Experimenting with diet & diet log / mood / hunger tracking

Quantified Self Project Logs
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Hi all! As mentioned by @Agaricus in his own post we have a small, fun group of folks that are exploring self-experimentation.

You’re welcome to join! You can read more about the idea & motivation here: http://openhumansfoundation.org/DIYExperiments/

My upcoming plan is to test this question: "Does intermittent fasting work for me?"

Boring for you, but it matters to me! I’ve lost 10 BMI points and I’d like it to stick. :wink:

#My plan

  • Test between two conditions:
    • Condition A: only eat between 12pm-8pm
    • Condition B: have 300-400kcal breakfast
  • Alternate every week, a total of 6 weeks: ABABAB
  • Track “adherence” (sticking to plan) via diet logs (I’ve been using MyFitnessPal)
  • Track “outcomes” via mood tracking, 1-button tracker (distracted/annoyed by cravings), weight logs (Withings scale)

What mood tracking is best?

I tried two different apps, Daylio and iMoodJournal. I scheduled an identical set of check-ins for both, 7 times a day (7:30am to 7:30pm, every two hours). Beyond this, I’m using the default settings.

Neither app has continuous data export (e.g. via API) but both have an easy export-to-CSV in an email to myself.

Daylio has timestamp problems. The time recorded for my mood records in Daylio were the scheduled time, not the time I actually checked in! I often miss my notifications (sometimes I only manage to check in once during the day!) – more often than not, I’m not logging it when prompted. :thumbsdown:

iMoodJournal seems to work. I like that there’s more granularity on mood (1-10), and I like the defaults for these. Timestamps are correct. I’m also curious about the tag features – maybe I can do more with that.

It seems iMoodJournal is the winner – but I’d love to hear other recommendations. One gotcha is that iMoodJournal tracks location, which I don’t want/need. (You can turn it off and delete past location history, but be aware that it’s on by default.)

Next steps

  • One-button tracking hunger? I want to try using the 1-button tracker – maybe when my thoughts are distracted by hunger/cravings? (Interestingly, a couple other DIY Experimenters had similar ideas for the button.)
  • Tags for hunger? maybe I can use iMoodJournal tags to track hunger.
  • Getting my diet log data. Diet logs are routine for me, I’ve been using MyFitnessPal for 18 months now (not paying the monthly fee; I’ll buy an app, but not a subscription). I’ve seen an export tool on GitHub. IIRC it’s a hack (log in & web scrape) but I’m OK with that.

I’ll update with insights into my data collection efforts. Part of our goal here is to learn barriers and share tools that help others do similar things. :smiley:

(One thing I did earlier today: figured out how to parse the Withings API data to get weight logs. Hopefully others can reuse what I learned.)

Hopefully I’ll get the button soon and will start the experiment soon after. :slight_smile:

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Even when our data exists, it’s not really ours, is it?

My first goals are to check that I can get my data – and use it.

And I’ll share some code I produced in this quest…

MyFitnessPal to CSV via notebook

I created a little jupyter notebook for exporting MyFitnessPal data to CSV: https://exploratory.openhumans.org/notebook/30/

It’s Open Humans flavored, i.e. it expects to be run on free private virtual machine for an Open Humans member (our personal data notebooks project). If anyone wants to get their own data, they can use this if they want, you don’t have to install anything (or even know how to code).

(It’s hard to help others do MyFitnessPal export because it needs username/password to log in and scrape the website from one’s account directly. Ideally open source client-side code (i.e. JS), but an open source script on an ephemeral private VM is pretty good too. Many thanks to Adam Coddington for creating/sharing/maintaining the python-myfitnesspal library!)

gnarly Withings API data :dizzy_face: (+ CSV notebook)

I also made a notebook to extract my weight logs from API-retrieved Withings data. I know Withings provides a CSV export, but APIs are great for syncing data continously. Unfortunately the data is a bit gnarly – nested JSON with ambiguous labels and unknown units.

So this notebook does that, and also reverse engineers some aspects of the API that weren’t documented. (Measuring mass in decigrams?!) https://exploratory.openhumans.org/notebook/29/

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trying nobism app: appetite & mood

There’s a new app that’s been released on Open Humans – nobism – developed by Rogier Koning to help himself and others in the cluster headache patient community to study themselves. https://www.openhumans.org/activity/nobism/

(Aside: I had a kidney stone a couple months ago and it really was more painful than childbirth. I read that cluster headaches are worse than kidney stones. Wow. I’m separately excited about that project as hopefully helping that community do studies and more!)

