Gut Health Storylines Review
Having a chronic illness sometimes feels like a full-time job. You feel like you spend your life juggling doctor appointments, medication refills, and pill schedules. You try to remember the different times you need to take medication and which ones need to be taken on an empty or a full stomach, but it’s hard to keep track of everything. Between brain fog and trying to live a somewhat normal life, it can be hard to keep track of everything, and this is where the Gut Health Storylines app can help. With Gut Storylines, you can easily record your symptoms, food reactions, bowel patterns, moods, and more for Crohn’s disease, ulcerative colitis (UC), or other inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD). Having all this information in one place can help you to learn more about your health and can help you manage your illness.
I have been given this product as part of a product review through the Chronic Illness Bloggers network. Although the product was a gift, all opinions in this review remain my own and I was in no way influenced by the company.
The app is simple to install from Google Play or the Apple store. After you download the app and sign up for a Health Storylines account you reach the home screen for the app.
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You are given several options to start with. You can:
- Write a journal– Document your thoughts around your health and daily living, reflect on what you’re thankful for, log accomplishments that you made for the day, etc.
- Log your daily moods– I found it interesting to look back over time and see if my moods corresponded with my symptoms. They didn’t exactly, but there was a trend of my physical difficult days being more mentally difficult as well.
- Log your symptoms– This gives you a chance to enter your regular symptoms and rate their severity for each day. This is really useful as over time you can see the pattern of your symptoms and maybe figure out if there are certain triggers.
- Log your daily vitals
- Track your medications by creating a list and setting up reminders. This is a really handy tool as sometimes I have so many medications and supplements that have to be taken at a certain time of day. It’s really easy to forget, so I appreciate the ability to set an alarm.
- Make an appointment calendar– Keep track of the time and date for your various appointments all in one place.
- Enjoy a daily dose of healthy wisdom for your mind and spirit
You also have the flexibility of adding additional tools or deleting the tools that you don’t use. For instance, I added a food diary as a new tool that became available this month. The tool library makes all of these features simple to use.
Another feature is the ability to participate in several communities. There’s the Gut Storylines community where there are various polls about coping with your condition, as well as an opportunity to make suggestions for questions to ask the community. You also have the opportunity to create your own circle of support.
My favorite feature of the app is that I don’t have to remember to log in to track my symptoms every day, it actually reminds me about that too.
Overall I found the Gut Storylines app to be helpful in managing the day-to-day details of living with my illness. It was helpful to have all the information in one place with easy access, and the best thing about the app is that it is completely free.