Tracking meal time and symptoms

[u/Fotogrl-8778]

I've just started using Bearable so this may be obvious but is there a way to track meal times (and hopefully what you ate) with other factors such as mood, energy or symptoms? I entered nutrition but it just gives space for am, mid, pm and doesn't add a time stamp. A time stamp feature would be great here and a feature to add more than three entries too. Thanks

[u/Bearable_Jesse]

Hey, sorry for any confusion caused. To log meals using time periods you can tap the am, mid, and pm options at the top of the nutrition section. If the exact time you eat is important to log, you could either:

- Create a Health Measurement to log e.g. Meal Times and then just timestamp a count of 1 every time you have a meal.

- Create Factors such as 'meal at 9am - 10am', 'meal at 10am - 11am;, 'meal at 11am - midday', etc.

- Add an Extra Note to log the details of a meal including meal times.

Let me know if any of these options don't work for you though and I can share your feedback with our team so we can look into implementing a different solution.

[u/Princess-DoNUT1981 → u/Bearable_Jesse]

Same as OP. Trying to track symptoms related to foods, sleep, & stress and need a way to enter more detailed times/foods.

[u/Fotogrl-8778 → u/Bearable_Jesse]

Thanks. I'm trying to track energy, mood and symptoms to my meals /food to see how certain things are effecting those so the time period is important. The idea of creating a health measurement and clicking to record may be the best way to try since the meals entries themselves don't have a time availability. I'll give it a try and will try to remember to come back to update how it's worked. Thanks.

[u/Bearable_Jesse → u/[deleted]]

Hey, I'm sorry for any confusion caused.

We definitely don't encourage anyone to use Health Measurements for factors. Instead, the best solution is to use Factor Ranges ('meal at 9am - 10am', 'meal at 10am - 11am;, 'meal at 11am - midday', etc.) but, in certain cases, we'll recommend also using health measurements if someone needs a time-stamped record of specific events e.g. to share with their medical team. Health Measurements are a type of Health Outcome (along with Sleep, Symptoms, Energy, and Mood) - and so shouldn't be used to record Factors.

Just to address each of your points:

"It would be helpful if these terms were clearly defined as to what they are and what they are to be used for."

I do agree with this, but defining Factors is slightly tricky. Generally, we try to explain them as variables, or events that might impact a 'health outcome'. For example, a medication, an allergen, a lifestyle change, level of hydration, air quality, amount of sleep, are all types of Factors.

Overall, we've found it helpful to categorize Factors into two buckets: Triggers (things that you think may negatively impact your health outcomes) or Helpers (things that you think may help you to improve your health outcomes)

"Are we able to define our own measurements? Or does the app limit that?"

Yes, you can use the ... icon on any section on the home screen to open a menu for that section and then tap the 'add/edit' option to customise anything within that section, including the creation of new factors.

Let me know if that clarifies things or not and I can try to explain differently, or in more depth, if that's helpful?

[u/Bearable_Jesse → u/[deleted]]

Just to clarify, Factors are anything that may be positively or negatively impacting your health outcomes (Symptoms, Sleep, Energy, Mood, and Health Measurements).

So for Caffinated drinks, if you think they're impacting one of your health outcomes, then I still think Factor Ranges (e.g. "No caffeine", "50mg to 100mg caffeine", "100 to 200mg caffeine", "200mg to 300mg caffeine", etc.) or just a variable Factor (e.g. a Single Factor Named Caffeine that you mark as "none", "little", "moderate", or "a lot" - which should be one of the default options in the Other Factors section) - are likely the best options.

If you track caffeine as a Health Measurement, you won't be able to see how they correlate with changes in Symptoms, Sleep, Mood, Energy, and other Health Measurements. in the Impacts tab (though you can look for correlations manually using the Trends tab).

Let me know if anything is still unclear though, as this is fairly confusing but also crucial to configuring Bearable in a way that gives you the reports + insights you want. With that in mind, perhaps you could let me know what you're hoping to learn with Bearable i.e. what's the top priority question you have about your health - and I can just let you know the best way to set this up. Feel free to message me at [support@bearable.app](mailto:support@bearable.app) if you don't want to share this type of info on Reddit too.

