Achieving weight loss goals, or the journey towards living a healthier lifestyle can be a heavy lift, no pun intended.
Figuring out the best way to stay accountable to your weight loss goal can be challenging but creating bullet journal spreads to help keep track of your progress can provide motivation and be fun.
Below are 11 simple bullet journal ideas that will help promote healthy habits and keep you on track!
Your intentions for living a healthier lifestyle are good and motivation tends to start off high, but somewhere along the way you lose your stickiness. Sound familiar? One day off course becomes another day off course which leads to…well, the old course of the same old bad habits.
The shift into a heathier lifestyle isn’t just about weight, although that’s what so many of us use as our measurement of success. If you committing to weight loss, there are a ton of factors that play into your ability to be successful.
It’s worth investing some time into evaluating where you stand with those factors so you can figure out what you need to improve on and set relevant and appropriate goals. Goals that will help you achieve a healthier lifestyle and weight loss too if that’s an area of focus.
Benefits of bullet journaling for weight loss
A bullet journal is a great tool to use as you journey through lifestyle changes. It will help you:
- Evaluate where you are at with certain aspects of a healthy lifestyle.
- Help you visualize which aspects of a healthy lifestyle need improvement.
- Set specific supportive goals for the day, week, month, and year.
- Monitor and measure your progress with each aspect of a healthy lifestyle.
- Stay accountable to your new healthy habits, sustain your already established ones, and even help to break bad habits.
- Create a visual that celebrates your success and reminds you on a daily basis that you are capable!
Bullet journaling, if you aren’t familiar, brings a flavor of organization and creativity to traditional journaling. It’s more than just a single habit tracker or to-do list. Think of a bullet journal as a compilation of checklists, doodles, and tracking with a side dish of quick notes or even just phrases. It can be bright and fun or super simple and plain. What your bullet journal contains or looks like is all up to you and what you feel will inspire you to use it!
Here are 11 simple ideas to get you started down the path to good health or support your weight loss journey:
1. Water Intake
Staying hydrated is critical to many aspects of your health. But drinking water can be easy to overlook if it’s not top of mind. Figure out a good system to access water easily throughout your day. Set reminders on your phone or carry a 32-ounce refillable bottle that you finish once before lunch and once after dinner. Using a water tracker to monitor how much water you consume on a daily basis will help keep this healthy habit front and center.
The goal in this bullet journal spread is for 8 glasses of water a day during the month of January.
You can add in some of the benefits as motivating reminders and jot down some of the tips that help you keep going throughout the month.
2. Body Measurements
The scale can be frustrating at times. It either doesn’t budge or it moves slower than a teenager in the early morning. Ugh. This is where body measurements can save the day and give you that needed motivational boost! Taking body measurements is an incredibly helpful way to measure your progress towards living a healthier lifestyle. Measure key areas of the body such as your bicep, chest, waist, hips, and thighs and record the measurements weekly on a chart into your bullet journal. If you are fond of math, try setting up a graph to show your progress too!
3. Movement
If you already have a regular workout routine and are crushing your fitness goals, then great – keep it going! But for some people, the word exercise is dreadful. If that sounds familiar, then try swapping it out with “movement.” Pick a few types of movement that you enjoy and will commit to for a duration of time – 20 or 30 minutes – and color code each one. Create a tracker in your bullet journal and fill it in with the different colors as you complete the task. Not only will you create a beautiful array of colors but, more importantly, you’ll start to see how your movement is positively impacting other healthy habits, such as your body measurements!
Try using different colors in your bullet journal spread when you are tracking multiple activities on one page. Add an inspirational quote or your favorite personal mantra as motivation.
Remember, it’s ok to take a break and have an off day here and there too! Just don’t let it derail your overall effort.
Keep your bullet journal somewhere you can see it and easily access it as a reminder!
4. Healthy Snacks
The urge to snack is real, people! If the thought of a recording a full meal log or designing a food journal is too overwhelming, then a snack tracker is alternatively a great idea. Challenge yourself to keep snacking healthy and note your good moments throughout the day in your bullet journal. This can also be a helpful way to promote good eating habits with your children! Creating a reward system alongside a healthy snack tracker can be a fun way to earn little things like stickers or staying up late on the weekend for choosing a certain number of healthy snacks during the week. Plus, it will get more people in your house engaged in the healthy habits you are cultivating.
5. Steps
Nowadays your watch will tell you practically anything and everything you could possibly want to know about measuring your fitness. But if you don’t have a fancy watch any run of the mill pedometer will do the job just fine. Write down your daily step count each day in your bullet journal and aim to beat it daily.
6. Sleep
Do not underestimate the impact that sleep has on your health. Using a bullet journal to keep notes or as a sleep tracker can be a powerful tool to help identify patterns or trends that you may not be aware of. It can also help you realize just how much sleep you need each night to feel your best. Note if any small changes affected your sleep such as going to bed 15 minutes earlier or stopping your caffeine intake an hour earlier. When you partner sleep tracking with monitoring additional healthy habits such as movement, water intake or mindfulness you will start to see just how much they all impact one another!
Being intentional about logging your sleep can help identify patterns. Your workouts, caffeine intake, water consumption, diet and stress can all impact your ability to get quality sleep.
Make notes so you can better understand those “off” nights.
7. Mindfulness
Inviting more balance into your life by focusing your mental health is just as important as watching your dessert intake. If practicing mindfulness is new to you, then picking an activity to track in your bullet journal is a great way dip your toes in the water. Try on a few different activities to see what fits you best – traditional journaling, meditation, deep breathing – and see what sticks! You may also want to incorporate a mood tracker as part of monitoring your mindfulness routine. Take notice of how certain activities make you feel. Your mental health is just as important as your physical health.
8. Fitness Challenge
Change up your routine a bit or add a challenge into your existing fitness plans. Whether its 30 days of planks, squats, or a couch to 5K, creating a tracker in your bullet journal will serve as visual motivation and scream out any missed days!
9. Strength Training
Lifting weights and all the reps that come along with it count too! A bullet journal can help you get more out of your workouts by measuring your progress over the course of a month, or even the year. Track the amount of weight you lifted and number of repetitions for each exercise or even just one you are focusing on.
10. Blood Pressure, Cholesterol, and A1C
While these tests aren’t run as often as daily or weekly, the numbers that represent them are important to your overall health. Even if they don’t pose a current challenge for you, it’s a good rule of thumb to know your numbers. A bullet journal is a great place to log them after your annual physical. Plus, you’ll get the satisfaction of seeing year over year improvement because of the other healthy changes you have made.
11. Weight Loss
Finally, the scale. While the number isn’t everything, or even the first thing, it is something. And chances are, if you are putting the hard work into monitoring, measuring, and building all those other healthy habits then you may also see a welcome change in your weight. The important thing to remember is not to use the scale as your only milestone or measuring stick for success. How much weight you lose may vary but there are a multitude of additional health benefits to consider as well.
Whatever your specific health goals may be, creating bullet journal pages is a great way to help cultivate and track supportive habits. Your bullet journal tracker should be more than just a monthly calendar of sorts, it should be a reflection of what will inspire you. Have fun trying all the different ways you be creative and enjoy the healthier version of yourself!