Journal #2 - Electronic Symptom + Food Diary - My Symptoms

One of the goals I set for myself in this process was to be more mindful and aware of what was going on with my body.  I had a really bad day with anxiety and mood swings and wanted to put some energy into trying to find patterns.

And I knew, that both for blood sugar and weight loss, I needed to start tracking what I was eating.

So I started another round of research. I had this idea that I was going to use my phone for tracking so I started looking at Android apps, and comparing features. I wanted a single app that would track it all.

I ended up installing MySymptoms, as it was the most comprehensive app I could find. It tracks everything.

• Food
• Sleep
• Exercise
• Digestion
• Energy
• Mood
• Blood Sugar

It also has a feature to find trends and related items. I could enter a ton of data, all day long.

And all day long, I did. To an extreme. I kept adding categories and rating systems. Different types or areas of pain, different moods, other symptoms.

Honestly, I turned it into this obsession, and I was on my phone constantly, updating my status, and trying to be hyper aware of my body at all times.

Of course, this made it hard to be productive. I was constantly distracted, and it was pretty tiring to be deciding which number on the scale I was feeling over and over.  The food diary didn't have a lot of items I was entering (Canadian only food items are not in all the standard libraries). And it didn't have a web interface, so I was constantly stopping what I was doing to pick up the phone and open the app and so forth.

I think this is a great app. It tracks more things than any other app that I have seen, and it had both 'regular people' food tracking, and diabetes specific items, and symptom logging for chronic illness.  It has data exports. For someone who is already on their phone a lot, it could be really nice. 

Status: Fail I had to quit this one. For me it was Too Much Logging. I wasn't able to set boundaries about how I was using it, and I was spending all my time tracking stuff but not actually learning anything.  I thought I wanted to track everything in one place in a lot of detail, but it turned out that was not useful to me.

Also, it being phone only made it more distracting.