Before answering the question “Why?”, Let’s define what it means to “keep a diary in detail”.
✔ ️ Timely record your blood sugar, insulin dosage and time of administration, amount of carbohydrates eaten and meal time.
✔ ️ Describe in detail the composition of each meal / snack.
✔ ️ Write down your feelings; symptoms of hypoglycemia; factors potentially affecting sugar (sports, day of the menstrual cycle, illness, etc.).
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WHY DO I DO THIS?
1. Diary is convenient! It is easier and more efficient to analyze indicators when they are recorded on any physical medium, and not only in memory.
2. The ability to provide your endocrinologist with the most complete information about your sugar, diet and lifestyle. It’s easier to show the diary than to try to explain it on the fingers.
3. Ability to analyze and adjust your nutrition. It is especially important for those who gradually gain weight month after month, and why is not clear. You are probably taking unconscious snacks or have frequent hypoglycemia, which you stop with a lot of fast carbs. Keeping a journal can help you identify such moments.
The diary allows you to learn how to analyze your sugars, evaluate the body’s response to different foods, makes it possible to evaluate the pauses between insulin administration and food intake, and much more.
4. Additional motivation. It is much more pleasant to see beautiful numbers, values, graphs in the diary.
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Friends, do you keep a self-control diary? If so, in which format: electronic or paper?