Tag Archives: planning

Not Perfect This Month (or Challenged With The Monthly Challenge)

My August monthly challenge in my Spark Planner was to practice mindful eating. This is something I’ve read about in the recovery books I’ve been reading and it sounded like the perfect challenge for me to try. I know that when I’m not eating correctly, I am eating mindlessly. So mindful eating seemed like the ideal thing to work on.

I’ll admit that this challenge was not 100% successful like all the past ones were. I knew this was going to happen eventually but it doesn’t make it easier on me. I like to be perfect and I know that it can’t always happen. Ironically, the recovery book I was reading for most of August did discuss perfectionism and the relationship between that and eating disorders so that did help me a bit. I know that being perfect is part of the reason why recovery is tough for me to achieve and that’s why I’m glad I struggled with this challenge.

I set an alarm to go off every day around 6pm to remind me to practice mindfulness before dinner. I don’t always eat at 6pm, but I usually don’t eat before then so it seemed like a good time to have the alarm go off. I could always ask it to go off again later to remind me to be mindful when it was closer to when I would be eating. The thing was, sometimes I’d remember and sometimes I’d forget even with the alarm. And sometimes I’d remember once I started eating and then the perfectionist in me said it was too late and I couldn’t practice mindfulness mid-meal.

I was getting better toward the end of the month, but it still wasn’t what I was hoping for. I really thought I could jump in headfirst like I have with all my other challenges and it would come easily to me as a new habit. I’m not sure why this one was difficult, but it was and it’s something I have to accept. I know that when things get hard for me I sometimes will just give up and think it’s not for me, but I’m not doing this now. I’m going to continue to try to practice mindfulness and hopefully one day it will be just as easy as remembering to track food, weigh in, read my recovery books, and all the other challenges I’ve done.

Since the August challenge ended up being tough for me, I’ve decided to pick another tough one for me for September. I’ve been trying to get into yoga more often lately. I know it’s good for me and my hips and it will also help me with my meditation and mindfulness eating. I’ve tried to set weekly goals to do yoga once a week, but it’s too easy to keep putting it off until the week is over and I missed the goal. So I’m setting a yoga challenge for September.

As much as I’d like to say that I want to do one online yoga class (I have an app on my iPad that I like), I know that it is not something that is likely to be done and the perfectionist in me will give up if I forget too often. So I’m setting the challenge to be a small one that I can hopefully build up over time.

This time, for my monthly challenge, I’d like to do at least 1 yoga pose a day. This is totally doable for me and even if it is bedtime and I’ve forgotten to do it I still will be able to do so. One pose a day isn’t a lot, but I think that it may help me to build my way up to having a more regular yoga practice and I’m guessing that on several of the days I will do a short class from the app instead of just one pose.

As the year is winding down, I have just a few more monthly challenges to go for 2016. I have ever intention of getting a Spark Planner for next year so I know the challenges are going to continue. And since I’ve had my first “failure” at a perfect monthly challenge, I think now I will be more open to doing challenges that may seem impossible because I won’t be as scared of failure as I was before.

Reflection on April’s Challenge (and Looking At May’s)

I’ve been keeping up with the monthly challenges with my Spark Planner. Even though I do weekly and monthly goals in the planner, the monthly challenges are nice because they are something I want to do every day and for each of them (100% accurate food tracking, daily gratitude lists, and no ordering delivery food), I’ve been able to maintain those habits since then. I’m sure that eventually I will not be doing everything 100% perfect, but it’s nice to know that I’ve added some great daily habits into my life that I’m keeping up.

For April’s challenge, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do but I eventually settled on doing daily weigh-ins. I have such a love/hate relationship with my scale and tracking weight can be so emotional for me because it’s a black and white status. If I gained 6 pounds because I ate something really salty, it upset me and any weight tracking things I used made it look so horrible.

So once I knew that I would have this as my challenge, I looked for a new way to track my weight. Weighing in every day is great, but if I don’t keep records then there is no point of doing it. After searching in the app store, I came across Happy Scale. You still track your weight similar to any other app, but in the tracking it shows trends versus just the current number. So if you are overall down 10 pounds but you happen to gain a pound, it will still have a line headed down. It also shows you what you will weigh by a certain time based on the trend that you are currently on. This app really helped me to focus on the overall view and not just pinpointing this particular moment.

