9 Jun
Okay so I've been down the supplement rabbit hole for about six months now and I finally hit a wall. My Instagram feed is basically one long ad for adaptogens and "hormone support" blends and I genuinely cannot tell anymore what's a real person's experience and what's a gifted post. So I'm done with that as a research method. What I'm actually doing right now: I picked one thing. Just one. Vitamin D, because my OBGYN mentioned my levels were on the low end at my last physical and I figured that was at least a real data point from a real clinician rather than a reel from someone with perfect lighting. Here's my extremely unglamorous tracking system. I have a notes app on my phone and every morning I write maybe two sentences. Sleep okay or not. Energy by 3pm, yes or no. Mood, one word. That's it. I've been doing it for about five weeks. What I can tell you so far: absolutely nothing conclusive. Some better weeks, some worse. I have no idea if that's the vitamin D, the fact that I started eating actual breakfast instead of just coffee, the weather getting slightly less depressing, or pure randomness. Probably all of it. Probably none of it. But here's the thing I keep coming back to. Before I started writing anything down I was convinced things were getting worse every single week. Now that I have actual notes I can see that's not true. Some weeks are genuinely fine. I just wasn't remembering the fine weeks because the bad ones hit harder. I'm not saying the tracking fixed anything. I'm saying it made me slightly less convinced I was losing my mind, which is its own kind of win I guess. I do have a question for anyone who's done something similar: how long did you track before you felt like you had enough to actually bring to your OBGYN? I want to go in with something useful, not just "I've been tired and weird for a year." I'm saving my notes but I don't know when there's enough of them. ETA: not looking for supplement recs, genuinely just curious how other people have structured this.