The Benefits of Maintaining a Regular Health Diary

The path to creating a healthy workplace culture starts with a self-conscious workforce. In every scenario, a person who is always aware and cautious of his/her health is fitter than the ones who are not. Thus, self-awareness of one’s health issue and precaution is imperative for employee health.

When creating a wellness program, you should make it more holistic in nature that caters to every aspect of your employees’ well-being. It is the responsibility of the organization to keep its workforce more aware and updated on prevailing wellness trends and matters. One of the key aspects that all employees must be aware of is personal accountability for a fitter lifestyle.

And how to keep a track of your employees’ health information? Well, regularly maintaining a diary can be your answer. You can encourage your employees to keep a track of their health either by logging in through a wellness app like Vantage Fit or manually through journal entries.

A health diary is a sign of responsible work which helps individuals to be aware of their health. It takes into account all the relevant information that can affect a person's health. This is why maintaining one has become so important recently.

Maintaining a health diary is beneficial for many other reasons as well. Let's have a quick look at a few of these.

The Benefits of Maintaining a Regular Health Diary

1. Better Understanding of One's Health

A health diary will give you a better understanding of your health. In most cases, people often don't realize their medical symptoms or illness. This ignorance of one's health can magnify one's health issues even more. By keeping a health diary, you will be highly engaged with your health and how you can take better care of it.

2. Cuts out Guesswork

Most of the time, when we fall ill, we tend to be doctors ourselves. Here, our inevitable action plan is to enter our symptoms into Google and figure out the illness. This is never sensible nor informative. It only adds to the guesswork and lousy mental health.

By maintaining a health diary, you can eliminate this guesswork to a vast extent. It is because you will have a better understanding of your health and what is affecting it. This will save you a lot of unnecessary trouble.

3. Cost-Effective

A health diary is a very cost-effective tool for employee health. A proper health diary also educates its user on the credibility of the medications consumed. While maintaining a record of your daily prescription in the journal, you will have a better idea of which drugs have a better effect.

It can help you save a lot of money and lessen the employee healthcare costs as well.

4. Saves Time

Sometimes, doctors need to make a thorough study of their patients. This takes up a lot of time and energy for the patients. Regularly maintaining a diary will always be a great time-saver in this regard. Most of the relevant information will be present already, which can save you a lot of time running from tests to tests.

5. Analyze Patterns

From a health perspective, it is crucial to analyze patterns when and where they evolve. Here, there may be a food one is allergic to, any pet that can affect one's health, etc. Knowing these patterns can be a great tool to prevent illness in day-to-day life. Here, keeping a regular and detailed health journal can help to ascertain these patterns.

Related Article: 6 Ways Employers Can Prevent Allergies At Work

6. Accountability

Everyone must be accountable for their actions. A health diary instills this vital healthy habit in employees by becoming self-conscious of their health. This habit is a crucial one which will serve them well for the rest of their life.

7. Know your Effort's Results

Each of us undertakes individual efforts to better our health. Here, the measurement of these efforts is also necessary to ascertain the viability of the steps. You must know if your efforts are worth the time or if it's time to change your regime. Keeping a detailed journal will also help you ascertain this fact.

8. Informative Report for Doctor's Appointment

Last but not least, it is a handy tool to plan your doctor appointments. An adequately maintained health diary proves to a worthy companion that can help your doctor design your treatment plan. In the end, this paves the way for a speedy and proper recovery.

These were a few of the advantages of maintaining a health diary. Here, to obtain these results, you must also know how to keep a health diary. You must know what to include, time frame requirements, etc. You can better achieve this by following the points below.

Pointers On How To Maintain A Health Diary

1. Custom Built

Usually, a health journal contains information affecting your health. But, since all of us will have different conditions, it must be customizable. You should mainly focus on the diseases that are common for you and what information will help you prevent them.

Here, you can also ask your doctors for recommendations on what to include. Generally, your journal should consist of your common illnesses, injuries, hospitalizations, surgeries, allergies, hereditary conditions, etc., if any.

Related Article: Office Workers’ Health Problems: 7 Common Ailments & Their Remedies

2. Accuracy

A health journal must be accurate. To do so, you must be sure and precise of all the entries you make in the diary. Here, be sure to use the journal regularly. Also, if you are entering symptoms of allergies, mention the starting date of the same. You must keep the date against all the significant occurrences in your health issues.

3. Medical Records

There will always be instances wherein you will need technical information about your health. In this regard, you will need to include the critical points of your past medical reports in your health journal. You can either keep a snapshot of it or a xerox copy.

4. Doctor's Help

Naturally, doctors will know more about your conditions than you. Therefore, it is vital to ask for their recommendations on what to include in your journal. For example, they may need a detailed nutrition intake for a week. In this case, you should have thorough nutritional information in your health log.

Apart from this, here are a few questions that you can ask your doctors for help.

• Type of information required in your health journal according to your health
• How detailed should a journal be, daily, weekly, bi-weekly input, etc.?
• Insertion of medical reports
• What prescriptions to store for future use
• Family medical history, etc.

Abiding by these pointers should help you maintain a perfect health diary. Here, it is also vital to have an ideal tool for keeping such information. While a traditional log works fine, it is always better to take a bit of digital help from a journal app in this regard.

For example, you can take the help of our very own corporate wellness app, Vantage Fit- An Employee Health and Corporate Wellness Platform.

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How Can Vantage Fit Help You Maintain A Health Diary

Being a corporate wellness platform, Vantage Fit is a well-equipped mobile app with many features, one such being a health diary. Now, you can input your information anywhere digitally on the go. Additionally, with our in-built step tracker, mood meters, nutrition tracker, and fitness tracker, you can keep and input an accurate count of your health.

Besides these, Vantage Fit is packed with a host of different facilities to help improve your health. To know more about our platform, you can schedule a demo at your convenience and see it all for yourself.

Conclusion

Therefore, keeping a health diary can save your company or yourself millions of dollars in health care costs. As technology advances, you can now keep track of your health to prevent chronic illnesses or reduce hospital visits for minor inconveniences.

Furthermore, by monitoring your nutrition, glucose level, and a variety of other health conditions regardless of where you are or what time of day it is, you can take an offensive position with your personal healthcare.

Hopefully, this article helped you to understand the benefits of maintaining a health diary, either through a journal or an app and enlightened you with the why, how, and what Vantage Fit can do for you in this area.

This article is written by Jyoti Prakash Barman. He is an in-house Content Marketer at Vantage Fit with interests in music and automobiles. For any related queries, contact editor@vantagecircle.com