January Progress: Habit Tracking into a Healthier Lifestyle

As I mentioned in my post about how to use a habit tracker, and how I use my year-long tracker, I keep track of several habits throughout the year.

Sometimes, I just want to track a habit to see how often I’m actually doing something (or not doing something). Other times, I’m trying to establish a new habit. Filling in a square on my tracker each day helps with my accountability and motivation.

To start off the first six months of 2022, I’m tracking the following habits for each day:

• Alcohol-free
• At the end of the day, I feel good about what I ate that day (physically feel good and mentally feel good about my choices)
• Move 9 km or more, based on my Fitbit data
• Walk on the treadmill or outside
• Complete resistance training (7 Minute Workout app or other form of building strength)
• Move my body in another way (other than walking), such as shoveling, gardening, cleaning the house, etc.
• Drink 3 L of water

I’m tracking 7 habits this year, which may seem like a lot, but I’ve been doing this for many years now, and 7 habits is doable. Sometimes I give up on a habit or two. We’ll see what happens this year.

Each day that I’m successful with a habit, I fill in a square on my tracker, which I keep posted in the kitchen where I can see it every day. My tracker shows 6 months at a time.

Here’s a picture of my January 2022 progress.

Which habits have I kicked ass with in January?

• Alcohol-free days
• Feeling good about what I ate that day (making what I feel are healthy choices and not feeling full or bloated when I go to bed)
• Walking on my treadmill
• Drinking 3 L of water daily

Which habits would I like to do more consistently?

• Moving my body 9 km per day, according to my Fitbit (I was sick for two weeks in January, so that was a factor in not achieving that habit more often)
• Doing a resistance/strength training workout 5 days a week

At this point, one of my habits, other movement (movement in addition to my walking, which could be vacuuming, shoveling, cycling, etc.) is something I’m tracking to see how often I do additional exercise. It’s not a goal for me to do it everyday; I’m tracking it mostly for awareness.

When you’re first establishing habits, it’s hard to remember to get them in, or it can be difficult to make the time to get them done.

By tracking the habits you want to develop, you can see them right in front of you. The visual, colorful tracker is a reminder to me that I want to be a person with those habits. 

I love using this tracker, and I have been using it for years. You can start anytime, not just in January!

For me, seeing my habits over a full 6 months and a year is powerful. Last year, I made major discoveries about what an awesome job I was doing with some habits.

2021 was a great year for walking daily and having more alcohol-free days than with-alcohol days.

It also showed me that I still need to develop the habit of incorporating resistance training in my daily life (especially now that I’m getting older and have lost muscle mass as a normal part of aging). Check out the insights I discovered from my 2021 habit tracker at the bottom of my post about how a habit tracker can help you make changes in your life.

Some people track their habits on a weekly basis, and some people track for a month. These methods don’t work for me because I can’t see, at a glance, how my habits are developing over the long term.

To really gain insights into the actions you’re taking to move towards a goal, I highly recommend the year-long habit tracker (mine is two pages with a 6-month tracker on each page).

If you want to track your habits in a year-long version like I use, download the pdf here, or download the Word document below, where you can type in your habits at the top.

Good luck to you in whatever goals you’ve set for yourself this year. No goal yet? It’s never too late.

If you’re worried about failing at a goal (especially if you’ve failed at it before, as many of us have when it comes to losing weight), check out my post on what to do when you feel like a failure. In it, I recommend a helpful, practical book that can help you set a goal that is uber important to you.

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