Anyway it’s clunky but cool, you can add a button for each thing you want to track, and self log whenever you want. It records the data with a timestamp, and – with my Open Humans connection added – a csv ends up in Open Humans. I added buttons for:

  • Increased appetite (1-10 scale)
  • Depression (1-10 scale)

I was limited to the buttons that exist. “Depression” isn’t quite the same as the scale in iMoodJournal (which I’m still using), mostly I was curious to see how well it aligned with the iMoodJournal moods. My plan is to record these whenever I’m already logging in response to an iMoodJournal prompt.

That is:

  1. iMoodJournal prompt
  2. log in iMoodJournal (mood score)
  3. log in nobism (appetite score, depression score)

The reality is that I miss a lot of prompts, I have some days with just one entry.

I’m not sure tracking appetite in response to prompts (rather than logging it when it bothers me) is the right approach. If/when I get a one-button tracker, I guess I can see how they compare.

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Does MyFitnessPal now record timestamps? I remember it didn’t use to…

To track adherence, a low-tech option could also be to simply record at the end if each day whether you stuck to the plan :slight_smile:

Also, are one-week periods sufficient to establish the impact of a diet?

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I tried out all nutrition trackers and posted results on this forum. Bitesnap is much better than free MFP. Or waistline cause it uses OFF though it does not timestamp.

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Wow, @madprime, you rock. Thanks so much for sharing this.

I had just decided (this past weekend) not to switch to MFP because even with Premium, the export sucks. (It only exports by meal, so, if I’m trying to symptom track, that’s not enough.)

I just joined Open Humans to try it. No luck for me. I just downloaded an empty .csv file. Is it because I only have a bit of data in MFP?

I’m still using myNetDiary for logging and tracking my food. But I would seriously consider switching to MPF if there was a good export. I like the new macro stuff, and the ability to set goals by meal and day.

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Yes, @ejain – They seemed to have added timestamps! Unfortunately, their export sucks. (Meal level only food data.) They also now have macros by meal, and the ability to set different macro goals, which is interesting to me.

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@ejain I only got per-meal data, not timestamps…

Are timestamps a good/useful thing for me? I often log stuff much later, I’ve done this for so long that I’m accumulating a mental list of what I ate and recording it later. (It can be hard to record immediately, especially if I’m with family.)

are one-week periods sufficient to establish the impact of a diet?

Not for weight, haha, I would agree with that concern! But I want to track adherence to a caloric target and mood/annoyance/etc. My question is which diet is easier to follow i.e. has less negative outcomes with mood/appetite.

Data exportability is a big deal for me. Also, ease of use. I’m having trouble reading the write-up here but it’s really awesome you’ve done all this investigation, thank you! Recommended food tracking apps?

@JessicaK since you’re in the Open Humans slack I’ll see if I can help with the code :slight_smile:

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Also a project update, since I’m here!

  1. I’m waiting to receive a 1-button tracker – soon I hope. :slight_smile:

  2. I started forgetting to record with Nobism. :confused:

  3. I set iMoodJournal to spam me with a reminder every hour (around 15 times per day), this has helped increase the data to around 6-7 per day.

  4. I stopped recording food the last couple days because it was my birthday on Saturday. (A zero was involved, so I thought, “let’s go wild”… i.e. not record food, haha.)

As of this morning my cake has been consumed so… I’ll get back into the routine tomorrow. Maybe the button will arrive soon, too. :crossed_fingers:

I may try out some other diet logging apps, many thanks to @JessicaK and @rain8dome9 for suggestions, I’ll do it in parallel as I did with other things I’ve tried.

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I can’t speak for @ejain, but I needed timestamps for sure when I was tracking blood glucose–and I know @ejain wrote up his project tracking blood glucose as well. Now I’m about to start a project on diet and blood pressure/symptoms related to that. I can imagine I’d want timestamps again. Like, I eat salt–does my BP go up? for how long? Any symptom reduction? That kind of thing is what I’m thinking about next.

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Thanks @JessicaK! That makes sense, if you’re tracking something granular like that, it does make a lot more sense! I used a CGM when I had gestational diabetes last year, but mainly just as a rapid feedback mechanism to learn which foods were “safe”. I never exported the data.

So… my experiment still isn’t started. A couple reasons…

  1. I fell off track on food tracking entirely, whoops
  2. I really want to try the one-button tracker. In fact, I used it for a day, and the experience of it was interesting! But it’s actually a bit broken. @jakobeglarsen guessed the GPS chip wasn’t connected, so I opened it up – yup, a loose wire. He showed me where it should go, and I’ve ordered a soldering iron.
  3. I’m also really interested in logging data via self-survey, and in particular want to try setting something up using MindLogger. Anisha Keshavan shared an example on how to do this (an example “hangry” survey, haha), and I still want to try setting something up!

Maybe next week. :slight_smile: I’m enjoying exploring tools.