As far as my monthly challenge goes, I wasn’t 100% this time. I didn’t bring my scale with me to Santa Barbara, so on Sunday and Monday that week I didn’t weigh in. But every single day beyond those I weighed in (I set an alarm to remind myself but I didn’t really need it). I’m fine that it wasn’t 100%, and now I’m trying to figure out how I want to continue in the future. I don’t know if I love the idea of daily weigh-ins, but I don’t know if weekly ones are good enough if I’m tracking a trend. I’m going to play with the frequency of the weigh-ins and I feel really confident that I will find a happy medium.

For my May challenge, I decided to change things up a bit. Most of my challenges have been related to my health or eating disorder recovery. I love that I’m making great strides in that, but I also want to improve other aspects of my life. And one thing that I feel has been falling behind is my acting career. I’ve had some great things so far this year with the short film I helped a friend with and the new short film that I’ll be starring in (don’t forget to donate to our Kickstarter!).

But I know there is so much more that I can do. And I can’t think that my agents will do 100% of the work for me. I need to be proactive and work on finding great parts to audition for as well. So for May, I’ve set my challenge to search the various self-submission acting sites every single day. I can’t guarantee that every day I will submit myself for something because there isn’t always something that matches me. But every day I will check to make sure. I used to be really great at doing this, but lately I’ve been slacking.

I’ve set an alarm to go off every single day to remind me to look on the self-submission sites. It does come in handy to have the alarm because it’s so easy to forget. But this way my phone (and computer) will keep reminding me until I click that the task is complete. So far, it’s been pretty easy to remember to self-submit but I know there will be days that I completely forget until the alarm goes off. But that’s exactly why I have the alarm and there’s no shame in needing to be reminded to do something.

Hopefully out of doing self-submissions checks every day, I’ll get some more auditions this month. Getting auditions isn’t something I can control, so I’m not focusing on the results (just the action). But having results would be awesome and I know that every opportunity I have to audition is another day that I get to live my dream and be closer to my dream career.

March Recap (or I Almost Hit All My Goals)

Now that March is done, I wanted to recap my goals I set for the month and how I did on my monthly challenge. I’ve been loving the goal setting work that I can do in my Spark Planner and it really has helped me to break down my goals into nice chunks so they don’t seem overwhelming!

First of all, my monthly challenge for March was to not get any delivery food at all. I don’t need to spend the money on it (and it’s not the cheap way to eat) and I know that I overeat and consume too many calories when I get delivery food. While there were a couple of times where I was feeling really lazy and just wanted to get something ordered in so I didn’t have to cook, I’m happy to share that I did not get any delivery food for the month.

I did go out to eat and sometimes got food to bring home, but that is a much more controllable amount of food and there are no minimums I have to meet in order to order. I’ve gone a month or so without delivery food in the past, but it’s never really been a conscious effort before. This time I had a reason to do it and a reason I wanted to prove to myself that I could do it. I know that it’s not reasonable to say I will never get delivery food again (I do always get Chinese food delivered for Christmas), but I really do want to keep this new habit up and extremely limit how often I order in. I’m not sure what I want to limit it to, but I think once a month max seems like a good goal. I’ll have to see how it goes as time goes on, but I’m glad I set this goal for myself so I could prove that it’s not difficult and a lifestyle that I can maintain.

As for the rest of the goals I set for March, I did ok. I got all the workouts in for the month that I wanted to. I did try a new yoga app I have on my iPad (and I’m going to keep doing that). I worked on my budget and reevaluated things and figured out where I can save and where I can avoid spending. And I went on a ton of fun adventures with my friends.

The ones that I didn’t quite get done are having a home cooked meal every week. I did that for 4 of the 5 weeks this month. That’s not bad, but I know I could have done it that one week I didn’t and it frustrates me that I wasn’t able to motivate myself enough to do it. It does help that I’m keeping my house stocked with easy to put together things so I can eat those and not get delivery food. But microwaving something isn’t home cooking. And I had a goal to read one eating disorder book this month. I read about half of one book and the first few chapters of another. But there was always another book that distracted me and I didn’t finish the ones I set a goal to. This isn’t horrible, but I want to finish at least one of those books soon.

