Food Diary

When you retire you will have a lot more spare time..... to visit your health care specialists and the doctors!!  Not quite!!

As part of monitoring my health, our wonderful French Health Service takes a huge interest in a lot of normal health parameters, such as weight, blood pressure, diet, blood tests etc etc. 

Before moving to France I rarely saw my Doctor, these days it seems to be every 3-6 months. But I'm not complaining, it's good to have this level of care. 

I've mentioned about doing blood pressure tests and logging the results before. At my most recent visit to see my Doctor, I was given an information sheet (en francais of course) to log my food intake for a week prior to my next appointment. 

It seemed like a great opportunity for another insert! I've translated the sheet in to English and created it as an A4 insert. The boxes are then a sensible size to write in. After punching the left hand edge, fold it in half and then back to the right hand edge. (Z fold).

Download the file here: 

• Food Diary (Word)
• Food Diary (PDF)

Bon appétit et bonne santé !!

Using your Filofax to focus on self care

Apologies to those of you expecting to read your Saturday dose of Web Finds, as Steve is currently out of action, but thankfully is doing better. We all wish him a speedy recovery to full health and hope that he gets home soon. 

Following on from Laurie's post about keeping medical details in your Filofax, I thought that I'd write a little about tracking self care. It's not something that I've done much of in the past, but the last couple of years have been challenging, so I thought that it would be useful to have some reminders about this in my organiser.

The last section in my Kensington is my A to Z and I just keep a list under T called TLC. As I think of something, I'll add an idea and remind myself to look at it and pick one later.

Some examples:

• Have a bath
• Book a shiatsu massage (pre-lockdown)
• Read my book
• Do some jigsaw
• Go for a coffee alone (our household is still currently shielding, so currently I make coffee in my reusable cup and take my book and Filofax out onto the green outside our garden)
• Yoga Friday a.m.
• Play Diablo 3 (game on my Mac)
• Eat ice cream
• Skype with Meerkat (nickname for my best friend).

As you can see, it tends to be quite simple and normally free activities that I enjoy and are good for me (as long as there isn't to much ice cream!). Sometimes when life is busy or stressful, it can be easy for me to forget that I have these kind of things that are easy to do and really helpful for my mental health and overall well-being. As mentioned in my previous post about working from home, I'm very grateful to still have a job, but it's much busier than normal, so I have been making greater use of my TLC list. 

For those of you that might prefer more structure, these free downloads (voluntary contribution) from Blurt might be of interest:

• Self-Care Starter Kit
• An Utterly Useful Self-Care Planner
• The Self-Care Project Worksheets
• Habit Tracker
• 365 Days Of Self-Care Journal Prompts
• Making Space Worksheets
• Your Sensory Self Care Toolkit 
• Getting To Know You Workbook
• Blurt's Guide On How To Support Someone Who Has Depression
• Depression Symptom and Mood Tracker
• Crisis Plan
• Crisis Card

Blurt is 'a social enterprise dedicated to helping those affected by depression' and you can read more about them here.

I don't have any links with them, but am just a satisfied customer as I treated myself to one of their lovely Buddyboxes when I was going through a particularly stressful time.

Medical Filofax? - by Laurie

In light of Steve's medical emergency and the fact that we're in the middle of a global pandemic, I thought it would be a good time to talk about having medical information pages in your Filofax. It might be an uncomfortable or scary topic, but good to think about just in case.

Several years ago when my family and I moved frequently and my kids were little, I had pages in my Filofax with medical information, recent illnesses and treatments, medications, etc. Now that we have been living in the same place with the same doctor for several years now, I don't keep that information anymore. Where we live, if we had to go to the doctor or hospital, they would have access to our medical data on their computer, so I don't feel like I need to carry it with me everywhere. But it's probably a good idea for me to have some information like our blood types in case of emergency. I do have a page with all of our insurance numbers, our doctor contact details, etc.

For anyone with chronic medical conditions or medications it's always a good idea to keep emergency medical information on you either in the form of an alert bracelet, information pages, etc.

Do you keep medical information in your Filofax for you and/ or your family members?