Over the past 2 years, I am very involved in what I eat, and I have always tried to control my total number of meals. I started doing so because during Covid, my mood levels went very down and the only thing that helped me to elevate my mood was diverting my mind towards healthy eating. Therefore, I take this opportunity in the form of a project and have decided to analyze my assumption: Your food intake can affect your mood level. Further, I would like to prove that by analyzing what day of the week am I most healthy, and if my mood levels are high around that day. Therefore, this project is solely for my own use and to analyze it in the form of visualization.
Research Question:
Dataset:
For this project, I decided to create my own dataset (quantified self). The data I collected is about my personal routine of my daily meals and how I felt overall during my entire day. I recorded my meals (including what I ate during breakfast, lunch, and dinner), the number of snacks that are usually unhealthy, the days and dates of the meal, and my overall mood level of the day. The data was recorded manually because I wanted to record my mood level as well and it was not possible to do so using any application.
Visualizations and Details:
Firstly, I created a Radial Pie Gauge chart to show what food I ate and how much of that food was consumed for the month of October 2022. Secondly, a horizontal bar graph was created to depict the overall picture of the health spectrum vs mood rating, by comparing the number of healthy and nonhealthy meals with of average mood rating. This graph helps to show that healthy eating does improve overall mood. This graph tries to support my assumption that food does have an impact on mood levels. Thirdly, a comparison bar graph is created to visualize the pattern between # of meals and mood ratings throughout the week. Fourthly, the line graph does the same comparison, but it shows the pattern for the individual days all over the month. I chose a line graph because visually it is easy to see the pattern. The pattern that one can predict here is: As the number of meals increases, the mood rating goes down. It is inversely proportional to each other. The days where such a pattern is not followed could be because the intake of snacks ware healthy and that influenced the overall mood levels. From the comparison bar graph, one can also figure out that Monday is the healthiest day of the week, and mood levels are usually high as well. However, Saturday does not follow the same pattern, maybe because it is not a working day and apart from food, other factors, such as rest, stress-free, and entertainment, will be playing a role to impact the mood levels.
Dashboard:
Limitations/Conclusion:
I am very happy with my dataset; however, it is limited to one month of data. Predicting the overall nature and the correlation between food intake and mood levels can be accurate as well as inaccurate. Also, I have categorized the meal with one word (such as vegetables, bread, salad). There were days when I had a different category of food with the same meal. But just to analyze the data with less complication, I decided to enter only the bigger portion category. This can impact the results as well. Fixing these things can definitely take the project to a different level. In conclusion, the dataset and the graphs have helped to answer the asked questions.
Tableau Public Link:
