Body Diary | Bill Eisenhauer

A private, plain-language log of what your body did, when, for how long, and what helped — built to be read back years later.

At a glance

A plain-language diary for your body — not a fitness tracker, not a medical record. A journal remembers your life; a body diary remembers your body.
Jot a note like “dry eyes, mild, since yesterday, tried Systane,” and it decides whether that opens a new episode or updates one already running.
It follows up on open episodes until they resolve, so each one ends with a real start, end, and length — and it remembers what helped.
It reads back and looks ahead: searchable history, per-ailment stats, a years-stacked week grid, and a nudge when something tends to show up around now.

The itch

For years I’ve had a repeating set of ailments, and every time one shows up I ask the same three questions. When did this happen to me last? How long did it last? And what did I do — if anything — to make it go away?

I never have the answers. I never wrote any of it down. If only I had some kind of body diary.

Here’s the strange part: I registered bodydiary.com sometime around 2007. I genuinely can’t remember why. It’s just sat there ever since, and every so often I’d wonder what its best use might be.

So I built it

Turns out I don’t have to wonder anymore. I can build the thing in an afternoon and just see. So with some extra weekend tokens, I did — it came together in less than a day, and honestly, it works pretty well for me.

Whether I turn it into a subscription SaaS, I don’t know yet. For now it’s mine, and it answers the questions I kept asking.

What it does

The Body Diary daily screen: a plain-language note form, a 'running long' nudge, and this-day-in-other-years — The daily screen. Note what's going on — and the diary answers back: what's running long, what happened around this day in other years.

The whole thing runs on one idea: you write in plain language, and the diary does the bookkeeping. You note something — “dry eyes, mild, since yesterday, tried Systane” — and it works out whether to open a new episode or add a reading to one that’s already going. Then it checks back on a widening cadence, a couple of days and then a few more, asking only better, same, worse, or gone, until the thing closes. That’s how every complaint ends up with a start, an end, and a length, without me tracking any of it.

The point is reading it back. Searchable history across everything, per-ailment stats — how often, a typical run, the worst one — and a “years stacked” view, one row per year and one cell per week, where patterns I’d never have noticed just appear. It’ll tell me what helped last time. And it looks ahead a little: a heads-up when something tends to arrive around now, or has been dragging on longer than usual.

A single ailment read back: episode stats, a years-stacked week grid, seasonality, travel triggers, and what helped — One ailment, read back: typical run, longest stretch, the years stacked a week per cell, and what actually helped.

There’s more if you want it — it can factor in where you were, so travel itself can show up as a trigger, and even the weather and pollen wherever you actually were that day. But the core is simple, and it’s the part I wanted all along: write it down like a person, and let the diary remember like a machine.