Ready to Slay Your Health and Fitness Goals? Start With a Motivating Nutrition Journal

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Getting fit sounds easy, but it often involves more of a bigger transformation than you might have anticipated. If you’re trying to seriously level up your health and wellness, chances are, you’ve already scored some of the best fitness gear, clothes, and equipment. You have a plan. You know where you’re headed. But do you need a little extra accountability and support to get there?

Personal trainer Michael Hamlin, NSCA, CSCA, says fitness journals can help guarantee long-term success. “A fitness journal helps you set and track your goals,” Hamlin says. “Whether you want to lose weight, gain muscle, gain endurance, or achieve other specific fitness objectives, having a clear record of your progress can be motivating and encouraging.” The science backs him up: Studies show that tracking fitness keeps people focused on achieving their goals.

If you're committed to living a healthier lifestyle in 2024, set yourself up for success by keeping a record of your progress: It'll help you meet your fitness and nutrition goals and let you know how far along you already are on your journey.

While it can be hard to stick with your workout routine, writing down your goals makes you 42% more likely to achieve them, a study conducted at the Dominican University of California found. It can also keep you motivated if you celebrate your wins and progress.

“Documenting your workouts and nutrition makes you more accountable to yourself,” Hamlin notes. “When you see your efforts in writing, you’re less likely to deviate from your plans.”

Bottom line, keeping a wellness journal can give you a sense of consistency and accountability — and keep you from skipping the strength-training class you already signed up for, or from ordering takeout when you have your grain-bowl meals already prepped for the week. Better yet? Pair your journal with a wearable fitness tracker to help you reach your goals.

The Best Nutrition and Fitness Journals

• Best Overall: NewMe Fitness Complete Fitness and Nutrition Journal

• Best for Accountability: Cossac Fitness Log Book and Workout Planner

• Best for Lifting: Workout Log Gym Personalized Training Diary

• Most Holistic Planner: Erin Condren Coiled A5 Daily Wellness Planner

• Gym Training Log: Signature Planner Journals Gym Training Log

What to Consider

Fitness journals come in as many forms and types as daily planners. In addition to considering basics like price, size (do you want to be able to slip it into your bag?), and aesthetics, keep the following in mind to ensure you make the choice best for you:

• Organizing Workouts: If you are most focused on achieving fitness goals, you’ll want to make sure your notebook tracks your workouts and activity levels.

• Meal-Prep Plans: If you invested in making healthier food choices, you’re going to want to look for a journal that allows you to keep a food log and track your water intake. Some also include calorie and macro charts for common food items so you can plan healthier meals.

• Track Progress and Assess Goals: “It’s incredibly hard to see progress throughout your journey, so seeing the tiniest of improvements can be massive,” says Hamlin. “By consistently recording your workouts, nutrition, and how you feel, you can identify patterns that contribute to your progress or setbacks.” Some journals provide space for you to set fitness goals with checklists and health trackers, and record your thoughts on your progress.

How We Selected

When setting out to improve your health and fitness, you need to think about your physical and emotional state.

“Keeping track of how you feel before, during, and after workouts can help you understand your body’s responses and make more mindful choices,” Hamlin says.

We selected notebooks that prioritize taking care of your physical and mental health, using insight from our own long-term fitness journeys, pro recommendations from outlets like Men’s Health and Women’s Health, recommendations from Hamin and other personal trainers, and by reading through thousands of user reviews on Amazon.

Use one of these motivating fitness journals to track your workouts, meals, sleep, water intake, and more, in order to stay motivated throughout the year.

Complete Fitness and Nutrition Journal

If there is one one-size-fits-all fitness journal, this is it! You can track your nutrition, fitness, and even weight loss during your 2-month-plus fitness journey with this book.

“This is one of my top recommendations for fitness-focused clients especially,” says Hamlin. “It is convenient and versatile, and it’s designed for all fitness levels, it enables tracking of health, nutrition, weight, muscle changes, and workouts.

Research has shown that 12 weeks of intense exercise and wholesome nutritional choices is enough time to actually see improvements in your metabolism and potentially lower stress hormones, yet short enough that you won't lose motivation.

