicated that with a half filled box.

2016 Goal #1: Get Organized

Happy New Year!

It’s that time of year where most of us are sitting down and making plans for the new year.  And I’m no different.  Last year I had already made all my goals for the new year before it arrived, but this year I was a bit slower… I’ve been debating on how I want to move forward with my goals and if I want to continue with some of the more basic habit based ones from last year, or if I want to just go for new goals only… Lots of humming and hawing… I think I’ve sorted it out now…

My 2016 Goals Brainstorming

But before I can do any of my goals, I need to get organized.  I need to have a place to keep track of my goals, my to-do lists, and whatever else I have going on… I had a notebook that I was sort of using for this over the past year, but I was so rigid on what I could put in it and I didn’t just let myself have fun with it, so it didn’t stick very well.  And I didn’t use it to plan… just to record (my failures)…

Enter Bullet Journaling.

Yup, I have started bullet journaling.  If you haven’t heard of it, it may just change your life… like seriously.  Like more than Marie Kondo’s method of tidying up (sorry Marie).  (I have seen a lot of posts of people using their bullet journal to declutter with the KonMari method though…)  Anyway, I had heard of bullet journaling before, but it wasn’t until ShyWriter over at writerstyle.wordpress.com posted about her plan to use a bullet journal in 2016 that I really dug in to it.  And I have been Instagraming and Pinteresting all sorts of bullet journal fun.  You can check out the original bullet journal concept at bulletjournal.com, but that’s just the basics… Look up the hashtag #bulletjournal or #bujo on Instagram and you’ll find some crazy artistic takes on what you can do with bullet journalling.