I’ve also spent the past few days thinking about the goals I want to set for April. I know that I have a certain number of workouts I want to get done, I want to do the home cooked meal once a week again, and I want to not order delivery food for the month. Those I think will be easy enough to do and I almost feel silly for writing them down because I see them as things that I will automatically do.

As far as the goals that are a bit more of a stretch for me, I’m still working on them and hope to have them figured out in the next day or so. I want to set a goal for a certain number of iPad yoga classes this month, but I don’t know how many I want to do. I also want to set a goal of something related to going out and having fun, but I’m not sure how I want to phrase it.

And the hardest thing for me to figure out is what my month-long challenge for April will be. I think it’s so difficult for me because each month I’ve had 100% success with my challenges. It doesn’t need to be that way (and the 30 days of completion don’t have to all be in a single month), but I’m really stuck in that mindset.

One of the ideas I thinking about has to do with weighing myself every day. I’ve rarely weighed myself every day. It can drive me crazy with the little fluctuations that everyone has. But I haven’t been doing so great with weighing myself once a week, so it could be a long time between weighing myself and I don’t want to avoid it. I realized that this month, I went over 3 weeks between weighing myself and I was starting to feel a bit panicky. I had no idea if my weight was up a bunch or down a bunch and I was terrified that I was going to be way up because I was avoiding reality. I was up by about 6 pounds, so it wasn’t that horrible but I know that I don’t want to repeat that gap between my weigh-ins.

I am a bit afraid that if I weigh myself every day I will get very obsessive with it, but maybe that fear is the exact reason why I need to set this as my challenge. I don’t have any other challenge ideas in mind right now, and if I don’t have anything else by this weekend I’ll probably set the weighing one as my challenge. But I’m not 100% ready to write it down just yet.

I hope that you guys are enjoying these monthly recaps as much as I’ve enjoyed sharing them. I think it’s so important to set goals and before this year I really only focused on annual ones. Now that I have weekly and monthly ones, I’m realizing how much I was skipping out on before and I almost feel like I am making up for lost time now.

Monthly Recap Update (or My New Habits)

I’m 1/6 of the way through the year and I’m still totally loving my Spark Planner and using it every day! I’ve been using almost every single feature of it (I’m still not 100% sure what to do with the monthly calendar, but I’m working on it) and it’s made a huge difference in my life!

I’m pretty much using most of the sections of the planner as they are intended. I use the weekly goal setting for weekly goals, monthly goal setting for monthly goals, and monthly challenges for monthly challenges. I love how I’ve been accomplishing so many of the weekly and monthly goals I’ve been setting. Some of my goals are easy to achieve (like how many workouts I’ll do that week), but I always set a couple of challenging ones too. I’ve been working on going to bed earlier and I’m setting weekly goals to slowly do that. I’m setting a goal to go to bed 5-10 minutes earlier each week. So far, I’m in bed 45 minutes earlier than before and I’d like to work to maybe 10-15 minutes earlier than I have it now.

Even though most of the features are being used exactly how they are set up, I’m still playing around with the weekly calendar and love what I’ve got going so far. I’ve mentioned this before, but I’m using the first of the 3 sections on the weekly planner as my blog planner. This has been so helpful for me and it’s really helping me plan out posts way in advance (for example, I’ve got a couple of things already planned for the end of this month in the works). This also allows me to see when I don’t have something fun to write about yet so I can work on what I want to write about that day.

The bottom section of the weekly planner relates to what I had set to be my 30 day challenge for last month. I’m using that section every night to write at least 5 things that I’m grateful for. There are a lot of repeating things on that list, but it’s a nice thing to do at the end of the day to reflect on what I’ve done and to keep myself in a positive mindset. I’m finding that even on days that I struggle to find 5 things to be grateful for, I can always figure out something. And that reminds me that even on my worst days there are still good things.

I started to do this in January but I really wanted to make sure I continued doing this last month. I never missed a day (I did forget to write once but I did it immediately the next morning) and now I have reminders set to go off to remind me to do my daily gratitude, weekly goal setting, and monthly goal setting. I’m making sure that I stay on top of things.

