Getting started

Quantified Self Apps & Tools
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Hi everyone,

first of all, I apologize for any mistakes I may or may not make in writing this post. English isn’t my native language, and even though I’m quite fluent, I’m pretty sure I’m not perfect. :slight_smile:

As the title says, I’m looking for information on how to start tracking the daily aspects of my life. I already track some data (temperature, weight, food), but for health reasons, I’d like to find out what kind of things could trigger various changes in my wellbeing.

For now, I don’t wish to buy any physical gadgets for this purpose. I’m willing to spent a few bucks on a good app or two, but I’d like to wait to see whether I actually stick to recording all the data before I spent a lot money on this.

So, how did you guys get started? Any good advice?

If you’re interested, here’s what I’m doing now, and why I’m doing it:
I’m female, so I have a menstrual cycle I can track. I do this by recording the signs my body sends me - cervical mucus and basal temperature are the important ones, even though I do track some “softer” signs like hunger, what my skin looks like and so on, too. With this, I can safely prevent a pregnancy if I so choose (this method is called sensiplan, if you’re interested. It’s very well documented in Germany.)

Also, I’d like to lose some weight - after I tried to eat less and better and still haven’t lost weight I found out that I have an thyriod desease that makes it hard for me to lose weight when it’s not properly medicated. Since then (after taking pills for this), I joined a pretty popular program that converts food in points and tells me how many points I’m allowed to eat. I’m not sure how OK it is to name this here, so I’m just describing it. Many of you will know what I mean, I’m sure.

Apart from that, I suffer from migraines sometimes. This is the main reason of why I’m here. I’m pretty certain that there are some factors that need to “meet” when a migraine occurs, and I want to know which ones that are so I can avoid them in future. I’m fairly sure it has something to do with stress or sleep, because it mostly happens on weekends, but that’s all I got, really. I think that maybe the kind of food I’m eating could be an influence, too, but since the meagre information I do track is located in a lot of different place, I can’t quite see the correlation…

So, as you can see, I’m a bit lost. I did google a lot of stuff, but I thought it wise to ask the pro’s:
Do you have an links that would be helpful? apps (i’m using an android phone), or a spreadsheet that contains things that would be helpful to track? Anything you can say will probably be helpful, so don’t hold back. :slight_smile:

TIA,
fairycakes

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I don’t have specific advice; there are several apps for tracking migraines. If you end up checking them out, I’d love to hear if any of them work for you, or if not, why (I’m working on a more general-purpose service for aggregating and correlating self-tracking data).

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For now, I just created a spreadsheet listing all kind of stuff. I’m curious as to how this works out.
For some reason, I didn’t think to look for specific migraine apps. I might have a look, just to get an idea about possible triggers and/or early symptoms I might have missed.

Now that I started tracking, I randomly think of questions the data might be able to answer some day. It’s fascinating, really. I could track anomia (I hope this is the right word, sarcasm alert!) to figure out if I should get some bloodwork done for Hashimoto’s. I could find out whether consuming milk or carbs makes a difference in how I feel. The weather and it’s relation to my mood. I could see if my TSH actually related to losing and gaining weight.

Ahh… the joys of knowing … :slight_smile:

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Be careful–it’s easy to see correlations where there are none! How do you determine whether or not x has an influence on y?

Once you’ve got your spreadsheet figured out, it would be nice if you could share it here (optionally with fake data, or just as a template)!