Benefits of "micro-tracking" for personal health measurements?

post by VipulNaik · 2021-01-19T14:58:51.570Z · LW · GW · 1 comment

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I'm interested in understanding the benefits of what I call "micro-tracking" for their health: tracking information such as diet, heart rate, exercise routine, etc. at a granularity finer than a day.

Starting last year, and likely expanding further into this year, I am using a more "macro-tracking" approach.

For instance, for supplements, this macro-tracking simply involves tracking the start and end date of consumption of each supplement bottle. This means roughly one new data entry per month. The corresponding "micro-tracking" approach would be to record each time I take a supplement, possibly with other information such as the time of day, relation with meal, etc.

Similarly, for food, I do record all purchases of restaurant food in my activity tracker (albeit not in a computable format). I am now thinking of adding information on the specifics of all food purchases (from both grocery stores and restaurants) in a computable format. This is a macro-tracking approach. The corresponding micro-tracking approach would mean recording each meal, including information such as time of day, quantity of various foods in the meal, etc. (For the most part I do not share food with others, and my food waste is near-zero, so purchases = consumption; I can record exceptions separately).

Disadvantages I see of micro-tracking:

1. Time: It looks like micro-tracking adds a nontrivial daily overhead of tracking work. Time is very important to me. Even more so, time that I need to spend daily, when I might be pressed for time on other tasks, is even more important.
2. Difficulty with micro-quantification (for food): It's an extra hassle to quantify exactly how much food I am consuming. When consuming cooked food, I am usually helping myself from a large bowl of prepared food and may go from 70% to 65% of it or something like that. The food isn't perfectly mixed either, so some days I might end up having more of the tomatoes part and other days I might end up having more of the spinach part.
3. Aggregation effort: Once all the micro-quantities are entered, I need to aggregate them to extract meaningful data. If I enter data at a more aggregated level, this is somewhat easier.

Advantages I see of micro-tracking, and why these did not ultimately convince me:

1. Better correlational analysis of day-to-day fluctuations: If I were micro-tracking my moods, physiological measurements, and physical reactions as well as my food and supplement intake, I might be able to identify what patterns of food or supplement intake correlate with what moods. People I know who micro-track tend to have reasons like this.

   This is a pretty good reason for some people. People who suffer from allergic reactions, stomach issues, or large mood swings could probably benefit from such diagnostic data very concretely. In my case, I haven't had major issues of this sort frequently; the few rare times I do have such issues, I manually record in my notes folder along with details specific to the situation. I also don't trust my self-reflection to assign quantifiable and consistent measures of things like my mood.

2. Having micro-tracking permits some sort of aggregations that wouldn't be possible just with macro-tracking, such as information on time of day, time gaps, etc.: For instance, rather than just know how much of a Vitamin D supplement I took in the last three years, I can learn how much of it I took in the mornings versus at night, and what the day-to-day fluctuation in intake was. Possibly, such details matter a lot for assessing the impact of the supplement.

   I agree that this is a potential benefit; however, as of now I am not collecting enough fine-grained data on the other side to meaningfully correlate with. It seems to me that combining total consumption with some general information on when I usually consume supplements is enough.

I'm curious to hear what people think I'm missing, or any other insights people want to share!

UPDATE 2024-11-21: These are the practices I settled on:

• Starting March 2021 (a little over a month after this post), I have been recording all my food purchases here. I also entered nutritional information for most of the foods I purchased, which allows me to do crude calculation of nutrient consumption.

• Starting June 2024, I have been recording something that's intermediate between food purchase and consumption: the preparation or opening of food. For a raw vegetable or something like rice or lentils, this corresponds to when I add it to a cooked meal; for a packet or bottle, this corresponds to when I open it to start consumption. The information can be found here.

  This has proved to be a better proxy than purchase tracking (though I'm still doing purchase tracking as well). The main advantage is that preparation or opening is more granular and closer to the time of actual consumption. This became particularly relevant for foods that I purchase in larger quantities, like rice, lentils, and yogurt.

• I've also written a bunch of verification queries for both purchases and preparations and openings. These queries run automatically as part of the make commands I run to reload data after any data entry. This allows me to catch cases where my nutritional profile and food choices are deviating meaningfully from what I expect; in some cases, this information leads me to take action, whereas in others, it's an expected consequence of situational factors I am already aware of.

• I'm thinking of eventually making an interface for easier historical comparison of food consumption, but the verification queries (see preceding point) are good enough for now so I may not get around to making the interface in the near future.

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