Log Your Way to Better Health

As you go through the Signos Weight Management Program, you will come across a critical element to help you harness biofeedback from your CGM and optimize health behaviors.

“Food journaling,” “food logging,” or “meal tracking” are all terms for the same thing.  Food logging is a form of self-monitoring, or observing and regulating your behavior. Food and hydration logging, exercising logging, checking your glucose readings before or after an activity you do, weighing yourself at the same time daily, noting stressful events through tags to link them to your glucose at the moment, and even being part of our Signos program is all a form of self-monitoring, which improves accountability and success around your specific health goals. 

Though it seems like a time investment, it only takes a minute or two and helps you pay attention, on purpose, to your choices and bring awareness to your habits and behaviors throughout the day, which could be influencing your weight without your knowledge. This purposeful attention can help quickly identify unhelpful patterns (which then gives you the power to do something differently, if you’d like) and create a record for you to look back on changes that worked or didn’t work in terms of glucose and overall health impact. 

There is no judgment in logging and no right or wrong item to log, so you should be honest and accurate in learning about your daily lifestyle patterns! The more consistently you log your behaviors and the more you log different types of activities, including environmental stressors, through tags and notes, the better you’ll connect your real-time glucose responses with what is happening in your life and detect useful patterns over time. Signos will be most helpful to you if you 1- note your activities or stressors as soon as possible because our memories are often flawed and 2- if you use your logs daily. This includes much more than just food and extends to logging movement, sleep, and stress, which can all block your weight management efforts.

Research has found that people keeping a food diary six days a week lost twice as much weight as those who kept a food diary one day a week. This finding extends to exercise logs, even if the exercise you are starting is most accessible to you, like walking up and down your stairs at home for 10 minutes if you are physically able.

What’s unique about the Signos platform is that you can see how your body reacts to food, exercise, stress, and sleep in real-time. By logging consistently, you can discover insights about each of the key areas which lead to better metabolic health:

1. By logging food with us, you can learn which foods suit your metabolic profile best & how to combine foods into more nutrient-dense, metabolically stable meals.
2. By logging exercises with us, you’ll create a running playbook you can look back on of which exercises helps your body most.
3. By logging sleep, you will see how your internal clock and glucose are intertwined, including normal fluctuations in glucose, particularly before waking up as your body prepares to use energy.
4. By logging stress and other events through tags, you’ll see how your mind is connected to your body and how your body reacts to what you may be thinking, feeling, and experiencing at any moment.

The saying “you can’t manage what you don’t measure” is important to your health. To change certain health behaviors, you must understand patterns over time and what is happening. This is exactly what logging helps accomplish. 

Fun Note: If you log your foods, beverages, and snacks before you consume them, you’ll receive personalized insights around the food's potential glucose impact so you can decide if it’s something you’d like to have or prefer another food swap.