Diet Journals - December

Anyone else need to drop a few? Is anyone else better at keeping commitments to other people than to yourself? This swap is for a journal to be kept though the month of December recording your diet successes and setbacks. If there is interest I will continue this every month until... ?

For this you will buy one journal in which you must write at least one entry per day, Dec. 1 - 31, about your diet/exercise. At the end of the month you will send the journal to your partner along with a nice gift to congratulate them for doing their best this month.

Gifts can be anything and can be handmade or store bought, but please spend $5 - $10 and the item must be new and nice. Please look at your partner's profile and pick something they will like. You should also send a nice encouraging note.

Some things you may include in your journal:

What you ate/drank

How many calories you consumed

How much and what type of exercise you did that day

How certain foods affect you emotionally and physically

Beginning and ending weight

All your thoughts and feelings

Recipes

Great diet ideas

Why you want to lose weight and/or how you gained it.

Related magazine clippings

Things you send and receive in our group swaps.

Labels (incl nutritional info) from foods/drinks you love.

Other ideas? Post them in the comments! :)

First of all, please begin your journal with a short introduction of yourself - minimally half a page. Recipes and diet ideas are wonderful additions, but please do not have your journal entry for any day be only a recipe or diet idea, or your food for the day. These are not "how to diet" books. These journals are meant to help keep us on track and to help us to see that other people have some of the same thoughts and feelings. Also, just a list of foods someone ate is not very interesting or inspirational.

Please be honest. If you don't stay as on track as you want to this month, you can do better next month! On the bright side, your down days will help the receiver not feel so bad about theirs.

You may decorate your journal if you want to, but it is not necessary.

Finally, although beginning and ending weight are not necessary (I doubt I will include them), it would be nice to put how much weight you lost at the end of the journal. A simple "I lost 10 pounds!" or "I didn't lose any weight." would suffice.

This is US only; there is a separate international version.

A lot of time, feelings, and some money are going into this, and obviously I can only sort of angel it as I will only be keeping one journal, so there will be limits. If you haven't completed enough swaps, please pm me about setting up a private swap.

You must have a 4.8 or higher rating with no recent 3s or 1s and rated on at least 20 swaps

OR

you must have a rating of 5 and be rated on at least 5 swaps.

Ok, let's get skinny!

Amendment: Many of us felt this was too difficult/annoying in October, so there is a second option for how to fill out your journal. If you don't want to write everyday, you should shoot for a minimum of 30 entries which are each a minimum of 1 page in length of actual writing, not counting food lists or however much space something you glued in takes up.