What is a food diary?

A food diary (or food journal) is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. It’s a simple, yet potentially very effective, tool that is used to keep track of what we’re eating and how it affects us.

You may think of this as a superfluous exercise – after all, you already know what you eat! But so much that surrounds our eating choices and habits is done automatically, unthinkingly, quickly and even reactively, that it is all too easy to lose track, or just simply forget the details of what you have eaten in a given day.

A food diary is extremely helpful for stripping everything back and helping you see a bigger, fuller picture of your day-to day.

When you are dealing with unwanted symptoms, especially if they are gut-related or have an allergy-type reaction, a food diary is extremely helpful for stripping everything back and helping you see a bigger, fuller picture of your day-to day, and this can often be key when it comes to making changes to get you feeling better all round.

Why keep a food diary?

A food diary is all about tuning into your body, and learning about its patterns, responses and ultimately, its needs. By keeping a food diary, you are essentially taking an important step towards a better understanding of your body and its reactions, and in doing so, you are taking a proactive step towards your health goals. And for those of us with chronic illness, it’s an important part of taking on a more “active patient” role.

By keeping a food diary, you are essentially taking an important step towards a better understanding of your body and its reactions.

Many functional medicine practitioners use a food diary as a standard diagnostic tool in their practice. Indeed, keeping a food diary allows you to step back and essentially ‘zoom out’, so you can get a better overall view of how you are eating and reacting, which allows you to spot patterns that you may otherwise have missed.

While it’s not necessarily a quick fix, and life-altering revelations are not guaranteed, it will always be educational, and will help shed light on what’s happening in your body. At best though, you can often discover a link between unpleasant symptoms and eating a certain way, and so be able to get yourself feeling much better with minimum fuss.

Many functional medicine practitioners use a food diary as a standard diagnostic tool in their practice.

Indeed, one of my favourite things about a food diary is that, as you get into the rhythm of using and interpreting it, you can suddenly discover that you actually have a lot more power and control over your symptoms, and how you feel overall, than you may have realised! And it’s down to what and how you eat.

What a food diary is NOT

A food diary is intended as a helpful diagnostic tool. It is not intended for facilitating restrictive eating, calorie counting, weight loss or any other food or diet trend.

Who can benefit from a food diary?

Anyone who suspects that they are eating something that is bothering them in some way, can benefit from keeping a food diary. Anyone with gut issues, and IBD patients in particular, often find this tool to be extremely useful.

Anyone who suspects that they are eating something that is bothering them in some way, can benefit from keeping a food diary.

Use a food diary:

To hone in on the food(s) causing your unwanted symptoms or reactions.
To discover triggers for intolerances or allergy-like reactions.
To pinpoint your IBD/IBS trigger foods, and determine your ‘safe’ foods (see the section relating to IBD flares below).
When you are unsure about certain dietary changes you are making.
When reintroducing a food after having removed it for a period of time: you may know your ‘safe’ diet and be fine on it for ages, but when you want to try to expand what you’re eating, using a food diary during this phase can be very helpful.
Simply to gain a better understanding of your eating habits, so that you can make improvements accordingly.

What to include and why

You can make your food diary as simple or as complicated as you like. It provides a great opportunity to keep track of multiple things. Having said that, when you’re first starting out, there’s no need to overwhelm yourself. Keep it simple and start by tracking the basics. Download this free template to get you started.

You can often discover a link between unpleasant symptoms and eating a certain way, and so be able to get yourself feeling much better with minimum fuss.

Essential details to track:

What you eat: don’t worry about weights and measurements here, just the food itself (though if, for example, you have an exceptionally big meal, you may want to make a note of that fact, as the volume alone could cause symptoms), remembering to include things like condiments and spices (eg olive oil, black pepper, paprika, mustard etc) and other details (eg was the apple you ate peeled or unpeeled?).
When you eat: time of meals/snacks etc.
Gut Feelings: this includes, first and foremost, bowel movements (time of BM, consistency, if you can see any undigested food, and anything else of note - see this post for a full breakdown of the various helpful details you can make a note of). Also include general gut-related feelings, eg bloating, cramps, flatulence, abdominal pain etc.
How you feel throughout the day and when: this includes physical (non-gut-related) and mental symptoms, eg joint pains, headache, stuffy nose, low energy, stressed, anxious, moody, tired etc.
Water intake.

Optional add-ons:

Bedtime and waking time.
Can also include if and how many times you woke up during the night: what times? How long were you awake for?
Medication and/or supplements taken.
Things like the ‘Eating the rainbow’ challenge: noting what colour foods you have eaten each day to see if you are getting a wide variety of colours (and therefore nutrients) so you can see which colours you tend to consume less of and see what nutrients they correspond to.
Exercise habits.

How to Interpret the Information you have gathered

Analysing food diary data isn’t rocket science, but it can take some practice. To begin with you need to keep the diary for a decent length of time, in order to gather enough information to be able to establish patterns. One month is a very respectable chunk of time in which to gather this information, but patterns may start becoming evident to you as early as one week in – everyone is different!

When:

The first thing that a food diary will make apparent is when you are eating: are you eating just your three main meals a day, or are you consciously/unconsciously grazing in between?

If you’re always feeling bloated, maybe cutting out the snacks to let your gut rest between meals will help you. Or, contrarily, if you tend to eat three large meals a day, maybe switching to five or six small meals will put less of a strain on your digestion in one go, and leave you feeling more comfortable throughout the day.

