A food diary template, with a stool log
Here's a template for a food diary: what you ate and drank, when and roughly how much, with a stool log underneath if you want one. It's just 2 short tables, and they work on paper, in a notes app or in a spreadsheet, and there's a Notion version further down. The habit around them is in the how-to, and if you'd rather not count calories, there's a page on what to write instead.
There aren't many columns, and that's on purpose. A diary has to be as frictionless as possible, so the chances of logging everything are as high as possible, and bespoke, so it holds what you care about; for me that's what I eat and roughly how much, not calories. I won't list my own colors, but as an example, green could be for vegetables and fruits, ochre for anything sweet.
Write down every meal, the boring ones too. A diary with gaps can't be read back with any confidence: a day with no lunch in it might be a day you skipped lunch, or one you skipped writing it down, and a month later you won't remember which.
The meals
| When | What I ate or drank | How much | My mark |
|---|---|---|---|
- When is the time, not just the day. Breakfast at 7 and breakfast at 11 are 2 different mornings, and a list per day can't tell them apart.
- What gets one name per food, the same name every time. "Oat latte" today and "latte with oat milk" tomorrow are 2 foods when you go back looking for them. Split a dish into the parts you'd recognize again, so "toast, eggs, oat latte" and not "breakfast".
- How much stays rough: 2 eggs, a big bowl, half the pizza. No weighing and no calories; keeping rough amounts consistent is on the calories page.
- My mark is yours to define, a word or a color with a meaning you decide: ate out, ate late, cooked from scratch, bought ready etc. Write the key at the top of the page, so the marks still mean something a month later, and keep to a handful.
Drinks go in the same table, with "(drink)" after them. A coffee on its own isn't really a meal, and marking it keeps a 3-meal day from reading like a 4-meal one.
The stool log
Leave this part out if you only want the food diary.
| When | Type (1–7) | Had to rush? | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
- When is the time, as for meals.
- Type is a number from the Bristol stool scale, which runs from 1 to 7. The words below are the ones Digest uses, and they're there so the same thing gets the same number every time; copy them to the top of the page.
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| hard lumps | lumpy | sausage, cracked | smooth, easy | soft blobs | mushy | liquid |
- Had to rush? is a yes, or nothing.
- Note is anything else you want to remember about it.
A worked week
An invented week, cut down to a few rows. The key at the top of the page: out means ate out, late means after 9pm, ready means bought ready-made.
| When | What I ate or drank | How much | My mark |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mon 07:30 | toast, eggs, oat latte | 2 slices, 2 eggs | |
| Mon 10:30 | oat latte (drink) | ||
| Mon 13:00 | rice with chicken, yogurt | a big bowl | |
| Mon 20:00 | cheese pizza | half | out |
| Tue 07:30 | toast, eggs, oat latte | 2 slices, 2 eggs | |
| Tue 13:00 | rice with chicken | a normal bowl | |
| Tue 21:30 | pasta with pesto | a normal plate | late, ready |
| … | |||
| Sat 12:30 | ramen | a big bowl | out |
| When | Type (1–7) | Had to rush? | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mon 08:15 | 4 | ||
| Wed 07:50 | 3 | ||
| Thu 18:40 | 6 | yes | |
| Sat 09:00 | 4 |
Breakfast has the same 3 names every morning, so it reads the same on every page. The 10:30 latte is marked as a drink, which leaves Monday at 3 meals, not 4. And Tuesday's rice is written exactly like Monday's, even though it was the leftovers.
Reading it back
A week per page reads well: a couple of dozen rows, the stool log under them, and a margin to count the marks per day. Where paper gives out is going back for one food a month later, since every day you had rice means reading every row of every page.
In Notion
The Notion template is this page as 2 tables, Meals and Stools, with the sample week already in them. A meal is one row: the foods, the time, how much, your marks, and a Drink tick for a coffee on its own. The Calendar view puts the meals on their days, and Find a food lists every meal with a word in it, "rice" until you change the filter.
It stops short in a few places, though. Finding a food means editing that filter each time, and since a meal is one line of text, "rice" also turns up the rice cakes and misses the sushi, which has rice in it but doesn't say so. Notion's options can't hold a comma either, so types 3 and 4 read "cracked sausage" and "smooth and easy" there.
More guides in Keeping a food and stool diary.
Full disclosure: I make Digest, an iOS app that is this template with the tables built in. You type a meal the way you'd say it and it splits the words into foods and a time; the marks become colors on the foods, up to 8, each with a name and a meaning only you see; and the stool log is a sheet with the same 1–7 scale, or a switch in Settings if you don't want it. History draws each week in your colors, and search lists the days you had a food or a color, so nobody reads every row. You can also link the foods that share an ingredient, so a search for rice lists the sushi too. No account, and your journal stays on your devices and in your own iCloud. It's a journal, not a medical device, and nothing in it is medical advice.