I've been seeing some of the usual (and not-so-usual) issues about logging popping up lately. If it were just a matter of copying
readings off a glucometer... well, that's what the separate-purchase cable is for, right? The issue is all the other stuff
we need to log to make sense of those readings. When did you most recently eat? What did you most recently eat? Did you calculate
carbs correctly? Did you bolus correctly? Was there an issue of delayed release ("pizza effect") or sustained high (some of us have
carb thresholds beyond which we have a nonlinear response)? Were you tired? stressed? What sort of exercise did you do over the past
couple of days? How were you feeling when you tested?

And that's just the Type 1 log for someone without any other medical issues.

For most of us -- that's Type 2s, and Type 1s who have been "read the riot act" about cardiovascular issues -- we're also supposed
to be tracking blood pressure, dietary fat, saturated fat, dietary cholesterol, dietary sodium, number of calories per meal, total
number of calories per day, and total number of minutes and calories expended in exercise per day. Depending on other health issues,
we may also need to track protein, iron, potassium, or fluid consumption.

That's a whole lot of stuff to keep track of... and then when you get to the doctor, she doesn't have time to go through the two
hundred sheets of logbook you've amassed over the past three months.

I think that most of the time I'm lazy about logging, it's because I'm too busy doing other things -- but there's another possibility
to be considered.

Information overload.

When we're just copying blood glucose numbers and looking for major trends, the anomalies stick out at us like sore thumbs. It's when
we try to isolate the cause of that spike that we become overwhelmed by the number of possible contributing factors and the sheer amount of work needed to analyze it all.

When the doctor is -- as usual -- too rushed to do more than glance to see that we have been logging in this detail, we have to ask ourselves why we've bothered to put forth the effort -- why we've spent half our lives measuring and logging and living like lab rats -- why we've printed out half a ream of paper, just to be deposited into the recycle bin...

For many of us (too many?), the values of the deciduous forest and some semblance of normal life trump the value of (too much?) information.
Are we analyzing ourselves to death? Is there some middle ground that will allow us to identify trends without turning ourselves into both
investigators and lab rats? Without causing burnout? Without causing us to ignore the condition which, if not tightly controlled, will destroy
both our lives and the quality of those lives?

Finding that middle ground is necessary to keep us sane and in control.