Chronic Illnesses are not easy AT ALL. There should be easier ways to manage your symptoms, the brain fog, and all the fatigue.. These might not make your chronic illness go away, but they may help a little with medication management and managing your symptoms!
1. Apple Health
This app is simple. It comes pre-loaded onto your iPhone. It’s a nice place to store your diagnoses, medication list, height, latest weight.. This is all helpful for when the “fog” hits you at a doctor’s appointment. It also tells you how many steps you’ve walked, how far, how many flights of stairs you’ve climbed, and how many calories this burned!
2. MyFitnessPal by Under Armour
MyFitnessPal provides wonderful food tracking along with calorie and vitamin intake. It tracks your weight fluctuations with a handy chart and encourages you to reach your goal weight with some confetti and projected weight in 5 weeks. It also has many workouts, health articles, and food ideas and recipes all on the same app in a super easy to navigate layout.
3. HidrateSpark
If you don’t have a HidrateSpark water bottle – you should definitely get one. It lights up and reminds you to drink water – especially if you’re behind on your hydration goal! For more information on this, head over to www.hidratespark.com.
However, if you don’t want to buy a water bottle, the app works this way too – you just have to manually input the amount of ounces or bottles/glasses of water you drank. When you’re filling out your profile, you can also choose why you want to drink more water – if you’re really fit, if you want to lose weight, or if you want to increase your overall wellbeing. The app tracks your water intake, gives you hydration goals based on the elevation/activity level/weather, and has fun little “punny” notifications to keep you drinking water throughout the day.
4. Symple
This is a really easy to use symptom tracker. It has a “photos” section so you can see changes in your weight and overall appearance, a “factors” sections to keep track of your steps/sleep/weather and how that affects your symptoms, a “journal” section to help you remember what you did that day/what the doctor said, and it can create a doctor’s report about all of these for your doctor to help you manage your symptoms.
5. Daylio
Daylio keeps track of your mood or how you’re feeling along with factors that impact your mood. These factors can be anything, for example: weather, running errands, driving, travel, being with friends – and it creates a chart for you to see what you do that makes you feel your best, feel “good”, feel “meh”, feel “bad”, and feel “awful”. This way, you can decide what to do more and less of so that you always feel your best!
6. Flaredown
Flaredown tracks your habits, your symptoms, and your flare-ups, so that you do less of what caused previous flare ups and more of what has caused you to NOT flare up!
Control those flare-ups (please read in Jonathan Van Ness voice)!
