How To Use This Journal

The Essential Walker's Journal : Your Companion to Weight Loss, Health, and Personal Transformation
by Leslie Sansone

#1 Bestselling fitness expert Leslie Sansone provides the perfect companion to her video series with tools her fans need to get motivated, organized, and excited about exercise.

Using the system she developed in Walk Away the Pounds and Leslie Sansone's Eat Smart, Walk Strong, Leslie Sansone gives her thousands of fans the best tool yet for achieving physical, mental, and emotional well-being.

The Essential Walker's Journal lets readers document walking progress, eating habits, and overall health improvement from a personally customized routine that has been called "the simplest weight-loss program ever." In addition to getting physically fit, readers can achieve mental fitness by using the journal's inspiring messages, diary spaces, and self-assessment tests to explore their feelings and transform their lives.

The most important thing to know about using this journal is to relax. This is your journal, to be used however you see fit. Nobody is going to check your answers or make sure you filled in every page, because there is no one way of keeping a journal that works for everybody. Some people like journals with completely blank pages. Others want slots in which to write in their key numbers-miles, heart rate, whatever-and aren't comfortable with free space at all. I've tried to strike a balance here so that you can customize the pages to suit your needs. Each day has places to record all the things you do if you follow my program: your walking, strength training, water consumption, multivitamin, and sleep. It also has space to keep track of your eating if you choose to do so.

Each page includes some free space to use as you see fit: Explore your moods, get out your frustrations, or write down a list of the healthy whole foods you need to pick up at the store tomorrow.

BEFORE YOU BEGIN: VERBALIZE YOUR GOALS

The first step in realizing your dreams is nailing down what those dreams are and charting a course to get there. That is where the Dreamweaver page comes in. It's your chance to indulge yourself and go for broke. Write down what you really want to weigh, look like, feel like, and be able to do in life. You can't start on a journey unless you have a direction to go in; this is where you set up a star to guide you.

RECORD YOUR VITAL STATS

I have mixed feelings about numbers. They can never express how someone really looks and feels, and they can be misleading. The same weight can look very different on different people, depending on height, bone structure, and even ratio of fat to muscle, because muscle weighs more than fat. Still, numbers are the best way we have of tracking progress. If your cholesterol level has dropped twenty points after a month of exercising and eating right, you know you've been doing good work. I like people to start off this journal by recording whatever numbers are most important for their personal health, whether it's weight, blood pressure, or glucose level. Then, each month, I ask them to check in and see how much progress they've made.

READ THE NUTSHELLS

The sections in the chapter entitled "The Nutshells" provide basic information on weight loss, nutrition, and fitness. It's good to know why you're doing what you're doing! If you want to know more, you can find complete explanations and instructions for every aspect of working out, staying healthy, eating right, and staying motivated in my books Walk Away the Pounds and Eat Smart, Walk Strong.

THE DAY PAGES

These are similar to the Day Pages from my six-week weightloss programs. They can fulfill a variety of needs. You can track your eating as well as your exercise, and you can use the journal to explore your feelings and goals, or even just to keep track of daily events. Here's a rundown of what you'll find on those pages:

Thought for the Day

I love starting off my day by reading something wise, inspiring, or heartfelt. If I can begin my morning that way, it helps set the tone for the whole day. You're less likely to veer off into negative thoughts or general grumpiness. Each day in the journal starts off with some words to get you started. Sometimes I'll quote somebody else's wonderful Words to Live By; sometimes it will be a fascinating Fit Fact to remind you of the great benefits of exercise; sometimes it will feature the nutritional benefits of a Fab Food you might want to work into your diet; and other times I'll ask a question to trigger some Reflection as you go about your day. Whatever the words for that day, try reading them as soon as you wake up and see if that helps get you going even before you've had your coffee!

Today's Walk

This is where you record your miles walked, any upperbody strength training you did, your stretching before and after walking, and your general success. You can track the distance you walk, the time, or the steps you take (using a pedometer). Just remember this formula:

1 mile = 20 moderate minutes = 15 brisk minutes = 2,000 steps.

Obviously, the goal is to keep increasing the amount of exercise you get, but if you are walking three miles five times a week or so, and are mixing in some upper-body work half the time, you are getting all the exercise you need to stay healthy and in shape. If you are walking that much and still not losing weight, your diet is probably to blame. See "Weight Loss in a Nutshell" (page 20) for more information.

For a complete guide to basic walking steps, stretching routines, and a variety of strength-training workouts, see Walk Away the Pounds. And don't forget that you should always check with your doctor before beginning a fitness program of any kind.

