Dan833
Joined 28 October 2021
Write my approach tables
== Data sources ==
*[https://www.mysymptoms.net/ MySymptoms iphone app]
* '''Food''', '''supplements''', '''symptoms''', and '''weight''' with the [https://www.mysymptoms.net/ MySymptoms iphone app] (consistently)<br/>For symptoms, I recommend writing free text notes, so that searchable keywords emerge naturally, instead of only estimating them on a numerical scale at a regular time, which is hard to keep up. See my reasoning at my presentation [https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1LgLBUQFzioJMjr_o4B_YkOECGQ4p477XfaV1rLILOLg/edit The Tagged Self].
** food
* '''Hypotheses''' about food/supplement effects on symptoms with [https://dynalist.io DynaList] outlining app (every few days)<br/>Since nutrition experiments can take weeks or months to run, I run them concurrently. As symptoms emerge and worsen, it's urgent to solve them, and unclear which are caused by nutritional deficiencies and which are side effects from supplement overdosing. So I make several interventions until symptoms significantly improve, write down all possibilities, then reverse the interventions, wait for symptoms to recur, and reapply them later to hone in on exact supplements and doses. This solves three big problems:
** supplements
** giving up, because discovering one's own truth about food/supplements feels overwhelming, and relying on doctors' guesswork (ill-informed by vague symptom reports) to prescribe medications (often psychiatric) that don't work and create their own problems
** symptoms (as free text)
** major side effects from supposedly "healthy" foods and supplements that aren't right for an individual
** exercise
** complacency about regularly taking foods/supplements because it's not obvious whether they help
** body weight
* [[Lab Tests|'''Blood tests''']] (every few months)
* [[Lab Tests|'''Blood tests''']] (every few months)
** Complete Blood Count
** Complete Blood Count
** serum copper
** serum copper
** serum zinc
** serum zinc
== My approach to health/nutrition ==
{| class="wikitable"
|+
!Mainstream advice
!My approach
|-
|Eat a diversity of foods
|Eat a minimalist diet, adding only foods and supplements that I can prove resolve a symptom or improve a blood test
|-
|Follow a diet from a book with a theory
|Change one food at a time, since each food can have unexpected idiosyncratic effects
|-
|Get a doctor's check-up with routine lab tests
|Order my own lab tests, especially tests where I'm still out of range, whether or not a doctor has dismissed them since there's no known correction
|-
|Eat healthy foods on occasion
|Don't assume any food is healthy, especially so-called superfoods like liver and kale
See health success or failure as depending on the weakest link: it's multiplicative not additive
|-
|Take supplement blends such as Vitamin B Complex
|Learn the hard way that blends often contain ineffectively low or harmfully high doses
Take individual vitamins and minerals so I learn what each one does at which dose
|-
|Just hope that a healthy food or supplement helps
|Write hypotheses of how I hope the intervention help; update this with possible side effects; add and remove intervention over time to confirm or disconfirm hypotheses
|-
|Take medication to fix symptoms
|Assume almost all symptoms are indirectly caused by diet and supplements, via nutritional deficiencies or side effects, and may require months or years of patient experimentation.
|}
== My approach to quantified self ==
{| class="wikitable"
|+
!Usual QS approach
!My approach
|-
|Don't track food
|See food and supplements as 75% of health.
|-
|Don't track minor symptoms
|Respect my body's communications as smarter than technology.
|-
|Regular exercise wearing tracking gadgets
|Realize that exercise is a stressor with a cost. More does not equal better.
|-
|Use sleep tracking gadgets
|Track sleep vs. non-sleep manually, since automatic detection is unreliable.
Don't use automatic estimations of sleep quality, which are unreliable and unactionable.
|-
|Run one experiment at a time
|Recognize that deficiency symptoms can take months to emerge. Respond to one symptom at time, trying several interventions until it resolves, then circle back and retry interventions to narrow down what works.
|-
|Rate symptom of concern on a scale of 1-10
|Track all symptoms, even those that aren't bothersome as free text notes, timestamped to when they start, since they're often related to timing of food or supplement. Timestamps and consistency are far more helpful than regular quantities -- see my presentation [https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1LgLBUQFzioJMjr_o4B_YkOECGQ4p477XfaV1rLILOLg/edit The Tagged Self].
|}