I like to wander around Flying Tiger when I get off the underground and am waiting for my bus.

Today they had some really nice food and exercise diaries, for about €2/$2.75). They are the same size as US composition books (just a teeeeny bit narrower), have sewn spines (which I prefer to stapled and glued spines. I hate glued spines),and nice paper. The pages are colourful but still clean and easy to use, offering an attractive, user-friendly two-page overview of each day.

Two pages cover one day and there is place for recording

• meals – either as a food tracker or a meal planner
• water intake
• caffeine intake
• sleep
• mood
• exercise (different sections for strength, cardio and brain)
• goals
• unplanned things you have eaten

I don’t keep a food diary but I have in the past, and I found them very helpful if I started to creep up slowly in weight. I would track everything I ate and drank for a week. I also made a note of exercise, mood and sleep patterns. After that week I would look at the diary and could usually pinpoint patterns. For example that I was working at home (lots of snacking), long days (skipping meals, drinking too much coffee, and eating too much sugar), moving less, eating more, nibbling on snacks that I didn’t even realise I was eating (I tend to do this when I am stressed, working late or sleeping badly).

After a while if my clothes started feeling tight, I didn’t even have to keep a food diary. I know now that, like my mother, I am a snacker when I am bored, stressed, tired, or emotional. I also know I need to exercise, or else I sleep even worse than usual. But if you are not sure why you are gaining, or not losing weight it is often really helpful to record food intake just to see if anything is sneaking in there. Or, you could use this to plan your meals in advance. You could use the ‘laughs’ category to track moods in relation to how much you eat or how exercise makes you feel.

The photos are not particularly good as Sweden is so dark at this time of year and it is grey and snowing at the moment. The paper is white.

Categories: Diaries and Journals, Notebooks

Tags: Exercise Journal, flying tiger