If you made a New Year’s resolution to get fit and healthy then a diet and exercise journal is a good way to go. Tracking your diet and exercise daily will help you stay on track and, over time, it will show you how far you have progressed. To help you out, we have created a handy Excel worksheet that you can download and use to track your progress.
We’ll show you how to find this file and how to use it. We’ve also found some useful websites to help you locate the food and exercise information that you may need to complete the worksheet.
Open your browser and visit this link to download the Excel file: http://www2.e-thisisit.com/files/diet_and_exercise_journal.xlsx. If you are prompted to open or save the worksheet select Open and it will download and open in Excel. If you don’t see this prompt, once the file has downloaded, press Control + J to view your downloads and double click the file to open it in Excel.
You can track your goals, food consumption and exercise using this worksheet. Start by familiarizing yourself with its layout. The Weight Tracker sheet shows a summary of your weight loss goals for a period of 3 months. The monthly Diet tabs are used to enter food data and the Monthly Exercise tabs are used for to track your exercise data.
Start on the Weight Tracker tab. Click in cell B2 and type today’s date as the start day for your program – we typed 1-Feb-2015. In cell B3 type your current weight and in cell D3 your target weight. You can then read your target loss and required loss per day for the three month period. Each day type your weight in column C and the chart will update automatically.
Click the appropriate month’s Diet tab – we chose Feb Diet. In cell G1 type your calorie target. If you are unsure what you should be consuming, click the link provided to go to the web where you can enter your personal details and click to see how many calories you should consume.
Now you can enter the day’s food consumption. Select the day of the month from the list in column B. Select the meal from the list in column C and then type a description of the food and the values for the Calories, Carbs, Fat and Protein consumed.
To find information about the calories, carbs, fiber and protein in common foods click the Lookup Calories Online button. Type a description of the food and click to search. If a list of alternatives appears, choose the best fit for the food and you can then read the information from the data provided.
To record exercise click the appropriate month’s Exercise tab and select the day of the month from the dropdown list which appears when you click in a cell in column B. Type a description of the exercise, the duration and the calories burned. To lookup this data online click the Lookup Exercise Online button.
Once you have completed the initial entries you are ready to save the file. Choose File > Save As, type a name for the file and choose a location in which to save it. If you don’t know where to save the file then My Documents is a good choice. Once the file is saved, you can close Excel. In future, you can open the file each day, add the new data and save the file. The file will help you track your progress over time.
