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Old Nov 11, 2011, 10:58 AM
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AniManiac AniManiac is offline
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Member Since: Oct 2011
Location: Central NY
Posts: 922
Quote:
Originally Posted by hankster View Post
my diabetes nutritionist, when I showed her my food diary with protein grams, carb grams, fiber grams, fat grams, saturated fat grams, cholesterol grams, & yes, calories, calculated by hand with running totals during the day, told me to stop it and get a life - but now that seems OCD to me.
Oh noes! Me too... (Well, not the "get a life" part. And I use my big shiny computer instead of hand-totalling stuff.)

I once tracked step count on a pedometer against pages read for an entire semester so that I could conclusively determine that there's a -.3 correlation between reading and walking.

In addition to a few other odd habits to do with food handling, neatness, and symmetry, I currently have a 100% complete mood chart for nearly an entire year, with full data on sleep, alcohol consumption, meds, menstrual cycles, step counts, and events like travel. I use two different mood charts, one is a 7-point scale and the other is Moodscope which is percentage-based and much more useful for statistical analysis. I also track sleep two ways, with a FitBit and my iPhone using the SleepCycle app. For about 8 months I tracked a couple other covariates until I did some statistical analysis and found that they weren't correlated with anything, so I stopped tracking those.

I would claim that my tracking of all that stuff is because I data a lot. I mean, that's why I'm a researcher, after all - keep in mind that I am actually trained in data collection, management, and statistical analysis! And it has been personally useful for convincing myself that I do actually have BP, and figuring out triggers, because the statistical significance of the correlation between sleep and mood is absurdly high. There's no way I can convince myself that they are not related when faced with statistics like that.

But some days it does seem a bit obsessive... I consistently get an "OCD is probable" score on online tests, but my behavior runs in that direction primarily when I'm hypomanic.
Thanks for this!
nacht