User:Dan833

Data sources

• MySymptoms iphone app
  • food
  • supplements
  • symptoms (as free text)
  • exercise
  • body weight
• Blood tests
  • Complete Blood Count
  • Comprehensive Metabolic Panel
  • serum copper
  • serum zinc
  • iron
  • vitamin D
  • homocysteine
• Doctor's Data Hair Elements test
• Nebula Genomics whole genome sequence

My approach to health/nutrition

Mainstream advice	My "personal science" 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

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 The Tagged Self.