I’m not even letting myself slack off when I’m on vacation. I remembered to bring my planner with me when I went to Sacramento and worked on my goals in my hotel room at the end of each night.

Spark Planner

I’ve just set up my 30 day challenge for this month. My goal is to not order delivery food for 30 days. I’ve done it before so I know it’s not impossible, but I’ve gotten into a bad habit of getting delivery food when I’m tired. I don’t need to spend the money (especially since delivery food has a minimum for an order) and I definitely don’t need the calories. I’m not saying that I won’t go out to eat at all, but I won’t be getting delivery food. If I want something from a restaurant, I’m going to have to go there to get it (I would rather not do take-out either, but sometimes I like to get something yummy but need to eat at home so I’ll allow that in my challenge).

What I’m loving about these monthly challenges is that they are starting to turn into habits. I’m still keeping up my January monthly challenge of 100% food tracking (I’m pretty much only using Recovery Record now). And I can totally see myself keeping up my nightly gratitude notes. I don’t think that giving up delivery food will be a permanent change, but I’d love it if I could keep delivery food to a minimum.

It’s so funny that for years I was trying to figure out how to do almost everything digitally and not have a paper planner or tracker anymore. I had finally gotten everything to that point and then started using my Spark Planner. It’s not a planner in the same way that my planners in the past have been, so maybe that’s why I never realized how great it would be to write some things down to track and that I would be able to accomplish more goals each month than I ever expected.

Lack Of Planning (or No Home Cooking This Week)

After doing so well with cooking recently, this past week was a serious let down for me. I had ever intention of trying to do some real cooking this week, but that never happened.

Part of it is due to my schedule. I got back late on Monday night from my trip. And while I did go to the grocery store, I wasn’t going to cook at 9pm for the week. Tuesday after work I had my WIF meeting. Wednesday after work was my workout. And while I could have cooked after getting home from my workout, I wasn’t feeling up for cooking after taking over an hour to get home. Thursday I had a friend at my house after work and I didn’t want to be rude and cook while they were here. And tonight I’m supposed to be meeting a friend for dinner. It’s just not my week to have free time after work to prepare and cook meals.

I guess there were little places in my schedule that I could have cooked, but I don’t think I’m really the person to cook a meal that I don’t need to eat that night and to use all of it as leftovers. I’m still easing my way back into cooking and I think knowing that what I’m making is going to be my meal is more normal to me than just cooking and storing everything immediately. When I cook, I do get hungry (even if I just ate). So knowing that I will be eating that meal when it’s done is a way to stop the cravings to want to snack while I’m cooking.

Just because I’m not cooking doesn’t mean I’m eating like crap. I’m doing my lazy version of cooking with the easy to prepare things that I bought at the grocery store on Monday night. These aren’t the most balanced meals and I’m sure I could do better, but sometimes I need something easy like a waffle with peanut butter and a banana so I don’t get really hungry and order delivery food (which is almost never the good option). I’m finding better things to keep in my house to use as easy meals so I don’t feel like there’s nothing in my house to eat. A lot of these things are frozen, but I think that frozen food doesn’t have to be bad food. Trader Joes sells lots of good frozen veggie options and I love their frozen prepared brown rice. Those plus a protein (like the frozen cowboy burgers) are great meals that I can put together in minutes.

I’m lucky that breakfast is pretty easy for me, and dinner is easy enough (but I know it could be better). The place that I’m struggling is lunch. I used to miss lunch a lot because I would get distracted by work and forget (never good before having an after work workout), but I have an app that alerts me to eat by 1pm now. So at least I’m not forgetting anymore. But I’m still struggling about what to eat because it needs to be easy enough to prepare because I don’t want to step away from work for too long but also needs to be easy to eat since I have to take bites between customers if someone calls or starts an online chat.

I’m working on meal planning (but not looking at bulk cooking as the plan) right now. I know that if I plan things out better, I can grocery shop better (and probably spend less money) and I won’t have the “what can I eat” feeling at mealtime. While I had a decent plan going last year on the cleanse, I think that it worked for me so well because the lack of variety. I need more variety than what I had then, but too much variety is too overwhelming and too expensive. The balance is tough to find, but I’m working on it.

