The Food and Gut Journal: Food Symptom Diet Diary: Importance of Establishing Your Baseline Frequency and Severity of Symptoms

Tuesday, January 09, 2007

Food Symptom Diet Diary: Importance of Establishing Your Baseline Frequency and Severity of Symptoms

. Food intolerance may be associated with a number of symptoms:
Celiac disease, gluten sensitivity, and other food intolerance may be associated with numerous digestive and non-digestive symptoms. Some of the most common non-digestive symptoms reported by people include fatigue, headaches, bone, joint and muscle pain, mental fogginess, neuropathy, and skin rashes. The most common digestive symptoms include bloating, diarrhea, excess, constipation, heartburn, nausea, vomitting and abdominal pain.

Rating the severity and frequency of common symptoms:
A good place to start when determining if foods are causing your symptoms is to keep a symptom diet diary along with your own “Top Ten Symptoms” list. Before making any change in your diet or eating pattern you should have a medical evaluation and record your baseline symptom, rating each for frequency and severity. With one of my patients I have recently published the HealThySelf Journal that has daily food symptom diary sheets for 3 months and a “Top Ten Symptoms” assessment for each week.

Key to success with an elimination diet is an adequate trial with accurate diary:
When trying to determine if certain foods are contributing to how you feel and the kinds of symptoms you are experiencing, it is important to complete an adequate trial of elimination combined with accurate recording of what you eat and how you feel. A commitment to 4 weeks to try strictly eliminating the foods recommended according to your specific assessment while recording accurately what you are eating and how you feel will help you identify patterns. It will also help you stay motivated to eliminate, restrict or rotate regularly any problem foods especially when you can readily see patterns.

If you are interested in purchasing the HealthySelf Journal send me an e-mail. Online purchasing of this Journal and other helpful products will be available when the premier form of www.thefooddoc.com is launched in the near future. Be sure to subscribe to the food doc blog for more updates.