With this fitness and nutrition journal, you can log your number of reps, your dietary patterns (follow along with the food guidelines for every macro), and the inches you've dropped off your waistline.

Set goals, track your progress, and celebrate the victories with this journal! We also love that it’s super compact and can easily be tossed into a gym bag.

More: 60 Fitness Gifts That Will Impress Your Most Active Friends

Fitness Log Book and Workout Planner

If you’re great at lofty goals but need to work on following through, this journal will help you get there. Runner's World recommends this straightforward, easy-to-use planner that allows for up to 140 days of fitness logging.

It keeps track of types of exercise, sets, body measurements, dietary preferences, supplements taken, and so much more. It also has pages for goals, and you can set your own deadlines to achieve them, making this a handy tool for fitness accountability.

More than 80% of over 2,940 reviewers give this journal five stars. Reviewers say it works “well for a beginner and for somebody who is more advanced.”

Personalized Training Diary

This is a super journal if optimizing your strength and physical fitness is your focus. This Workout Log Gym journal lets you set up to six fitness goals at the start. Then, track 100 workouts with up to 11 exercises per training session. Stay on top of every aspect of each sweat session with allocated spaces to record your tempo, rest intervals, and cardio efforts.

There are also two pages in which you can record your body weight, body measurements, and personal bests, so you can look back and see how far you’ve come.

Reviewers say the tracking pages are “intuitive and comprehensive,” with plenty of room to “track progress, and note how I’m feeling.”

Coiled A5 Daily Wellness Planner

If processing your journey and meditating on what you’ve done and still need to accomplish is a priority for you, this journal is worth a look. Fitness, after all, isn’t just about what happens in the gym.

This spiral-bound journal offers an uncomplicated way to log all your self-care efforts, from fitness and health goals to sleep, nutrition, and water intake, among others.

With 160 pages filled with health goal spreads, checklists, health trackers, and more, you can easily track your daily habits, review your monthly progress to plan ahead, and add inspiration with colorful stickers.

More than 81% of reviewers give this “budget book” book five stars on Amazon, citing its “great size,” “effective” methods of tracking, and “easy navigation.”

Gym Training Log

We found a great basic workout journal that helps you get specific with your workout goals, whether you plan on working with a personal trainer or not.

There are slots for logging your cardio, the number of reps you complete of your strength-training exercises, and even the amount of water you're drinking per day (which is one of the most important parts of staying fit and healthy).

Reviewers love that there are “individual pages for each day,” with places for “food, water, and workout tracking,”

‘Eat Pretty, Live Well: A Guided Journal for Nourishing Beauty, Inside and Out’ by Jolene Hart, CHC, AADP

If you are focused on the nutritional element of your health journey, this is a great journal to consider. After all, what you’re putting into your body is just as important as how you’re moving your body. Get on track to a healthier mindset and eating habits with this journal, which features goal-setting guidance, fill-in trackers, and diet checklists. This journal monitors up to 40 days of healthy living.

It also includes thought-provoking Q&As and self-reflection questions, along with recipe cards. If you want to become the best version of yourself, this illustrated guide is a great place to start.

The author, it should be noted, is a beauty and health coach certified by the Institute of Integrative Nutrition and the American Association of Drugless Practitioners.

WODBOOK Workout Journal

First things first: WOD stands for “workout of the day” in Crossfit lingo. That said, this Crossfit journal is packed with pages and pages of workout inspo — it includes 30 Girl WODs, 22 Hero WODs, 21 Travel WODs, 10 Run WODs, 47 Benchmark WODs, and more.

“This journal is specifically created for CrossFit enthusiasts,” Hamlin notes. “The templates are great, and it allows you to track your personal records, and assess your progress.”

Track up to 200 personal WODs (that’ll last you 8 months) using templates that include warm-ups and goal setting, strength and skills worked, the workout breakdown, and subjective measurements, such as how much energy you had and how hard a particular session felt for you.

A bonus is that the spiral binding and hard, sturdy cover are purposely durable enough to be toted around the gym with you.

Training for a Healthy Life: A Daily Food and Fitness Journal

If you need reminders of what you’ve accomplished versus your current goals in terms of overall wellness, this journal may be a good fit. This easy-to-use workout journal offers an uncomplicated way to log your efforts both in the gym and the kitchen.

