I bought a used planner for 2015 and have turned it into another exercise/food journal/menu planning planner.
This past year I was very sporadic about the food situation in this home. My family suffers and mealtime is stressful and something I dread each day.
When I have a plan, I do much better, so I hope to be much more consistent this year and plan to do the menu planning each Sunday evening (I even have a custom EC label in my regular planner as a reminder).
I was thrilled when the used planner arrived (thank you Roxan W) , and it began Thanksgiving week! I had guests coming and needed to plan our food, so the timing and pages from 2014 were perfect!
The weekend went very well, and my husband even told our guests, they should come more often because all the meals were better than normal! I credit that to simply having a plan, and following through.
Since it’s Sunday night, I’ve been planning the food for next week and have the first part of the week done. I decided to make it colorful. It just makes me happy when I see rainbows and lots of cheerful colors!
Thursday-Sunday aren’t done yet, but I’m planning Thursday to be a day for leftovers, so I will have time to cook again before the weekend.
I’m planning to use the bottom 2 lines to track any exercise I do (this is another area that needs desperate attention in my life), and we’ll see how far I get with the monthly calendar.
Putting all the water stickers in one place is a bit of rainbow happy overload, even though they are cute on the weekly pages. I only tried this on one month and I might ultimately trade the water and exercise spaces and use the monthly as more of an exercise journal/health journal entry for the day. I’m not sure yet as this is all new to me and not something I’ve ever given this much attention to in the past.
I really want to at least do the menu/food part of this goal. The water and exercise can come along when I’m able to add those and be consistent with them!
Since this was a used planner, there is a bill tracker on each monthly layout. If anyone has any ideas on how I can utilize that in a food/menu/exercise journal, I can’t wait to hear your ideas.
My Erin Condren 
what a great idea. I sure wish I could find a used calendar. This is the last month for my current calendar. I just can”t afford spending $50.00 on a calendar and another $50 for shipping. Enjoy!
You could use the bill tracker section of the monthly spread to list quick go to meals that you normally have the ingredients on hand for in case something derails your planned meal, or you just “aren’t in the mood” for that on a given night. (That is the problem that I have with planning meals.) Since I am an empty nester now, I got away from planning anything, and our waist lines paid for it because of the convenience/fast foods.
In my case, we both work normal business hours so we only need dinner plans. When I had little ones, it was a much different (chaotic) time and I needed a little more structure to work around everyone’s practice/school function schedules. To try and salvage our health, a few months ago I started trying to work out a system and found that a list of 5-6 dinners worked better for me because I could pull which one we were more interested in for that particular day. The key for me was to make the list and to make sure I had everything that the meals required in the house so I had need to leave again after I got home.
I try to think of the quote “To change your life, change your habits.” and that is what we both seem to be trying to do here. I really like what you have done, and think it will help many people. Good luck with staying on track!
Denise
How can I do this, the exercise and meal planning and adding it to the original life planner?
Do you know where the previous person got the Bill Tracker sticker?
That was a really good idea to use the EC planner to plan meals! I too struggle with meal time, and unless I plan it ahead it’s not going to be healthy. I just noticed that EC came out with a meal planning snap it, you write on it with a sharpie. I ordered one, and am anxiously awaiting for it to come in. Have you tried it yet?