Attention Data Lovers!

Confession: I am a dinosaur.

I am not tech-savvy, and other than my phone and my computer, I have almost zero electronic gadgets, gizmos, and doohickeys, and cannot for the life of me relate at all to people who line up outside electronics stores the night before a new product is released from their favorite company just so they can be the very first in their family or friend group to get their grubby mitts on the latest and greatest. That I figured out how to create even this sad little blog is nothing short of a miracle. (This is really pathetic, considering I graduated from Carnegie Mellon, which is one of the foremost computer engineering universities in the world. Alas, I studied creative writing there, which is why the writing part of my site is so much better than the aesthetics and functionality.)

BUT: this post is not about me. It’s about you. Specifically, it’s about those of you who are tech savvy, and also those of you who are data junkies.

I am not a data junkie. I don’t have spreadsheets, apps, and wearable devices loaded with numbers and metrics about my body. I don’t own blood or breath ketone meters, nor a heart rate monitor, nor a blood pressure cuff, nor a Fitbit, nor a fancy-schmancy watch that keeps track of running pace. Like I said: di-no-saur.

HOWEVER! I know many of you, dear readers, are not living like it’s 1987 (except my phone and computer are both way smaller now), and you do enjoy employing the technology available to track all sorts of health-related data.

With this in mind, allow me introduce you to Heads Up Health. The people at Heads Up Health have asked me to let you know about the very handy one-stop-shop they’ve created for you to keep track of all your data in one convenient place.

Before we go any further, let me answer some questions:

• Do I have an affiliate relationship with Heads Up Health? No.
• Do I make even one penny if you choose to create an account with Heads Up Health? No.
• So why am I telling you about them? Because they asked me to, and I’m a nice person. (Also, I think this a very neat tool that many of you will be interested in.)

They’ve asked me to tell you about this unique tool because they know that people who read my blog care about their health and generally go out of their way to eat a good, low-carb, Paleo, Primal, or ketogenic diet, and be somewhat physically active. You might also have a variety of healthcare providers you see, depending on what’s going on with you at any given time. Wouldn’t it be nice if there were some sort of central repository for your medical information from your medical doctor, your naturopath, your chiropractor, osteopath, and village shaman? Wouldn’t it be really nice if you didn’t have to sort through the overflowing stack of papers stuffed into the shoebox where you stash copies of your labwork and other medical records? (Or is that just me? :-/ )Wouldn’t it be nice if all of that could somehow be compiled together, all in one place, and you could access it easily any time you wanted?

And would it be even better if, in the very same place, you could also keep track of the things you, yourself, measure on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis? How about if you could record your blood glucose, ketones, blood pressure, heart rate, body weight, BMI, body fat percentage,  hours of sleep, basal temperature, meditation time, and more?

Well, Heads Up Health is exactly that: like I said, a one-stop-shop for all of this. It even syncs with a slew of programs & apps that you might already be using, but the benefit of this is that your data will be together in the same place as your medical records – EVERYTHING, in one neat package. (Heads Up Health can import data from MyFitnessPal, Fitbit, Garmin, Microsoft Health, Google Fit, Jawbone, Apple Watch, Apple Health, and more.) As I mentioned, you can also import your records from a multitude of medical centers, hospitals, and clinics around the country.

In addition to consolidating your data in one convenient place, something I really like about Heads Up Health is that it allows you to graph various parameters over time, so you can look at trends in, say, your weight, or blood pressure, or sleep duration. You can even compare and contrast most of the metrics, so, for example, you could plot your blood glucose together with sleep and see if your fasting blood glucose is higher on mornings after a night of insufficient sleep. Or you can graph your blood pressure, BMI, or whatever else you like, against your exercise time, to see if your physical activity efforts are having an influence on those. It’s very neat, actually. Even as someone who doesn’t obsessively track 98% of this stuff, I can see the utility and convenience of this system for those of you who do. (Even if you’re not “obsessive,” but just want the convenience of having everything all together.)

Besides just syncing your medical records from several disparate practitioners and facilities, you can also enter data manually, such as triglycerides, HDL, A1c, vitamin D, and tons and tons of markers related to cardiovascular function, kidney and liver function, etc. And you can display those graphically, as well, to identify trends and/or correlate changes in them with changes to your diet, physical activity, sleep, and more. This seems especially cool, and might be right up some of your alleys.

If you’d like to learn a little more about this company and what they’re doing, their founder and CEO wrote a guest post on Robb Wolf’s site recently with more details. (I told the rep who reached out to me that my following is approximately one-zillionth the size or Robb’s, and that anyone interested in this would most likely have already jumped on it after seeing it there, but I also said I would still tell people about it on my own blog just in case.)

So, if you’re into tracking your data, and you’re looking for a very easy and convenient way to do it, check out Heads Up Health.

If you have concerns about the privacy of your personal data, HIPAA compliance, etc., I recommend that you contact the company to ask all your questions and to make sure you understand the parameters under which you would be entering your data into this system.

Disclaimer: Amy Berger, MS, CNS, NTP, is not a physician and Tuit Nutrition, LLC, is not a medical practice. The information contained on this site is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any medical condition and is not to be used as a substitute for the care and guidance of a physician. Links in this post and all others may direct you to amazon.com, where I will receive a small amount of the purchase price of any items you buy through my affiliate links.