I record everything related to my diabetes. Everything. I have a spreadsheet that I record it all in which I update every night. My records go right back to 2008 when I started properly testing again after a period of darkness. I was on MDI back then but I have graduated through carb counting to pump therapy today.
Recently I have been updating my spreadsheet to pull out some facts and figures over the last year. I need to use this information to improve my control but it has shown me some surprising numbers from last year. The two that I find most fascinating are that I did 2,683 blood glucose tests and, slightly disturbing, I ate 124,669g of carbs! That’s 125kg. Of Carbs! Wow. To put this into some context I am 2 metres tall and I weigh about approx 94kg. Although when I write this it doesn’t make it seem any better.
I class a hyper as a blood glucose of 12 or over and a hypo as a blood glucose of less than 4. Of the 2,683 bg tests I did 474 were hypers and 114 where hypos. I am pleased with the number of hypos as although this is still high I have improved this since November and I have only had 15 from 01 Nov until today. My hypers are something that I am going to have to work on though.
By posting this I can already see that I need to gather some more stats from my spreadsheet (no of corrections, no of tests in range, standard deviation, a nice pie chart, total insulin dose & total basal & total bolus) but, more importantly, I can also see where I need to focus my efforts to improve my control.
For me this level of data collection works, despite the effort, and I would love to hear how you collect your data and what you do with it.
PS. My biggest month was September 2014 when I ate 546g of carbs in one day!