Cylinder Health

I’ve had GI issues since my mid-30s which escalated early last year to multiple doctor visits, 2 invasive procedures and a prescription medication (that didn’t work). Not only did none of the appointments help, I paid literally thousands of dollars. I joined Cylinder and was admittedly skeptical. Frankly, I didn’t think an app with a GI team could help, especially if gastrointestinal doctors couldn’t. Boy was I wrong. I started with some pretty simple things like tracking food and symptoms and had an appointment with a GI specialist registered dietitian. After that first appointment I left feeling like it was the first time anyone had ACTUALLY listened to me and approached my issues with actual curiosity. It wasn’t that feeling you get when you know a doctor is just looking to put you on medication because they don’t know what else to do. She asked me to keep tracking for a week and we would start to try and uncover foods or ingredients that may be causing my stomach problems. Fast forward 3 weeks and a couple of appointments and we were able to identify 2 “triggers” that have been causing 99% of my issues. I was shocked. I really wish I would have found Cylinder years ago (or at least last year before I wasted $4000 in deductibles) because I feel like a new man!

Tracking food is a pain in the bum, It would be nice just to record what you eat when you want, instead of going to recommended lists to choose from and then taking you to servings and nutritional pages to fill out. It’s unnecessary to me and takes to long in my opinion. I can’t even join challenges which again you need to record what you eat. And recipes! I try to add a my own dish and you can’t list all the ingredients at one time in the same place but you have to list them individually, also when you list everything you will get a pop up of foods/recipes to choose from, for example when I try to add my homemade chicken & vegetable soup, I get all kinds of soups that I can possibly choose from like Mary’s chicken & bone broth soup. Who is Mary and why would I select that? I want to add my own Soup but you can’t advance to the next page without choosing something they have already listed. It’s aggravating to say the least!

I’m just starting with this app and so far have found some helpful information regarding digestion, they ask you to log your food for at least 3 days. I already do daily food logging using the LoseIt app so I need to duplicate it in Cylinder. The food database they are using is sad, many food items not found, serving sizes are lacking, each food item gets a date and timestamp when entered, so if you are logging a meal after you ate it, you need to adjust time on every single entry. No ability to just group food under Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, Snacks. No nutrition is displayed. Very time consuming entry and results are not useful. They really need a way to import data from more robust food apps.