You have been told to keep a food diary. So you keep one, and three weeks later you have two lists — what you ate, and how you felt — and no practical way to line them up. The pattern, if there is one, is buried somewhere in the handwriting.
This journal does the lining up for you. You set a reaction window — how many hours after eating a symptom still counts as “following” that meal — and a minimum severity. Then every meal you log is checked against every symptom you log, automatically. The Suspect Foods tab counts, for each food you’re watching, how many meals contained it and how many of those were followed by a symptom, turns that into a reaction rate, and ranks them.
That ranking is what you bring to an appointment. Not “I think dairy might be a problem,” but “dairy was in six of my meals and a symptom followed all six; wheat was in six and followed five; caffeine was in eight and followed three.” That is a conversation a doctor or dietitian can actually use.
What makes it more than a blank spreadsheet
The window does the matching. A meal at 7:45 and a symptom at 10:30 are two hours and forty-five minutes apart — inside a six-hour window, so the meal is marked “followed” and every watched food in it gets a tally. Change the window to twelve hours and every flag, rate, and rank in the file recalculates instantly.
It refuses to overclaim. A food needs at least three logged meals before the journal will band it at all — until then it reads “Not enough data yet” rather than turning one unlucky dinner into a verdict. The Dashboard shows your overall share of meals followed as a baseline, because a food whose rate merely matches your baseline is behaving like every other meal. And the band labels never say “trigger” — the top one reads Ask about this one first, because that is the honest claim.
It runs the whole protocol. The Elimination Plan takes your phase dates and works out the end dates, which phase today falls in, and how many days are left. The Reintroduction Log takes each food you add back and checks your symptom log for a qualifying reaction inside the window — reporting the worst severity it finds, so your verdict rests on what you recorded rather than what you remember.
What you get
A 10-tab workbook that opens in Excel, Google Sheets, and LibreOffice — with a one-click “Make a copy” link for a native Google Sheet, so there is nothing to import. It arrives pre-filled with a clearly fictional worked example so you can see every calculation running before you delete it and start your own.
Three PDF guides come with it: a Start Here guide on choosing your window and reading a pattern without fooling yourself, a Finding Your Patterns how-to covering what to record for digestive symptoms, reflux, migraine, skin reactions and fatigue, and a set of printable pages for logging by hand.
Want to try the idea first? The free Food & Symptom Log starter is a one-page printable — what you ate, how you felt, and how bad it was — with a worked example already filled in. No signup, no email. It records; this journal counts.
Own it, don’t rent it
What you build here is a detailed record of your own body over months. It lives in a file you own — not on a company’s server, not behind a subscription that can lapse, not in a service that can be sold or shut down. You decide where it is kept and who sees it. Keep logins out of it and it stays safe to hand to a doctor.
An important note
This is a record organizer, not medical or dietary advice — not a diagnosis, not a treatment plan, and not an allergy test. It counts correlations in your own records; it cannot tell you that a food is a trigger. Foods you eat constantly will appear before symptoms by chance, foods that travel together in the same meal cannot be separated by counting, and symptoms have many causes unrelated to food.
Elimination diets are normally run with a doctor or a registered dietitian, because removing food groups can create nutritional gaps and can make some tests — celiac testing in particular — unreliable. Use this to follow the plan you were given and to bring better records to the people helping you. Seek urgent care for any severe reaction, including trouble breathing or swelling of the face or throat.
