It's said that (for those of us with full visual faculties) we process something like 80% of what we learn visually. Color-coding, shading and graphs are some ways of marking differences between between values and degrees of value, helping us digest large amounts of complex information in a single glance. Consider the political map, with each country, state, county, or other subdivision in a different color. "Red" states and "blue" states. Degrees of obesity per state. And so on.

Consider the color-coded diagram of the human digestive system. Red stomach, yellow intestines, pink colon, green gallbladder, brown liver. What color is your pancreas? Do you want to color it in World Diabetes Day blue to indicate yours has died?

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As an engineer by training, I find quantitative analysis -- numbers -- an expression of control. Self control, exercise, body function, health and illness... So while I'm fortunate enough not to have to be "Bionic Betty" with a peripheral pancreas, I still refer regularly to six separate instruments, plus additional Web-based resources, to manage my food intake, exercise output, and biometric information.

Weight. Some folk say weighing once a week is enough, but I find that if I don't weigh in every morning, my weight can go off on very health-unfriendly curves. I log my weight both in The Daily Plate and in my personal Excel workbook.

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...but no place to correlate it all.

Yet.

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This is not the post I planned to write this morning.

Having a nearly one-hour commute (everyone flees the city in the summer, so traffic is much, much lighter) often gives me a lot of time to think. This morning I thought about what a crappy mood I had been in on Sunday and that it had carried over to this morning.

I tried to blame it on the kids: a four-day weekend trying to keep the kids entertained and not arguing and generally not getting on my nerves is exhausting.

I tried to blame it on AF: though she has left the building.

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The Joy Of The Mundane on Flickr

For the past few years, I've gotten into the bad diabetes habit of skipping boluses. Not food boluses. But blood sugar boluses. I have the habit of foregoing boluses when my blood sugar is 160 and under. I'll see a 140 or 155 and skip the bolus instead of bringing it down to 100. But above 160, I'm good about bolusing to bring the number down (something about those 180s and 200s scare me into submission).

I know that this extremely bad habit leaves my averages a little higher than they should be. And I'm not sure exactly why I do this...maybe over the years, a 150 doesn't seem so bad. Maybe I just get tired of so many injections a day so I leave off the "unnecessary" ones. Maybe it's some habit that I started in my childhood. (READ MORE)

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.

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