Health & Fitness Hobonichi Weeks Set Up

August 9, 2020

One unexpected upside of 2020 has been it’s given me the opportunity to really focus on my fitness.

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I’ve been trying to lose a bit of weight for well over a year. I made some good progress at the start of last year and then undid it all with a holiday. You know what it’s like. There’s always some excuse. I started 2020 with a bit of a fresh start and made some progress. Then Covid happened and I’ve now been working from home since mid March.

Compared to a lot of people, I’ve been really lucky. I already have an office and a desk, so I’ve not had to work on a dining table or sofa for months. I’m also fortunate to not be cramped in a house or flat with other people in the same boat. While my commute to work was only ten minutes when I did work in an office, I’ve still managed to save so much time each week that I wasn’t expecting.

No more needing to get ready for work (no full faces of make up for me!)
Minimal ironing (no more work shirts every day)
Sitting down to work at 9am, instead of getting into work 45 minutes early to secure a decent parking space and desk (I hate hot desking)

I probably have around 1.5 hours a day extra just from working from home. So, what have I done with that extra time?

Actually looked after myself.

Exercising daily
Lunch time walks to clear my head and get away from my desk
Eating better (I pretty much have a salad every day now, as nipping to the shops for extra fresh food is so much easier now)
Focused on my skincare (and my skin has thanked me for cutting down on the make up)

My Hobonichi Weeks has really helped me to keep my focus on this over the past few months.

I’ve been using my Cousin for all my normal planning, so aside from my budget plan, the Weeks has been a bit unloved. So, I spent a few weeks perfecting the layout, but now have something that really helps keep me on track with the result that last week I hit my (first) goal weight – the weight I’ve been trying to get to for over a year.

Now, as I focus on my second (and last) goal weight, I thought it would be a good time to share my set up, and the planned improvements for it in the coming weeks.

This isn’t the first time I’ve tried to use a Weeks for health and fitness.

I think that experiment (that I didn’t keep up with) really helped shape the set up this time.

At the moment, I’m not using the two yearly overview pages. I don’t want to try and find a use for them just for the sake of it. With any secondary planner it’s really important to only set up parts you know you’ll keep up with, and are of a benefit. I’ve learnt this the hard way.

Previously, I’ve used the yearly overview to track weight but I have an alternative way now that I’ll share later that is much more visual.

The monthly pages also haven’t really been used, but I have an idea for September that I’m going to try out.

I have been using another Weeks for meal planning and creating food shopping lists, but for 2021 I don’t want two Weeks. I want to try and keep everything in one book.

Instead, I’m going to try and use the monthly pages for meal planning.

On the left hand side bar I’m going to list out my basics, that I buy every week. I’ll then plan out the three meals of the day on each of the daily boxes. From there I’ll create my shopping list on my phone (I use the Sainsburys Smart Shop app – you use this to actually scan and pay for your shopping but it also has a shopping list function).

Hopefully this works, so I can continue it through to 2021.

The weekly pages are the hub of everything.

This gets left open on my desk, next to my Cousin. Leaving it open, so I see it all day, really helps keep my focus.

The first spread I tried combined the meal planning I’d been doing in my other Weeks with the things I wanted to track – exercise, calories, water intake and weight.

This worked quite well, and I started looking at stamps that would allow me to set up this kind of layout in a nicer way.

These stamps are from Doodlestamp*, a UK based store. There’s not that many UK based planner stamp shops, so this was a nice find.

Stamping has never been a strong point for me, so I’m hoping I’ll get better over time. In terms of ink, I’ve been using StazOn*, as it’s one of the best ink brands, in my opinion. It works well with the Tomoe River paper of the Hobonichi, with no bleed.

I’ve said before that I’m not a massive fan on Mildliners*. However, I’ve found the tip end is perfect for filling in the water stamp. This pen now permanently lives in the cover, along with my Platinum Preppy*.

Around this time I started using the Smart Shop app, so I started writing my shopping list on my phone in the app and didn’t need it on the weekly pages.

So the goals I’d started adding to the weekly spread, became more of a focus.

I then started to pretty up the spreads a bit, adding some washi and stickers.

During June, I started using tret and so needed to keep a close eye on when I was using various strong skincare ingredients for the first few weeks, to ensure I didn’t have a reaction to anything. I realised these weekly pages would be perfect for a little skincare tracker.

From mid July I also started tracking my total cycling and running distance each week, because I signed up to a work competition. In teams, we had to try and cycle and run the most each week over seven weeks, all while raising money for the Samaritans. Not only did my team win, but we also raised over £1000 for the Samaritans!

The final step of my planning progression was to start looking at my macros each week.

I knew I was close to hitting my first goal weight and that when that happened I’d look to bring weights back into my workout regime. So, ensuring my protein intake was good enough was something I’d not really been focusing on, but knew I’d need to going forward.

I also released some new icon stickers, which fit perfectly in the weeks to track the different exercises I’d hopefully be doing once the cycling competition was over.

These little stickers are also deliberately credit card sized, so they can fit in adhesive pockets for easy access.

The final thing I’ve added is just some trackers. Even though I have the exercise logged on the left hand side, I like to see visually how many days I’ve gone for a walk, cycled, or done weights.

Finally, while I write down my weight each day, I wanted somewhere to visually see my progress.

I hit upon creating a page in the notes section, where I could track my lowest weight each week, so I could turn it into a graph that would hopefully show a nice downwards trend. This is a great page to look at to remind myself how much I’ve achieved in just a couple of months.

I love this new set up.

I’m probably going to keep tweaking for the rest of the year, so I can start 2021 with a really nice, strong planner set up. By then, hopefully the focus should be maintaining my goal weight, and building muscle.