How To Keep a Food And Symptom Journal

The best way to figure out what your little one is reacting to is to keep a food and symptom journal. This can help you to determine trigger foods, reaction symptoms, as well as to establish a baseline of what “normal” (read: non-reactivity) looks like for you baby.  In this article I’ll discuss the key elements of a food and symptom journal, and provide a free printable to help you get started with yours.

Helpful Hint 

If you are breastfeeding and your child is eating solids, then you will need to track everything that both you and your child eat.

(1) Create your own format.

This is the route that I went because when I started on this journey I couldn’t find anything that seemed applicable or fit well.  The format has to make sense to you and be easy for you to implement.  Keeping a worthwhile food and symptom journal requires a lot of effort, the easier that you can make it on yourself the more likely you will be to follow through with it and keep good records.

If you’re going to create your own format, here are some items you may want to include in journal:

• Dates of each journal page (I like to do one page per 24 hours period).
• Foods eaten.  Recording amounts of each food is also helpful, as sometimes a little bit of a food won’t cause a reaction but a lot of a food will (and those thresholds can be moving targets).
• Symptoms.  It’s very helpful to record everything even if you aren’t 100% sure if it is a food reaction symptom.  You can always go back and make notes next to items after you have confirmed whether something was a food reaction or not.
• Time of day each food was eaten or each symptom appeared.

(2) Use this pre-formatted printable journal page and keep the pages in a 3-ring binder.

If you’re not sure what this would like in practice, you can also download this example Food and Symptom Journal.

Helpful Hint

Keep the food and symptom journal in a place that is accessible to all caregivers (like the kitchen counter).  Explain what the journal is for and how to use it.

(3) Use an app as your journal.

Day One Journal App

I started out with my food and symptom journal using pen and paper and a 3-ring binder.  It made sense at the time, but I tend to be a bit of a tech nerd and gadget lover so once I got comfortable with the format I looked for something that was a little bit more nerdy.  I ended up using the Day One Journal app for my iPhone.  This is not at all the purpose of this app, but for me it has been working. I tend to be pretty organized and detail oriented, so I don’t have trouble remembering to log the times foods were eaten or that symptoms appeared.  I also tend to format the journal “page” in the app in a very similar way to the printout.  The added bonuses of the app – for me – is that I am able to create my own tags and I can add pictures.  

Tags can be created and then added to any journal entry.  I created tags based on the some common symptoms: mucous in poop, hives, reflux, vomiting, sleeplessness, eczema, etc and I also added “confirmed exposure”.  This way, when I look at my list of journal entries by date I can get a quick overview of her symptoms over several days or weeks without having to open each journal entry to review it.  This gives me a high level picture of where we are with health and our food trials.

Adding pictures of diapers (read: baby poop) that are of particular concern is helpful for remembering when they happened as well as for showing our pediatrician. Adding pictures of rashes or other noteworthy symptoms has also been of benefit. A note of caution, though: don’t let it consume you. Sometimes too much info can make you feel more overwhelmed instead of in more control. It’s about finding the right balance for you.

Cara App

Cara is a new-ish app aimed at helping those with a variety of different GI issues. When I signed up for it I answered a series of personal questions about my gender, my symptoms, and whether I knew the source of my symptoms (i.e. IBS, food allergies, Celiacs, etc). The app aims to track your symptoms and habits (food, sleep, exercise, etc) overtime to give you a more complete picture of your health. So far in my use of this app I have personally find it a bit too cumbersome for tracking my little one’s food and symptoms, but that also might be because I’m so comfortable in my current setup. It’s hard to compete with something that’s working so well! If you’re just starting out, though, it might be worth giving it a try since it’s TOTALLY FREE as of my writing this.

Helpful Hint

Let your pediatrician / naturopathic physician and specialist know that you’re keeping a food and symptom journal.  They may want to review your child’s symptoms and foods to better inform their practice.