Tag Archives: allergies
Sue Lueder had a mystery stomach ailment that started after a vacation to Spain in 2011. When she returned from her trip she was beset by consistent and frequent burping attacks. After visiting her physician and receiving a diagnosis for heart burn, which she didn’t trust. she began to track her attacks and her diet. In this talk, presented at our 2013 Global Conference, Sue how she tracked he symptoms and used the data to make sense of this mystery food allergy.
What Did She Do?
Sue tracked her diet and the frequency and severity of her attacks.
How Did She Do It?
Sue was able to explore the data she was entering in to her self-designed spreadsheet tracking system. She used a few of the analytical tools and visualizations built into Excel to explore her data.
What Did She Learn?
Her analysis was able to pinpoint that dairy was probably the main culprit responsible for her attacks. Sue found out that she was able to improve her “good” days from 32% to 51% of the days she was tracking when she reduce dairy in her diet. When she experimented with adding dairy her findings were confirmed.
It’s an iterative process. I’m peeling an onion, and I can continue peeling that onion for the probably the rest of my life.
How many times have you sneezed today? This month? Over the last 3 years? Thomas Christiansen knows his sneeze count because he’s been tracking them since 2011. We’ve actually heard from Thomas before, but we were happy to have him give an update on his unique self-tracking project at the 2013 Quantified Self Global Conference.
To better understand his allergies and his overall health, Thomas began tracking a discrete phenomena, his sneezes. By plotting them over time and then exposing himself to other data like sleep, travel, and diet he’s been able to start to understand himself better. Watch his talk below to see what Thomas learned, and how he thinks about his process of continuous learning.
This video is from our 2013 Global Conference, a unique gathering of toolmakers, users, inventors, and entrepreneurs. If you’d like see talks like this in person we invite you to join us in Amsterdam for our 2014 Quantified Self Europe Conference on May 10 and 11th.
Thomas Chistiansen of Mymee spent three years using a QS approach to reduce his allergies. He recorded his symptoms, intake of food, water, and supplements, as well as sleep, urination, and elimination. Through his careful observations, Thomas has been able to get rid of the eczema on his hands and can now manage through allergy season without any medication. In the video below, he talks about how his allergies change with traveling, how he has changed his diet, and other interesting insights. (Filmed by the Bay Area QS Show&Tell meetup group.)