I know this weekend will not be including cooking because I’ll be out-of-town again, but I’m hoping after getting back from that trip I can get back into my groove and continue to enjoy lots of healthy, delicious, and easy meals that I cooked myself.

How My Goal Setting Is Going (or A Spark Planner Update)

I’ve officially been using my Spark Planner for a full month now and I have to say that I’m loving what I’m getting done with it! While I still use my phone/computer for my scheduling (things overlap and change too often to handwrite everything), I’m using the goal setting sections of the Spark Planner and finding my own ways to customize it to work for me the best that I can. So I figured that a month in would be a great time to do an update!

First of all, I’m still using the weekly calendar feature for blog scheduling. Since the weekly planner has 3 sections for each weekday (morning/noon/night), I use the morning section to write what I want to write about here for that day. It’s so helpful for my Monday posts about Orangetheory because now I write down what I did for each workout after I get home so I don’t forget about the workout (I hope that you’ve noticed that change on here!). It also helps me see where I’m missing an idea or where I have too many posts scheduled for that week so I need to move something to the next week. I’m hoping to make Finding My Inner Bombshell bigger and better this year and planning out my posts will be a big part of that!

For the beginning of January, I didn’t really do much else with the weekly planning section. I sometimes put a to-do list in the noon section so I had it there to check off, but that’s not a daily thing. Then, about a week ago I saw something about making gratitude lists each day to help stay in a positive mindset. So I decided to put a list of at least 5 things I’m grateful for in the night section of the weekly planner now. I’m loving this routine but I need to create an alarm for my phone to remind me to do this in the evening (sometimes I get in bed and realize I forgot to do it, so I have to get up and write them out quickly). I’ve actually made my gratitude lists my 29 day challenge for February!

Speaking of the monthly challenge, I’m so excited to share that I was very successful in my 31 day challenge for January! I decided to challenge myself to do 100% accurate food tracking for the month and I did it! This may be the first time that I did 100% tracking for an entire month and I know that I will be able to keep it up now. The big change I found while doing this challenge is that I’m not loving My Fitness Pal as much as I have in the past.

While I have loved seeing the exact numbers for my calories and knowing I’m under my calorie goal, that also created anxiety when I was over my calorie goal. So I stopped tracking on days where I was going over or when I had a binge. I didn’t want to see what I had done and the number of calories I ate. And that was creating avoidance for me. So I’ve been using Recovery Record now and I love it! There are no numbers on the tracker. You just write what you wrote and how you feel. That’s all. And there are meal reminders so even though I don’t always remember to eat lunch, I at least have the alert that I should eat then.

I’m also loving the monthly/weekly goal setting pages. I don’t hit all my goals at the time, but it gives me something to work toward and each day I look at what the goals are so I can make sure that I’m on track to check off as many of them as I can. It also has made me think more about what goals I want to track and what is really important to me. I never thought that maybe I had some bad goals in mind, but I’m now reconsidering some of them (don’t worry, I’m happy with my 2016 goals I announced on here).

I’m still not sure what I want to do with the monthly calendar or if there is something I want to do regularly with the noon section of the weekly planning pages, but the beauty of this planner is that there isn’t something that I feel has to be there. It’s freeform and I can do what I want. I’m thinking about some ideas with meal planning or maybe workout tracking. I’ve been seeing some awesome inspiration on the Spark Planner instagram page. I know I’ll think of something soon and then that will be what I keep up for whatever time remains in the year.

No matter what else I do with my Spark Planner, I can’t believe how much this planner has influenced and changed my life in the first month. I’m so excited to see how amazing it helps to make my year and how much I’ll be able to get done.

Balancing My Workouts (or Doing Some Planning)

It was another week of highs and lows in my workouts. I had to do some real thinking about how I can continue this lifestyle long-term and I think I’ve found some great ideas to help me.

