One of the annoying things about doing an elimination diet, or trying to find out any useful information from your day to day routines, is that to do so you have to be fairly religious about writing everything down. EVERYTHING. This can get really old after awhile, yet it’s so important, especially when you’re trying to track down things like anxiety triggers – stuff that impacts my life in a major way.

Enter my programming god of a husband: Greg.

About a week ago, I said something like, “Man, it would be so useful if I could just record what I eat on my iPhone, or when I take a pill, or when I have a panic attack. I’m tired of lugging around this notebook.”

He got that look in his eye, the one that means he’s thinking he can make me really happy (I love this look, it always ends with him inventing something crazy and wonderful), and said, “Like maybe something where you could put in an event and then it would stick it on a calendar? You know, I could do that. I could make something would enter an event on, say, a Google calendar.”

And so he did.

Right now it doesn’t have a name or an icon: we just call it “Event Tracker” – it’s the white icon down at the bottom:

What it does is going to, for lack of a more mature phrase: rock my world.

• I can set up events with any text I want. Right now I’m using an initial system. For example, “A: FB PA”, means, “Anxiety: Full Blown Panic Attack”. I’ve created events for exercise, for example, “E: Stat. Bike (10m)”, means, Exercise: rode stationary bike for 10 minutes.
• Every time an event occurs, I just tap the button, and the information is put on a private Google calendar he set up, called “Hollie’s Events”.
• Greg is also planning on creating an Apple Script that will pull the data off the calendar into a list. By comparing lists, I’ll be able to answer questions like, “Is it true I’m more anxious at different times in my cycle? Is exercise triggering anxiety or is it something I’m eating on the days I’m exercising?”

Over time, I’ll be able to see trends a lot faster, and I’ll have a lot more data, since this is so easy to use and I won’t skip days because I’m tired and forgot to log what I did or what I ate. The data will also be more accurate, since it will have the date and time, and not lame notes by me, like, “I think this is what I ate, I can’t quite remember”. Basically, I’ll get better information while being able to obsess a lot less about tracking. Win-win!