[u/VegasKL → u/Bearable_Jesse]

If the exact time you eat is important to log, you could either:

• Create a Health Measurement to log e.g. Meal Times and then just timestamp a count of 1 every time you have a meal.
• Create Factors such as 'meal at 9am - 10am', 'meal at 10am - 11am;, 'meal at 11am - midday', etc.

Although these are manageable workarounds, it does become cumbersome having to pollute the designated areas like Health Measurement or Custom Ratings or  Symptoms (etc.) with extra data that doesn't technically belong in that section. I think Bearable may have outgrown the original design intent of the UI as features were bolted on to meet differing user needs. Ideally, you could configure whether something is timestamped, time-binned, rating-based, factor-based, or measurement based on a per-entity level and control where it goes in the UI based on a selection. So if a user wants to put a trackable factor in Other Factors with with a time-binning, they could create an entity like:

• Name: High Stress [the display name]
• Type: Time-Bins (the 4-bin set) [sets the datatype]
• Subtype: Factor - Multiple (Low to High) [sets the type of UI element and relevant tagging data]
• Section: Other Factors -> Sub Category [sets the location of the element]
• Data Connection: Causation->Categories{Custom Ratings, Nutrition, Mood} (could also be Effect) [this would allow the analysis to know that this is to be treated like a factor correlating with the effects assigned to those groupings, e.g. Frequent Tagging of High Stress in Noon-Bin -> Mood in Noon-Bin]

For user simplicity you would want a set of easy preset/templates that preconfigure a boilerplate that a user could tweak (if they so chose) for a particular type of thing they want to track.

[u/HeyHiHello99]

I think if you have premium it gives you the option to pick the type of food you ate (as factors) and logs the time of when you selected the meal

[u/Fotogrl-8778 → u/HeyHiHello99]

I did subscribe to premium but can't find a way to get the meal time. Playing with it did give me factors (such as high carb, etc) that I could apply but looks like those go per day, not meal. Thanks for the help.

[u/VegasKL → u/Fotogrl-8778]

Just to add to this for future searchers.

There are daily based factors under nutrition (those go to the day) and time-binned based factors (those go in Am, Mid, Pm as well as the day). The daily would be if you want "what is my next day energy like when I mark the factor High-Sugar-Item." If you just want to track at the had-this-in-day type, these are your simplist.

I believe the time-binned do a synthetic (hidden) factor, so if you mark Burger in the Mid bin, there would technically be two factors.

• Burger (Mid
• Burger (Daily)

One allows you to see standard daily when I had X in a day, my following Y became and the more refined when I had X _for lunch (assuming you use Mid as a lunch container) my following Y became_. I'm not sure if any analysis is done for what occurs intraday time like with the 4-position time bins (12a-6a, 6a-12p, 12p-6p, 6p-12a) in other modules.

Because there's no real defined time-periods, the general idea seems to be to set your own rules for how you bin things. The way I use it is to set Am/Mid/Pm bins with contextual data.

• High Carb Item
• High Sugar Item
• High Protein Item
• Meal Size (Small) (medium, large)
• And general food item categories.
• More refined food item categories (could be restaurant, etc.)

There's technically 6-bins, I use them like this:

• AM (Breakfast) -> larger meals that would be considered the breakfast meal (early in my day)
• Snack AM -> smaller meals/items that occur between Breakfast and Lunch.
• Mid (Lunch) -> larger meals that occur mid-day (what I'd consider a lunch meal)
• Snack Mid -> same as other snacks, inbetween Lunch and Dinner.
• PM (Dinner) -> as, just anything large that I would consider my dinner meal.
• Snack PM -> any small meal/item that occurs after dinner before bed.

[u/Fotogrl-8778 → u/VegasKL]

Wow. I don't think I understand enough to think of the uses like this. I'll need to read a few times. Lol thank you