My current dashboard in Notion
Hello all,
I hope you are doing well. Last week, I shared a small tip about graphs in Notion and also I mentioned that there will be more Notion content here. Well, one week later, here we are. Today, I am going to share with you “How I use Notion to track my weight loss journey?”
PS: Trust me, there is more Productivity posts are waiting to be published soon. Exciting times! 🔥
Introduction
For a while, I was trying to lose some weight. I was trying couple of different stuff but without proper tracking, it’s wasn’t giving me any results. Neither efficient, nor permament results…
Since I was using Notion as a second brain/information storage, I started tracking all this process also in the Notion and also cooperate with my dietitian in this process. At the end of the post, you can read her comments about this system as well.
The whole system divided into two small parts: “The Bigger Picture” and “The Devil In The Details”. Without further ado, let me explain them more!
The Bigger Picture
Let’s start with “The Bigger Picture” a.k.a the home page, which you saw in the beginning of this post. This is your home page, dashboard, you name it. I tried to make this page engaging as possible: cool thumbnail, emojis, graphs, different bold colours…
It’s easy lose track about your daily habits. Especially, when it comes to eating and recording what you ate, it’s even more complicated to keep eye on. So that’s why there is a HUGE graph for my weekly weigh-ins. It both keeps me motivated, and also warns me if there is an inclining interest.
For the graph part, I used Notion Charts. If you are interested about how to use charts in Notion. Check out my post about it here. The rest is a bit personal taste but for describing purposes, we have two bold and colourful texts that indicate the “Start”, “Current”, and the “Goal” weights for me.
Finally, I have an inline list that shows my daily eating records. I will go more detail about this daily records in a bit but I just want to mentioned that there is a small filter applied in the list which only shows Waiting Approval status. Otherwise, it will look so much cluttered and also my dietitian can browse in this week’s logs much easier.
PS: Whenever I need the older data, just remove the filter and all the results are visible there.
The Devil In The Details
Moving on with “The Devil In The Details” a.k.a Daily Details Page which I fill it as my daily food journal. Along the way, I understand the importance of portion size, portion control and tiny details matters. So it’s okay to go a bit up from your daily allowance time to time but if you are doing it regularly, that’ll become your new portion which will effect everything negatively. In order to closely track everything that I eat in daily basis, I built this template which I reuse everyday and no need to write everything from scratch.
After reading Atomic Habits by James Clear, I really try to reduce the frictions to achieve to habit easy as possible. Creating the template was the most important step to achieve that. While creating the template, I also used a lot of visual cues to keep me entertained and boost my motivation through out this journey.
I created this template for my needs and cooperation with my dietitian. Every person and diet can be different but once you put down your template, reusing will save a lot of time in the long run. So my personal opinion is spend some time and create a good looking, exciting template for yourself.
Your template should contains some fundamental values such as: water, breakfast, lunch, dinner. But the customization will come after this fundamental step. For example, if you are using daily pills, vitamins you can put down as well. While you are creating the template, I highly recommend to talk with your dietitian for what to put down in your template.
If you are interested in with my templates and the board, you can take a look to the “Bonus” section to learn more!
I can talk all the time and try to explain this is a good method and you should use it as well.
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Instead, to validate, let’s ask to my dietitian and learn what she thinks about this system, shall we? 👀
What My Dietitian Thinks About It?
"This system is more usable and effective than the traditional methods. Because in the traditional system, either a piece of paper or a Word file is used to track their eating records. If something happens to that unreliable medium, all the progress will be lost forever. With this system, both everyday is saved seperately and with the aid of visual cues, people are more motivated to keep their logs regularly. Moreover, person can see results in weekly basis and keep themselves motivated all the time."
- Ş. Bilkan Yılmaz
Dietitian & Clinical Psychologist
Bonus
Starting from today, I created a membership in the BuyMeACoffee platform. From there, you can support me on monthly basis for one iced coffee price. You can click the “Buy Me a Coffee” button to navigate membership page!
Finally, for the supporters, they can find the private link for this very Notion board and they can freely duplicate to their Notion and start using right away.
Closing notes
I hope you liked what you read and I am really looking forward to seeing you in the next one! If you don’t want to miss any content, you can subscribe to the website and I will let you know whenever something new going on here!
Also you can reach out to me from the “Contact” section. Feel free to share your thoughs or suggest any ideas. I am reading all the messages and I will reply yours as soon as possible!
As you might know me, I like coffee and high-quality content. If you want to support me and my effort, why not a little caffeine boost ha? 😎
Until next one,
Furkan