What:

The next thing that will become obvious is of course what you are eating, that is, the variety of foods in your diet.

Are you rotating the same foods over and over, or are you changing it up? It’s important to eat a wide variety of foods, in order to take in a wide variety of nutrients (there are, however exceptions to this goal, for instance if you are in an IBD flare. See the next section for more on this).

You may discover that you’re eating a lot more red meat than you thought you were, that you often can go for two or three days without consuming fresh fruit or veg, or that a bigger part of your diet is comprised of processed, pre-packaged food than you realised. These are things that you may not notice on a daily basis when you are busy and are pretty much just going through the motions of eating, or grabbing something on the go.

Finding Patterns:

Moving beyond the basic essentials that a food diary can make you aware of, it’s time to look for patterns relating to unwanted symptoms.

Sometimes patterns will clearly call out to you. For example, you may notice that every time you eat cheese or yogurt, or drink a coffee or hot chocolate with milk in it, within a couple of hours you develop uncomfortable bloating with some cramping, and may even need to dash to the loo. This quite clearly suggests that you may have an issue with dairy. So, you remove dairy from your diet and keep tracking to see if there is an improvement in this pattern.

Sometimes patterns will clearly call out to you…Other times things will not be as clear and you will need to do some detective work.

Other times things will not be as clear and you will need to do some detective work. Sometimes reactions won’t happen until the next day, instead of the easier-to-spot window of a couple of hours. Other times it’s not an individual food that’s the problem, but the way it’s cooked, for example. If eating fries leaves you feeling bad, that doesn’t necessarily mean you can’t tolerate potatoes! Try some steamed or oven-baked potato and see if you feel the same way.

And of course, there are cases where multiple ingredients are involved and you need to pull things apart to determine which is the culprit. A coffee with milk may bother you, so you leave out the milk. If it’s still bothering you, you may have an issue with caffeine (instead of, or possibly as well as, milk).

Using a Food Diary during an IBD flare

While the essentials remain the same, food diary rules are slightly different when you are trying to navigate a Crohn’s or colitis flare.

For instance, you are not going to be as concerned if you are ‘eating the rainbow’, or if you have enough variety in your diet. Your number one goal in using a food diary is to determine which foods make you feel worse, and which help you feel better. What aggravates your symptoms, and what doesn’t. Once you begin to stabilise, then you can start to look beyond that. The idea is to scale back as much as possible and not ‘challenge’ the gut unnecessarily, only adding in new foods gradually as you improve once you have identified your triggers.

When you are trying to navigate a Crohn’s or colitis flare…your number one goal in using a food diary is to determine which foods make you feel worse, and which help you feel better.

Ultimately you want to identify your safe foods and stick with those for a while, until the flare starts to calm down. Then you absolutely continue using the food diary, to monitor how you react and feel when you begin introducing more foods into your diet. The food diary is the perfect tool for this purpose and will help you get a lot clearer on what you can eat as you begin expanding your diet again.

When in a flare, there is also the possibility that the food diary will not provide you with the illumination and clarity that you so very much want and need. We can be so physically aggravated that pretty much everything sets us off in one way or another, making it harder to spot patterns – but not impossible! The diary can still be useful in determining what sets us off the least. Even if that’s not the ideal we are aiming for, it can help guide us little by little to figure out how to give our body the support it needs at the given time. In such a case we must go back to basics, start with the foods that are better suited to flare phases (statistically at least), and work from there.

the Limitations of a food diary

Whether it’s dietary protocols, miracle ingredients, or life-changing tricks and methods, not everything will work for every person every single time. There’s nothing wrong with trying things, but remember that we are all individuals and there is absolutely no one-size-fits-all.

Sometimes, patterns emerge like the sun peeking out from behind a wall of clouds, and sometimes it’s all just a big old mess that you can’t make head or tail out of.

A food diary, however useful and illuminating it may be, is not the be all and end all. It is, unfortunately, not a guaranteed method of discovering one’s trigger foods every time. For instance, if you are in an IBD flare, there’s so much going on, it may feel and appear like absolutely everything is triggering you – which may, or may not, be the case. Sometimes, patterns emerge like the sun peeking out from behind a wall of clouds, and sometimes it’s all just a big old mess that you can’t make head or tail out of.

Furthermore, as with so many things, while positive and potentially very helpful when used as intended, a food diary can create stress and even add fuel to the fire of any obsessive behaviour and thoughts surrounding food and eating. Remember, the idea behind a food diary is: observation, not obsession!

The idea behind a food diary is: observation, not obsession!

So, if you are keeping a food diary, and find it stressful or confusing rather than helpful, that’s ok, don’t despair, it’s not the end of the world. It doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with you, and it doesn’t mean that you will never figure it out or that you won’t be able to help yourself. It just means that it’s not helping you right now, and it’s ok to set it aside for a while, try eating as intuitively as possible instead, and pick it up again at another time.

In a nutshell

A food diary is an important and potentially very useful tool to help you become more truly conscious of what you are eating, get to know your body and its responses, and spot patterns that can be very revealing. While clear revelations cannot always be guaranteed, keeping a food diary will always be a learning experience, and one that puts you in the driver’s seat of your own health, teaches you about your body, and can potentially help you make a difference in your symptoms and overall health.

Don’t forget to download your free template to help you get started!

Getting Started with a Food Diary