One of the more frustrating things about living with autoimmune disease and/or related conditions is that there are so many variables that can affect us at any given time. When you wake up in the morning in a flare, is it because you didn’t sleep well enough? Or because you ate something that triggered symptoms the day before? Or something else? When we don’t know what is causing us to feel bad, we don’t know what we need to do to fix it.

That’s why tracking your activities and symptoms is so important. I know it feels like a pain in the butt to do, but by keeping a journal of what you are doing, what you are eating, and how you are feeling, it can really help you to figure out causal relationships. For example, I keep track of what I eat pretty consistently. I started to notice that after I went to some restaurants, I would wake up the next morning with joint pain and feeling puffy. I went back to look at my tracker, and the answer was pretty clear - every time I woke up with symptoms, I had eaten something with tomatoes. I had isolated the variable.

This is also important in exercise. Different autoimmune bodies react differently to different things, and all exercises impact the body differently. You may find that walking too much triggers a flare, but that riding a bike is fine. Or you may find that if you exercise in the morning, you feel fine, but if you exercise in the afternoon, you wake up with symptoms. The only way to know is to track it! But believe me, once you have isolated the variables, it will put you on the path to getting stronger without putting yourself into a flare.