planner – Retro from Scratch

“I don’t want to ruin it, it’s too nice!” Anyone else feel like this about using their notebooks?! I know I have! But as lovely as your notebook may be, they are there to serve a purpose and we should use them! To get the most out of your notebooks and prevent damage, here are my top 5 tips on caring for your books.

1. Pop your notebook in a book pouch.

A pouch will protect your notebook from the other contents of your bag. I purchased a canvas bag and personalised it with an appropriate phrase in my Retro from Scratch font! You can buy book pouches online or you make one easily yourself – there are plenty of tutorials out there. Or maybe I should start supplying them in my shop?

2. Add book corners.

The corners are a really vulnerable part of the book and often the first area to show wear. Adding metal corners makes them super strong and keeps your notebook looking neat!

3. Keep them clean.

If you have a plastic coated notebook, apply some antibacterial spray (I like to use a very diluted Zoflora) to a cloth and gently wipe over your notebook cover. Never spray the book, and don’t attempt this on a paper / matt cover!

4. Don’t stick a pen in the spine!

I know it’s so easy to do, and convenient but the pen can bend your notebook wire out of shape and cause even worse damage if you open your book without removing the pen from the spine first!

5. Add a bookband.

My elasticated book bands not only add a bit of sparkle and make my notebooks look pretty, but they serve a practical purpose. They hold your book together, preventing it from opening in your bag and getting damaged. And they can also be used as a handy bookmark!

It is of course inevitable that your notebook will eventually come to an end when you’ve used up all the paper. My top tip? Buy another one!

Becky x

Meal Planning with my favourite Papermate Flair Pens and my essential re-bound Food optimising book

Two years ago I joined Slimming World on a mission to get back into my size 10 clothes. I succeeded within only a few months. My secret to losing that weight was meal planning. Whether you’re doing Weight Watchers, Slimming World or just counting calories, planning really plays an important part.

My meal planner has a week overview which is perfect for those of us that get weighed weekly. Divided into the three main meals of the day, it also has a column for snacks and notes.

You don’t need to waste time colour coordinating your planner – although I am a visual person and I found this helped me to see quickly if I was planning enough speedy and protein foods in balance with free foods and synned food.

You might be thinking that planning your food for the week ahead sounds too restrictive. What if you don’t fancy an omlette for lunch on Monday? How will you know what you might fancy for dinner next Thursday?! Remember meal planning is only a guide. You are writing down your ideal weekly meals – you won’t break any laws if you change it!

I found the SW plan relatively easy to follow. Until it came to the A and B choices! If I didn’t plan I would find myself having a B choice for breakfast and then accidentally using my B choice again for lunch – so then I’d have to syn it and if I’d had a chocolate bar as my mid morning snack, next thing you know I’d gone over my syn allowance!

So by writing it down I could work out what breakfasts and lunch would work together, and that allowed me to then ‘mix it up’ so I wasn’t having the same breakfast and the same lunch everyday – which I think is really important. Food shouldn’t be boring.

Meal planning allows you to work around other engagements that involve food – weddings, birthday parties, drinks after work etc… If you know it’s coming you can be prepared and then ‘be good’ the rest of the day / the day after – without starving yourself!

Planning your meals also helps prevent food wastage – you can use your meal plan to shop the right groceries that you need. If it’s not on the list then maybe you shouldn’t be buying it! And if it is on the list, you hopefully won’t forget it!

Whilst using my meal planner I also kept a food diary. Remember, they are two different things! The planner is what I HOPED to eat, the diary is what I ACTUALLY ate!

But what I would do, is look back in my food diary where I had a good weight loss that week and re-write that week out in my meal planner, so that I could try and repeat it. It worked before so why shouldn’t it work again?

I wrote my best weekly weight loss in my meal planner to help me with future weeks and I still look back on this now.

You can of course use my meal planners as a week per view food diary too. They come in all different sizes from Ladybird Book size, 11 x 17cm (£8) to A4 (£12) – all you have to do is choose which book cover to have it in!

Tag: planner

Prolong the life of your notebook with my 5 top tips!

How my planner helped me lose weight