Find the Food Behind Your Symptom Pattern
A symptom that comes and goes has a trigger hiding in the week's food — but a diary read as prose hides it. This reads each day as food items plus a symptom note, counts which foods keep showing up on the bad days, and ranks them as candidates. Local only; your diary never leaves the tab.
- Pattern
- Food/symptom co-occurrence counted across days
- local
- What it replaces
- A diary you keep but never actually read
- $0.00
- Input
- Days of 'food food — symptom' notes
- no card
- Output
- A ranked candidate list plus questions
- recomputed
What you pay otherwise
| Route | What you get | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Food-sensitivity test kit | A panel, not tied to your actual meals | $150+ |
| Dietitian consultation | An expert read of a diary (a good one) | $100+/visit |
| Eliminating everything at once | No pattern, all misery | unusable |
| This page | Your own diary, tallied into candidates | $0 |
The workflow
Log each day on one line
Format it as 'foods — symptom', like 'oatmeal, coffee, sandwich — headache by 4pm'. One line per day, every day, including the good ones — the contrast is what makes the pattern show.
Include the symptom-free days
A trigger only stands out against days you felt fine. Days with no symptom get the same food list and no symptom note; the tally needs both columns.
Read the candidates as hypotheses, not verdicts
A food that co-occurs with the symptom three times is a candidate to test, not a diagnosis. The board ranks them so you can try one change at a time — the only way a pattern test stays readable.
Bring the ranked list to the appointment
The questions the board prints are the ones a clinician can actually use: which foods, how often, how long after. That's the diary doing its job.
Worked example
Sample: 4 days, 3 with headache Days 4 Symptom days 3 (headache) Candidates coffee (3/3), aged cheese (2/3), bread (1/3) Questions 4 doctor-ready questions Uploaded nothing — tallied in the tab
Numbers above are sample data produced by the tool's own pre-loaded example, run in the browser — not averages or measured benchmarks.
What breaks this
Logging only the bad days gives the tally nothing to contrast against — the good days are the control. One-word symptom notes like 'bad' hide the pattern; 'bloated by 8pm' is readable. Dropping four foods at once after a guess makes the next week's diary unreadable — change one, keep logging. This board finds candidates, it does not diagnose.
Try it now
Four days of food-and-symptom notes are loaded. Replace them with your own week and watch the candidate list re-rank.
Open the pattern board →Go deeper: the printable diary
The pattern board is free forever. The $4 one-time tier adds:
- Printable diary sheet — blank day-lines to keep logging on paper — estimate: ~10 min saved versus drawing a diary.
- Saved log shelf — keep weeks of logs in this browser — estimate: ~15 min saved of re-pasting.
- Two-week comparison — before and after one food change — estimate: ~12 min saved of comparing by eye.