Main­tain­ing a jour­nal is a fan­tas­tic tool in many ways, it can help main­tain aware­ness of exactly what you are eat­ing and doing, it can help you stay focused on the job in hand and can pro­vide use­ful feed­back for your trainer.

While jour­nals will typ­i­cally be pri­vate, with you shar­ing things with your trainer, MY jour­nal is being writ­ten and pub­lished to the world at large. The pur­pose of this is that it:

  • pro­vides a real exam­ple of how you can go from couch potato to a health­ier lifestyle
  • doc­u­ments the “jour­ney” of a per­fectly ordi­nary indi­vid­ual — prov­ing that YOU can do it too
  • shows the bad stuff as well as the good, so every­one can see that slip-ups occur and sim­ply get dealt with
  • keeps me hon­est and account­able with my own efforts

Of these, the last point is per­haps my biggest moti­va­tor; I’ve joined gyms before and then fallen off the wagon after 6 months, 12 months etc. That said, I am very much excited by the poten­tial to help even just one other per­son become healthier.

BEFORE:                                                  AFTER:
beforeafter the daily journal

For the com­plete daily jour­nal archives click here

 

You may notice a theme with the jour­nal entry titles — they are mostly song titles.

I like music, so I include a YouTube music video with each jour­nal entry.

Unfor­tu­nately a recent server move mys­te­ri­ously caused the removal of the YouTube embed code, so most of the pre-2013 stuff is now video-less.