Each entry contains a template to enter your daily goals, meals, which exercises you do and for how long, how much you slept, and how much water you drank — plus, there are slots for noting your mood and which self-care measures you took that day. Weekly check-ins also help you track your overall progress.

Reviewers say it “works well,” and “tracks weight, date, foods, exercise, water, mood, and goals.”

Fitness Journal to Track Gym Progress

If you need accountability, and want a straightforward fitness journal to help you track your progress and goals, this is a great option to consider. This journal provides room for you to layout goals and a plan, track your progress, mark down workouts, and take notes.

There is space to mark dates, and information on stretches, warm-ups, reps, sets, cardio, calories burned, and more. The smooth white paper makes for easy note-taking and the lay-flat style makes it easy to take notes on the fly. There are 136 days worth of tracking, and the premium paper and sturdy cover are beloved for their durability.

Reviewers love this “great, simple workout tracker,” saying it offers “everything they need.”

Leather Fitness Tracker Notebook

If you need rigor and stern reminders, step right up. This journal is a splurge, but well worth the spend if you want a military-style journal to keep you on track. The Omega Project is a training journal that mimics the same system of tracking used by Active Duty Special Operators.

On deployment, the journal is used to log a soldier’s daily and weekly health and fitness and push it to the next level. The O.G. elite military journal was developed by coaches, physical therapists, and nutritionists.

There is space to track your workouts, sleep, water intake, supplements, vitamins, nutrition, alcohol intake, and emotional state. Reviewers “absolutely love it,” calling the journal a “game changer.”

Workout Planner for Daily Fitness Tracking

The straightforward workout log will appeal to task masters who want to deliberately strategize their goals, target dates, and track their progress. You can note up to 6 fitness goals, and record up to 100 workouts with 11 exercises per training session. There is room to note tempo, rest intervals, and cardio.

The journal is lightweight, portable, and a great size for storing in your gym bag. Reviewers love how “intuitive and comprehensive” the fitness tracking pages are, with room to “record workouts, track my progress, and note how I’m feeling. It keeps me motivated and engaged.”

The Dumbbell Home Workout Journal

If you’re laser-focused on optimizing your dumbbell work, this is the fitness journal for you. The 13-week journal and fitness planner requires just dumbbells and is designed to help you track your progress.

The book includes 65 detailed workouts, making it a hybrid personal trainer and workout log book. Each workout focuses on two primary muscle groups, with four exercises per muscle group to record your fitness log. Each workout will take 45+ minutes.

The 365-Day Running Journal

If you love to run, whether you’re a casual weekend jogger or hoping to train for a marathon, this is a great running journal that will help you keep your goals on track. The journal provides space for logging your runs and tracking your progress.

You can list location, time, weather, and distance for runs to analyze and finetune your progress. Inside, there are also 13 essays on motivation, body image, running form, and more.

This journal also emphasizes mental well-being and injury prevention. The author is a sports dietitian, author, and triathlon coach who specializes in endurance sports.

Reviewers say this is a great way to track progress and that it offers “great tips.”

Food Journal Meal Planner

If you need an A-to-Z guide on eating better, and monitoring your progress, this highly regimented health journal will be a boon. This journal is designed to set goals, measure progress, and assess where you are on a monthly basis.

The journal was specifically designed to transform your lifestyle in four months, with a 16-week planner, with pages devoted to tracking food items, and their corresponding caloric, fat, and nutritional content. There is space for every meal of the day, with room to document mood, energy, and activity levels.

The functional design and three sheets of stickers with elastic closures, three ribbon bookmarks, pocket for holding documents, and a pen will also help keep you on target with your goals. Reviewers love the “beautiful” journal, and say it allows them to “track everything.”

Yoga Fitness Journal

This yoga-focused journal and notebook will allow yoga practitioners to deepen their practice and gain insight into their progress. No matter what kind of yoga you practice — in the studio, via YouTube, or on your own — this journal will allow you to make notes of what you did, for how long, and how it made you feel.

The notebook provides space for up to 32 postures per session and will allow you to document 50 sessions. Reviewers say it’s great for beginners and experienced practitioners who want to improve their awareness of their routine: “This book is wonderful, easy, and practical.”

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