Monday was a bit of an odd day for me. I went to an afternoon workout instead of a morning one because of filming my friend’s project. I do afternoon workouts most days, so it wasn’t too bad. But it seemed to throw my day off a bit and I had trouble with figuring out when I should eat because I ate breakfast so early and didn’t want to eat lunch too late and get sick in my workout. But I managed to figure out something that almost worked for me (I didn’t eat enough before my workout so I was getting a bit light-headed).

Monday was a run/row day (those really are my favorites) and because the run segments were short enough, I was able to do my push paces at 3.6 miles per hour for the entire class. I’m hoping that I can get my base pace up to 3.5 miles an hour, but that’s still a struggle for me. But I’m ok with getting my push paces up. And as I mentioned before, I’m focusing on my speed on the treadmill instead of increasing the incline. I feel like that is making things a bit easier on my hips and calf so I’m happy to continue doing that.

Wednesday was a bit of a tough day for me. I’m not sure if I was getting shin splints again, but my legs didn’t feel right. It wasn’t the same as the usual shin splint pain. It was more toward my ankles and didn’t start until the end of the treadmill segment, so I didn’t stress out about it too much. As soon as I got off the treadmill I focuses on my weight works and was successful in only using 15 pound weights (no 12 pound weights at all that day!). We also ended the day with a 3 minute row and I felt like my form was a bit straighter than it has been in a long time (when I bend my legs on the rower, they go more out like a butterfly than bending like a squat). I did take care of my legs after class, so I didn’t have any pain on Thursday like I have in the past with shin splints.

Friday was a crazy day for me. I wasn’t thinking that it was the start of a holiday weekend and I was late for class for the first time ever! Fortunately, my friend Dani was there and saved me a treadmill. I was only 3 minutes late, but it did throw me off. It was another run/row day, so I was pretty happy about that. I was mainly doing 3.6 miles an hour, but I tried to increase it to 3.7 for the last 30 seconds of each treadmill block. My legs were feeling fine, so that was a relief. And Friday marked the start of the Orangetheory weight loss challenge so I’m glad I got the challenge off to a good start with a great workout.

I also added in a 4th workout on Saturday. And this is where I’ve made a decision that I think will help me out. While I don’t love using the bike instead of the treadmill, I’m terrified of overdoing it on the treadmill. So I’ve decided that on weeks that I do 4 workouts, I’m going to do that 4th workout on the bike (or the 1st workout of the week on the bike if that’s on a Sunday). It’s hopefully going to help my hips take a bit of a break without having to take a break completely with the workout. So on Saturday this past week, I was on the bike. I wasn’t able to get my heart rate up as high as I’d like, but I’m wondering if that may be because of how I’m hunched over on the bike and how the heart rate monitor fits in that position. But I was pedaling a lot faster than I have in the past and that made me very happy.

My weight work on Saturday was great. I was doing deadlifts with 25 pound weights and my bicep work with 15 pound weights (although I’m thinking now that I could have done 20 pounds weights). I also had some great improvement on my form on the work on the TRX straps. I don’t know what clicked for me this week with form, but there was something that just made everything easier to do so I could push myself even more than I was before.

I’m not sure when my next week of 4 workouts will be (maybe in 2 weeks), but I’m liking the idea of taking a bit of a break with that 4th workout being on the bike. Knowing that is my plan, I might start doing more 4 workout weeks if my schedule allows. I’m hoping that one day, that will be what my normal weeks will be like. But for now, I’m happy with only sometimes doing that 4th workout.

My Spark Planner (or Being A Little Low-Tech This Year)

I’m pretty big with using technology to make my life easier. I love having my calendar sync between any devices I use and I can color code it as much as I want. It’s pretty helpful when I have a lot of overlapping events in my life. I would possibly be lost without my phone calendar and the alerts it gives me (especially the 24 hour alerts before a Southwest flight so I can check in).

But toward the end of the year, a bunch of friends were posting about their new paper planners for 2016. Because of my changing schedule (and the overlapping issues), I don’t really see myself using a paper planner. It would be too messy for me to feel ok using it. But as I started to look into the planners that some of my friends were getting, I was intrigued by the other things that the planners offered.

So many planners now are designed to be more than just a schedule. They can be goal focused and I loved that idea! I looked around at various planners, and the one that seemed best for my life was the Spark Planner. So I put an order in and got it just before the new year! I’ve been using it for a little more than a week, and I wanted to share with you all about how much I’m loving it (and no, they didn’t pay me to say this)!

