Does anyone know a good app for recording food, meds etc?

catloverfromwayback

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I’ve been recording Daisy’s poos, food and medications on Notes on my iPad. I’ve been looking around on the App store and Googling for something more structured, like a calendar more or less, but that isn’t loaded with cutesy cartoons (ugh) or requiring email addresses and registration. Something more like a writable template, I guess. Anyone know of such?

(Apologies if this is the wrong place or there has already been such a thread, I did search first!)
 

LTS3

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Some people just use a regular notebook and write in their cat's info. daftcat75 daftcat75 might use some app / program / technology thing for his cat.

A spreadsheet can have multiple tabs for whatever you need to record. Most computers have Excel or other equivalent program. Google has the Sheets online spreadsheet editor which is free but you do need to sign up to access it if you don't already have a Google account.
 

daftcat75

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I use Google Sheets. It's free. I can access it from any device. I can share it with vets and specialists, if necessary. It has pretty much everything I need, and it's simple to maintain.

Let me show you a screenshot of this week.
betty-book.png


Each tab is a seven day week, starting on Sunday. Betty gets five meals a day and a few kibbles (about five pieces or 1.5 grams at 4.07 calories/gram) once a week simply to get her butt onto and keep it in the baby scale long enough to get her once a week weight. This week she weighed in at 9.60 lbs. Last week she weighed in at 9.64. This is within the rounding error of the scale.

Each day is three columns: the meals, the calories per gram of that food, and the total calories of that meal. If I'm mixing foods like a food transition, I'll either add a separate row for the other food or calculate the calories per gram of whatever slop I'm mixing. I have a tab way on the other end called Calculations that has a few tables for me to plug in numbers like how much of food A at x calories per gram plus how much of food B at y calories per gram gives me a food of a combined z calories per gram.

I use colors to help me focus on specific meals or incidents. A week with an "(I)" in its title means there was an incident that week. With Betty, that's usually hairballs--but that week might have been a couple scarf and barfs as we switched her food up and she really liked the new mix. Looking at Monday, I have a yellow 37 with the triangle in the upper right corner. That means there is a Comment attached to that cell. I use that feature a lot to remind myself of anything I may have noticed during this meal. For this particular yellow cell, this is when we started Rx Clay for an unfriendly bacteria strain that keeps showing up in her gut biome testing. She was hesitant about this meal even though the Rx Clay was only 1/16 of a tsp of powder. She did eventually finish that lunch and today's lunch with the same. The blue cells on Tuesday mean these are planned meals but I haven't booked them yet. When she turns in a clean plate, I can flip the blue cell to no fill, aka I book those calories. If she leaves a remainder, I weighed the plate that went down and I weigh the plate I pick up. I book the difference. On Sunday, her second dinner (fifth entry) was 18 grams. There's a little triangle there to tell me there's a note or comment. In this case, since last week she left a few remainders and her weight was still stable, the note reads, "Left a remainder. She probably doesn't need it anyway."

The purple days--Monday in this case--are the days I give her every other day medicine (mirtazapine.) When I duplicate this week's tab to create next week's worksheet, I will go back a couple of weeks to copy a purple Sunday row. But I also keep her mirtz days in my Apple Calendar on an every other day repeat. That's really what helps me keep them straight. The purple days are just documentation for me now.

Finally, there's those three numbers in A23 to A25. That's a running calculation of her average daily calories. That's why I sometimes fill in those blue cells before I feed those meals. I need to revise the Goal for the week because I don't believe she actually needs 175. She seems stable enough on 170 but last week was 156 average daily calories. So for now, we're just monitoring that average daily calories and her weekly weigh-in to see if she's eating too little, too much, or just enough.

I know it looks and sounds like a lot. But it's iterative. That means you can start with however little or much you want to keep track of. Each week is duplicated from the previous week. You'll have to spend a few minutes resetting any colors and zeroing out the meals. But that will become Sunday ritual. Any changes to the sheet one week, you can carry forward into the next week. So you can start simple, and grow into all the data points I track as you iterate over this task from one day to the next and one week to another.
 
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catloverfromwayback

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I use Google Sheets. It's free. I can access it from any device. I can share it with vets and specialists, if necessary. It has pretty much everything I need, and it's simple to maintain.

Let me show you a screenshot of this week.
View attachment 428230

Each tab is a seven day week, starting on Sunday. Betty gets five meals a day and a few kibbles (about five pieces or 1.5 grams at 4.07 calories/gram) once a week simply to get her butt onto and keep it in the baby scale long enough to get her once a week weight. This week she weighed in at 9.60 lbs. Last week she weighed in at 9.64. This is within the rounding error of the scale.

Each day is three columns: the meals, the calories per gram of that food, and the total calories of that meal. If I'm mixing foods like a food transition, I'll either add a separate row for the other food or calculate the calories per gram of whatever slop I'm mixing. I have a tab way on the other end called Calculations that has a few tables for me to plug in numbers like how much of food A at x calories per gram plus how much of food B at y calories per gram gives me a food of a combined z calories per gram.

I use colors to help me focus on specific meals or incidents. A week with an "(I)" in its title means there was an incident that week. With Betty, that's usually hairballs--but that week might have been a couple scarf and barfs as we switched her food up and she really liked the new mix. Looking at Monday, I have a yellow 37 with the triangle in the upper right corner. That means there is a Comment attached to that cell. I use that feature a lot to remind myself of anything I may have noticed during this meal. For this particular yellow cell, this is when we started Rx Clay for an unfriendly bacteria strain that keeps showing up in her gut biome testing. She was hesitant about this meal even though the Rx Clay was only 1/16 of a tsp of powder. She did eventually finish that lunch and today's lunch with the same. The blue cells on Tuesday mean these are planned meals but I haven't booked them yet. When she turns in a clean plate, I can flip the blue cell to no fill, aka I book those calories. If she leaves a remainder, I weighed the plate that went down and I weigh the plate I pick up. I book the difference. On Sunday, her second dinner (fifth entry) was 18 grams. There's a little triangle there to tell me there's a note or comment. In this case, since last week she left a few remainders and her weight was still stable, the note reads, "Left a remainder. She probably doesn't need it anyway."

The purple days--Monday in this case--are the days I give her every other day medicine (mirtazapine.) When I duplicate this week's tab to create next week's worksheet, I will go back a couple of weeks to copy a purple Sunday row. But I also keep her mirtz days in my Apple Calendar on an every other day repeat. That's really what helps me keep them straight. The purple days are just documentation for me now.

Finally, there's those three numbers in A23 to A25. That's a running calculation of her average daily calories. That's why I sometimes fill in those blue cells before I feed those meals. I need to revise the Goal for the week because I don't believe she actually needs 175. She seems stable enough on 170 but last week was 156 average daily calories. So for now, we're just monitoring that average daily calories and her weekly weigh-in to see if she's eating too little, too much, or just enough.

I know it looks and sounds like a lot. But it's iterative. That means you can start with however little or much you want to keep track of. Each week is duplicated from the previous week. You'll have to spend a few minutes resetting any colors and zeroing out the meals. But that will become Sunday ritual. Any changes to the sheet one week, you can carry forward into the next week. So you can start simple, and grow into all the data points I track as you iterate over this task from one day to the next and one week to another.
Thank you, that sounds like it might be just what I need!
 
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