I have an appointment at the Diabetes Centre next week.
It's one of the appointments where I meet with a nurse and a dietician. Not the appointment when I meet with my endocrinologist.
So no blood work is required but I do need to arrive with a two-week food diary that tracks everything I ate.
When I need to keep a food diary I usually just print out a few pages worth of charts and then carry them in my purse for two weeks, dutifully writing down every little thing I put in my mouth.
This time I decided to see if I could print out reports from My Fitness Pal. My Fitness Pal is the food tracking app that I've been using faithfully now since last December. The one that has been keeping me honest and showing me without a doubt that I need more protein in my diet.
Turns out that you can indeed print from My Fitness Pal.
There's a nice little printable report you can generate that allows you to pick a date range, say the last two weeks, and then print all the food you ate (broken down by meals) as well as all the key nutritional info (carbs, protein, fats, sodium, fibre, sugars etc). It also shows any exercise that I did that day.
Sweet.
Add to that the reports I'm going to print from Diasend to show my blood sugar trends and I'm going to show up there with all sorts of fabulous data for us to comb through together.
Oh, and I can't forget my blood pressure data that I've been tracking for the past few weeks (before and after workouts as well as at random times during the day).
They are either going to love me...or put a note in my file that says "Watch out, this girl has Type A diabetes".
Let us know how it goes!
ReplyDeleteI think diabetes is rapidly becoming a "big data" disease. (When I talk with my coworkers who work with Big Data and data analytics, they usually look at me and say something like, "Aww. 5000 data points. That's so precious. Big Data has 100,000s of data points." Anyway, I digress.) And this is going to change the way that we understand our own diabetes, and more and more of the decisions we make are going to be guided by tools.
You and I are on the vanguard by keeping track of all this data--CGM traces, BG readings, insulin dosages, exercise details, food logs. My hope is that someday soon there's a viable system that can integrate all of these data sources and provide guidance for patients with diabetes (possibly in the context of a clinical setting, like at your Diabetes Centre). I've been reading research papers and Ph.D. theses recently by people trying to do exactly this. It's coming.