Like I said, my plan for my planner was not to be a scheduling tool. That’s not something that I would want to use it for, but if you wanted to do that, there are plenty of ways to plan in it. But I’m going to focus on what I use my planner for.

First of all, I love that it’s a plain planner! If I want to decorate it, I can. But I love that it’s not super cutesy or obvious.

Spark Planner

Mine lives on my desk and it goes nicely with all the other things I have as desk accessories and looks professional if I did have it in my bag and took it out to use in public.

There are planner pages for each week. They are broken down by morning, noon, and night but you can use it for anything you want. They aren’t broken down by hour (I would hate it if it was) so things can be much more freeform. I’m currently using the weekly pages to do my blog planning because I’ve been blog planning on post-its in the past and that’s not efficient. This way, I can not only plan my posts each day, I can take notes on what I want to write about (which is very helpful in my workout recaps).

Blog Planning

I have decided what to do with the other blocks of time, but I might use them for just random notes or I might think of something later that fits perfectly. But that’s why I love the freeform of the planner pages!

The main focus on my Spark Planner for me is the goal setting pages. They have so many goal pages and I’m loving them all!

2016 Themes

I used the 2016 goal setting pages to help me plan my goals for the year as well as my word of the year. I haven’t started filling in the achievements page yet, but I’m excited to document all the great things I accomplish this year! I’m really using this section as a companion to the goal setting that I do on here, and I like having it written down so I don’t have to search my blog to see the specifics of goals I’ve set for the year.

Monthly Goals

The next thing I’m loving are the monthly challenges! My current challenge for this month is to accurately track my food every day. I’m still toying with which app I want to track my food with, but this is a great way to be accountable even if I’m working on my challenge in two different places. There is also a monthly goals page, and I’m using that as a breakdown for what I need to do this month to be on track for my year goal.

Weekly Goals

Finally, there are weekly goal pages. I’ve been using these for goals that aren’t necessarily specific to my monthly/annual goals. I’ve been using them as more of a weekly to-do list. I’ve got things on it like to book flights for upcoming trips, do things related to the blog, or appointments that I need to set. At the bottom of the weekly goal pages, there is a section to reflect back at the end of the week. You are supposed to review all of your goals and celebrate what you were able to get done.

Besides all the goal setting stuff, there are also prompts to help you reflect on goals and ideas that you want to work on. And there is a lot of free space to doodle, make lists, or do anything you want.

I’m sure that some people use the Spark Planner in a much more regulated way, but I’m so happy with the freeform and lack of time constraints that I’m finding in my planner. I know that over the year I will find new ways that this planner will help me in my life, but for now I’m loving how it is helping me work toward each of my goals.

If you want to get your own Spark Planner (and I highly recommend you do if you want to work on goals this year), you can pre-order the ones that will be released in March. And if you want to get a free PDF of the Spark Planner, if you share the website on social media and then email them a screenshot, they will send you the PDF!

Whether or not you chose to buy a Spark Planner, I think that having a planner that helps you work toward your goals is such a wonderful gift to have. And I know that I will be more successful in my goals this year because of all the tracking I’m doing!

Fitting In My Workouts (or Planning For The End Of The Year)

I had a reality check this past week when I was seeing how many workouts I had done so far in 2015. While I was on track for a long time to hit my workout goal, only doing 3 workouts in a week for a while due to my calf injury plus missing a week of workouts when I was sick really messed up my plan.

So before this past week started, I planned out some workouts in the app that I’ve been using to track my classes. I got it figured out for the rest of the year how I can hit my goal.

Workout planning

It’s not that crazy of a plan, but of course the next day I realized that my plan wasn’t going to work the way I wanted it to, so I’m thinking things through a bit more. But it helped me realize that I do need to push it a bit the next few weeks and my goal is going to be a stretch but it’s totally realistic.

My plan for this past week was originally to do 5 workouts and then do 2 7am workouts this week before leaving for Thanksgiving. Due to scheduling issues, I wasn’t able to do my 5 workouts and I’ve moved my workouts around this week too. But as long as I add in another workout in December I should be ok.