Multivitamin and Hours of Sleep

If you use a day planner at work, you know how good it feels to check off the tasks completed for that day. Seems silly, but it works. It's like a little pat on the back. I know, you could probably manage to take a multivitamin each day without a reminder in your fitness journal, but why miss the chance for an extra pat? And you should pat yourself on the back, because a multivitamin truly can improve your health. Even if we eat an excellent diet, it's difficult for us to get enough of vitamins B6, B12, D, E, and folate through our food. Pick any multivitamin that meets the RDA requirements and you are reducing your risk of cardiovascular disease for just a few cents a day.

Getting enough sleep is even more important to good health than taking a multivitamin, yet most of us don't get what we need. Sleep is the time when the body repairs itself, defuses stress, and makes sure all systems are running smoothly. When we don't get enough sleep, we get less done at work, drive worse, look worse, and feel de- pressed about it all. We also don't metabolize glucose effi- ciently, meaning that sleep deprivation can mimic diabetes and lead to weight gain and heart disease. Most of us need eight to nine hours of sleep a night but get fewer than seven. This journal is a great opportunity to pay more attention to your sleep habits and discover if some changes can help you realize the full appreciation of life, which can come only with a full night's rest.

A Beautiful Thing

People loved this so much in my first book that I wanted to include it here, too. It's a great tool for getting your mental outlook as fit as your body. Use this space to record something beautiful that you see each day. This can be anything at all, from a crab-apple tree in full bloom to the smile on your child's face when you make blueberry pancakes for breakfast. What you are really doing with this exercise is training your mind to see the beauty that is already there in everyday things. It gets easy to ignore that beauty if it gets buried under the daily drum of bad news in the papers and on TV, but don't ignore it. Good things happen all around you; allow yourself to appreciate them when they do.

Nutrition Center

Most people who start exercising regularly end up naturally wanting to eat better, too. Ultimately, the two issues are sides of the same weight-loss coin, and you need to control both for long-lasting health and weight control. (Experts estimate that lack of exercise is responsible for 50 percent of America's weight problem, while overeating accounts for an additional 30 percent.) My second book, Eat Smart, Walk Strong, tells you everything you need to know about eating right and gives you lots of tips for developing healthy habits that will help you to lose weight without dieting struggles.

If you have already completed one of my books or Walk Diets, you may already be tracking your eating habits. Each Day Page includes space for you to continue to record meals, snacks, and water consumption. See "Nutrition in a Nutshell" (page 25) if you need basic information on eating right.

Notes

Here is that free space I promised you. Use this any way you see fit. Write poetry or grocery lists. Ignore it if you like. Use it instead of the structured space if you find yourself craving some diary time.

Where's Sunday?

In our household, Sundays are different from the rest of the week. We take things a little slower, don't make too many plans, and give ourselves a chance to relax and re- flect on where we are. That's what Sundays are for in my program, too. It's important when exercising to take regular days off. This gives your muscles a chance to recover and build themselves back up. Equally important, it gives your mind a break from routine, which is essential for keeping things feeling fresh.

Don't worry about exercising or paying attention to your diet on Sundays. Just relax and go where the day takes you. I feel so strongly about having this free day that I didn't even put Sunday pages in the journal. Ha! You'll have to relax.

Of course, it's possible that your schedule makes Sunday one of the best days of the week for you to exercise. If so, then by all means feel free to pick a different day of the week as your free day. Just make sure you do have one. Whatever day of the week you pick as your free day, use that day's pages in the journal to record your Sunday workout, eating, and so on.

MONTHLY CHECK-IN

Every four weeks it's a good idea to do the numbers. Weight, cholesterol, glucose-whatever numbers are your personal keys to health and fitness, you can record them monthly. At your Monthly Check-In, it also helps to make sure you're on schedule for achieving your goals and, if not, to reaffirm your action plan for meeting them. These pages give you the space to do that.

FOUR MONTH WRAP-UP

When you reach the end of this journal, the differences in your physical and mental makeup will be too profound for a mere monthly check-in. To do them justice, please complete the Four-Month Wrap-Up at the end of the book to get a complete picture of where you're at, how far you've come, and where you're going next.

opyright © 2006, Walk Aerobics, Inc.

About the Author

“Fitness shouldn't be intimidating,” is Leslie's Sansone's philosophy for weight-loss and exercise programs. It is the foundations of what has become the fastest growing indoor fitness program in the country: IN-HOME WALKING.