Hi! I’ve been struggling with reactive hypoglycemia (as opposed to fasting hypoglycemia), and will often have a severe blood sugar drop very soon after eating (even if what I’m eating is relatively low on the glycemic index and apparently healthy). I know there are many blood glucose tracking apps, but as they are mostly geared towards diabetes, I am having trouble finding one that can do a complete breakdown of the nutritional value of what I am eating so that I can fully understand my triggers. One that can scan barcodes and the like would be very helpful as well.
Ideally, I would like to integrate this monitoring of my blood glucose levels with energy levels, mood, and sleep. I have episodes of chronic fatigue which have mostly been ignored by doctors, so getting to the bottom of that would be a miracle.
If anyone could recommend an app (or apps, I’m not holding out for a one-size-fits all approach), that could help me integrate these metrics I would be very grateful. Thank you!
I’m interested to see such an app as well. I’m new here, so I don’t know much, but I’ll share what I found so far.
I’ve used Microsoft Health Vault website for some time. It’s annoying at few things - the worst thing is that you have to enter all the nutritional values by hand, there is no way of defining food or choosing from list. On the bright side, it does offer adding blood glucose & blood pressure values as well as many others. I’m not sure about the sleep, I did find some information that it does cover that, but at least the UK version doesn’t. It’s a bit weird, as the SDK does offer much more options, like mood, sleepiness, sleep tracking etc. and I don’t know why it’s not on the site. It also lacks some sort of dashboard to present all the data on one page, and I ended up exporting all data to excel from their site and plotting it for my doctor manually.
I’ve also used myfitnesspal.com, which does offer a food database, and claims that the android client can scan barcodes (haven’t tested that yet), but I found it useless, as it really is more of a fitness site - you can’t, for instance, add time to your meals, which really is a surprising overlook, plus you can’t track anything more with it.
That said, I’m interested to see other answers as well, as those doesn’t really cover what I need as well.
As a bottom line, I do have some similar problems, namely chronic fatigue and a mood swings that I think occurs after eating, so I wonder if I should start monitoring my glucose levels. So far I’ve only found out my pulse is sometimes way too high - 110bpm while sitting at home doing nothing.
I also have been using HealthVault with Myfitnesspal. I also use a Fitbit to record activity and sleep. I pull all this data into spreadsheet along with some addition data I collect into a spreadsheet where I create a comprehensive table. I am then able to run Pivots to analyze the data and create some useful information.
Thanks! I just started looking into Health Vault, also taking MyFitnessPal for a test run. Love the database, but lack of time input is extremely frustrating. I get the impression they don’t want you exporting your data for your own analysis. Hopefully somebody can point us in the direction of something better…
There are two ways around downloading from Myfitnesspal. When you go to your food page on the bottom there is a button for viewing a printable report. Select that and either set excel up to download from that page, or cut and past directly into Excel. Only takes a few moments each morning. From that you can put it in a usable format then Pivot to get the info you want.
Hi Katherine, I recommend you try PredictBGL (iOS App and website). For people with reactive hypoglycemia, T2 diabetes and T1 diabetics in the ‘honeymoon period’, it allows natural insulin production to be modelled - in your case, with an OVER-production of insulin. The setting is called 'Natural Pancreas Function, and I think you want a value from 1-2 should do the trick. It models blood sugar, insulin, carbs/fat/protein, and can take live fitness data from fitbit etc through a secondary website (FitnessSyncer) that integrates with it.