This past week, I worked out Sunday/Monday/Wednesday/Friday. I’m glad I changed my plans from working out 5 times because these workouts were pretty intense.

2 days only had 2 blocks each. That means that I spent pretty much 30 minutes on the treadmill straight and then did 30 minutes on the floor without a block. And I did that twice. It’s been a while since we have had workouts that didn’t switch between blocks. It’s nice to have that challenge, but when we switch between blocks it feels better on my hips and it makes the time go by faster for me. But I know I need to push myself and having these long blocks gives me that chance (but I’m glad that this doesn’t happen more often).

With those long block days, my floor work suffered a bit. I was pretty exhausted so I didn’t push myself as much as I could (or should) with the weights. But I’m still using heavier weights than I was at the beginning of the year.

While my weight work wasn’t as good as I know it can be, I had a big improvement in my pushups. Pushups have always been hit or miss with me. Sometimes they do hurt my hips. And ever since I tore my calf I had to stop doing them on my toes because that strained my muscle too much. So instead of trying to get back on my toes I’ve been focusing my form when I do pushups on my knees. And I’m getting some good muscle fatigue now while I’m doing modified pushups. And I even was able to do pushups with the bosu ball as part of ultimate burpees. That made me pretty happy.

My treadmill work is still a struggle too. It’s both a physical and a mental struggle. I do have my pain from time to time, but I’m also terrified that my calf still isn’t fully healed and if I push it too much I’ll injure myself again. So I’m trying to be easy on myself and not stress out that I’m still not where I thought I’d be. I’m hoping that I can increase my treadmill speed at the beginning of the new year, but I’m not going to hurt myself over that goal.

This week is going to be a short workout week for me due to Thanksgiving, but I’ll be getting my 3 workouts in for sure (including my new tradition of a workout on Thanksgiving morning)!

Adding Variety (or Trying To Be Adventurous With My Food)

I’ve talked about my food rut before. I pretty much eat the same few things every single day. I have 2 or 3 different things that I will make for breakfast, lunch is pretty much always a peanut butter and jelly sandwich with some fruit, and dinner is some sort of salad or frozen entree.

Some of this food rut is due to my OCD and other parts of it are due to laziness. I’m not a huge cook, and especially during the summer when it’s so hot I don’t want to use any appliances in my house.

But within my few things I eat each day, I’m trying to change up some individual items.

For breakfast, instead of eating plain greek yogurt, I’m adding some granola that has flaxseed in it (I actually don’t mind the taste of flaxseed). That might not seem like a huge change, but it is for me. And I’m noticing that I’m not as hungry when lunchtime comes when I do add in the granola.

Dinner is still a tough one for me. 3 nights a week I’m getting home from Orangetheory at dinnertime and I’m starving. I need something to eat quickly. So I’ve been eating salads from Subway (no dressing just vinegar) or frozen entrees from Trader Joes (I’m loving the cod dinner right now). I’m working on trying to pre-make salads at home, but it seems like the veggies go bad before I use them up. So spending a little money to get a salad made isn’t too horrible. I’m also looking into some no-cook or slow cooker only recipes that freeze well. It’s tough when you cook and it makes 4 or 6 servings. I’m ok with leftovers the next day, but I don’t want to eat it multiple days in a row. So I need something that I can freeze.

My latest attempt at adding variety to my diet was changing up the fruit I eat at lunch. Most of the time I eat a banana and occasionally I’ll have an apple, but that’s pretty much it for now. I’m not a picky eater, I just am set in my ways.

So the last time I went to Trader Joes, I walked around trying to find another fruit that looked good to me. I saw some peaches that looked nice so I got them.

A day after I purchased the peaches, the mass recall of fruit (including peaches from Trader Joes) happen. And yes, I double checked everything and the container of peaches that I purchased is on the recall list.

I haven’t returned my peaches yet (maybe I’ll do that tomorrow), but now I’m definitely not eating them.

I’m trying to not see this as a sign that I shouldn’t change things up. It’s just dumb luck.

But it probably will be another week or so before I end up trying another fruit for lunch time. For now, I’m back to my bananas.