u/finndot

Hey everyone,

I was diagnosed with GERD, IBS, and SIBO back in 2021. After going through 5 endoscopies, thousands of dollars in medical bills, and being told to take 40mg of Omeprazole daily "indefinitely," I felt a bit lost. It really felt like no real effort was being made to find my actual underlying issue.and instead i was given a giant list of ingredients that may or may not be my real issue. 

To be fair, my diet back then was pretty bad... with lots of sweets, sodas, spicy food and way too much coffee on an empty stomach. I eventually tried a strict bland diet for 2 months (just chicken, rice and greens), and the irritation completely stopped. It was clear that in my case the food choices were the key, but trying to manually track complex ingredients and spot time delayed symptoms on my own was pretty impossible.

So, for the last 8 months, I’ve been coding an app to help me handle this data and spot those hidden patterns for me. I call it Puubu, and I just released it on iOS and Android.

Instead of making you type out full recipes, you can just type the meal name or take a picture, and the app estimates the ingredients for you to quickly tweak. When you log a symptom later, the algorithm cross-references overlaps, portion sizes, and delayed reactions over several weeks.

The app itself however is not an instant gratification tool. Real patterns take time to form and any app that instantly shows you results must be lying imo.

I built this to deal with my own health struggles, but I want to make it useful for others. Everyone seems to react in different ways to their conditions and if you've tried other food or symptom trackers and ended up quitting them, what did they miss? What features do you actually care about?

Like I said I would love to make this more useful and would love to hear any feedback, good or bad.

​Hey everyone,

​I was diagnosed with GERD, IBS, and SIBO back in 2021. First, I got diagnosed with SIBO and was handed a giant list of FODMAP foods to avoid and eat, which to me felt completely impossible. Figuring out what to cook and how to apply anything from this giant list was a task I just wasn't ready for.

​It also didn't feel like my doctor had a ton of confidence that this would actually solve my issues. It really felt like, "Give it a try and see which one of these might be an issue for you... good luck." My mom had colon cancer in 2014 (luckily all went well post chemo) but i wanted to get a colonoscopy to make sure it cant be inherited. That led to my first endoscopy which i had at the same time and quickly snowballed into another endoscopy and another one. I feel like with every endoscopy, my acid reflux actually became worse and happened more frequently. The main reason I went to the doctor was my digestion and prior to that I didn't really even have heartburn issues at first or at least not that I was aware of. Something I also didn't like at that time was that with every endoscopy, my data was part of some study and samples were shared without much explanation. In addition to that, despite having health care the bills kept piling up. You pay for your endoscopy but then also for labs where your samples get sent to. And it's thousands of dollars over these years.

​Pretty quickly I was put on 40mg of Omeprazole daily, then at some point, twice a day. I asked, "Okay, how long am I supposed to take this?" and the doctor said, "Indefinitely." That didn't seem like any real effort was being made to find my actual underlying issue.

​I finally started to experiment with food myself. To be fair, my diet at the time was pretty awful... lots of sweets, sodas, and way too much coffee, often on an empty stomach. So I decided to eat the most bland diet possible for 2 months straight leading up to my next endoscopy. Rice, chicken, and spinach/kale for 8 weeks. I cut sodas, coffee, and sweets. That boring diet made the irritation in my esophagus go away entirely. So for me it clearly had to do with my diet and taking Omeprazole indefinitely with potential long-term side effects was not something I was keen on.

​For the last 8 months I’ve been building an app to help me figure out my own problem. I eat a lot of different foods and sometimes I react to something, sometimes I don't. There was just no way I could spot patterns and keep track of them over time by myself. I figured an app might be a great use for this to actually help me handle the large data sets and cross-reference symptoms. So I built a meal and symptom tracker designed to find these hidden ingredient patterns over time.

​And I also wanted to make it as easy as possible to keep on track with things. The way it works is that instead of typing out a whole recipe like "Chicken Teriyaki bowl with soy sauce, garlic, onion," you just type the meal name, and the app breaks down the likely ingredients for you. To make it even easier, you can also just take a picture and the app gives you a guesstimate of the ingredients, which you can then quickly edit or tweak. When you log a symptom later, the algorithm cross-references ingredient overlaps, portion sizes, and time-delayed reactions.

​But because of the whole study where my medical data was shared, I purposely built this app so that no personal data gets shared with third-party companies other than for core app functionality, like the automated meal scans and weekly reviews. The background services only process the text or photo to break down the ingredients, and it isn't used to train public models or saved permanently there. The app also purposely has no user accounts. Everything gets stored locally right on your phone. No one but you has access to it.

​I’m not dropping a name or a link here because I want to respect the no-promotion rules. I'm genuinely just looking for insight from people who have been through a similar situation.

​I built this app tailored to my specific nightmare, but I want to make it useful for as many people as possible. It's very clear that everyone here reacts to different things and diet adjustments might not even be the solution for many of you.

​But if you've tried other trackers and hated them, what did they miss? What are the features you truly care about and would like to see in an app to give you an opportunity to help you?

​Thanks so much for taking your time and reading through my super long post.