IBS food diary: what to log and how to read it
An IBS food diary is a record of what you eat and drink, how much, and how your gut feels in the hours afterwards. Kept for a few weeks, it shows which foods keep turning up before your symptoms, so you and your doctor or dietitian can talk about your own patterns instead of a generic list.
What to write down
- What you ate and drank
- Write the ingredients, not just the dish. "Pasta" hides the garlic and onion in the sauce, and those are often the part that matters.
- How much
- Many foods are fine in a small serving and a problem in a larger one. "A handful of almonds" and "a bag of almonds" are different entries.
- When
- The time of each meal and snack, so you can line symptoms up against what came before them.
- How you felt afterwards
- Check in around 30 minutes, 2 hours and 6 hours after eating. Note bloating, pain, gas, urgency or stool changes, each scored 0 to 10.
- The rest of your day
- Sleep, stress, exercise, your cycle and any medication changes. They move symptoms too, and they explain some of the bad days that food does not.
Free printable template
One A4 page per day, with rows for each meal and snack, the 30-minute, 2-hour and 6-hour symptom checks, and a box for sleep, stress and anything else that happened. Print as many pages as you need, or save them as a PDF from your browser. No signup, no email.
How to read it
Look for repeats, not one-offs
A food that shows up before a bad afternoon three or four times is worth a closer look. A food that shows up once, before one bad day, tells you very little.
Check the amount
If the same food is fine at breakfast and not at dinner, compare the portions before blaming the food.
Watch for stacking
Several foods that are each fine on their own can add up in one meal. Our guide to FODMAP stacking explains how. FODMAP stacking explained.
Rule out the day
Before you cross a food off, check the other column: short sleep, a stressful day or your period can explain the symptoms on their own.
Give it enough meals
A pattern needs the same food eaten on good days and bad days. Keep going until the diary has enough repeats to compare, rather than stopping at a fixed number of days.
Bring it to your appointment
Your notes give your doctor or dietitian something concrete to work with, especially if you are going through the low FODMAP reintroduction phase with them.
Disclaimer: Identified patterns are correlations from your tracked data — they do not imply medical causation. Discuss findings with a qualified healthcare provider before making dietary changes. See our Medical Disclaimer.
Paper or app?
Paper is free, private and works anywhere. The hard part is the re-reading: going back over weeks of pages to spot which foods keep lining up with bad days, and remembering the 2-hour and 6-hour check-ins.
GutGraph does the re-reading for you. You log meals by typing, photo or barcode, answer a short check-in after each meal, and the app compares what you ate against how you felt, with statistical confidence based on your logged data.
| Feature | Free | Premium |
|---|---|---|
| Meal, symptom and post-meal check-in logging | Included | Included |
| Your top food trigger | Included | Included |
| Full trigger map and AI trigger detection | Not included | Included |
| PDF report to bring to your appointment | Not included | Included |
AI-assisted results are labelled as AI in the app. Premium starts with a 7-day trial.
Keep your diary in GutGraph
Free to start: unlimited meal logging and post-meal check-ins.
Start your food diary