A food intolerance diary for elimination and reintroduction

Six weeks, one dietitian, and a lot of labels

A dietitian suggests a structured elimination: take out one group of foods for a few weeks, then bring them back one at a time and write down what happens. It is a sensible plan and an easy one to get wrong. By the second week you are reading ingredient lists in the supermarket aisle, cooking from three different recipes and trying to remember whether the sauce on Saturday contained milk.

When reintroduction starts, the questions get precise. What exactly did you eat on day twenty-two? How much? How long after did the itch begin? A notebook rarely holds that level of detail, and a memory of “I think it was after the yoghurt” is not much to work with.

A food intolerance diary is only useful if it is specific, and specificity is what a spoken, photographed log is good at.

Why does a photo and voice log suit an elimination diet?

An elimination diet has two failure points: hidden ingredients and vague timing. Both are about recording the detail at the moment, not afterwards.

• Labels. Photograph the ingredient panel and Sayved reads the text into the entry, so the exact product is on record. Months later you can still see which brand of oat drink you used, rather than “an oat drink”.
• Plates. A photo keeps the sauce, the garnish and the side dish you might not mention. You can add detail by voice: “the dressing was shop-bought, I didn’t check it”.
• Timing. Each entry is dated and timed, and you can say when something started: “itchy mouth about forty minutes after lunch”. Meals and reactions are separate rows, so the gap between them is real information, not a recollection.

How do I set up a food intolerance diary in two minutes?

1. Create a condition label. Settings → Conditions → New condition. Use your own words: “dairy reactions”, “elimination diet”, “gluten test”. A condition here is simply a folder you create and name. The app never decides that you have one and never suggests one.
2. Pick the right person. Tracking for a child? Add them in Settings → Family and switch to their profile before you log. Each person’s entries live in a separate file on the phone, so a child’s reactions never appear in an adult’s report.
3. Decide what to log. Food is the centre, with drinks and supplements (a calcium tablet matters during dairy elimination). Symptoms, mood and sleep are optional additions your clinician may care about. You never pick categories; Sayved files each part of your sentence.
4. Routines for the stable parts. If you eat the same safe breakfast every day, open that entry and tap “Add to daily routine”. One tap files it again, already complete. Reactions cannot be saved as routines.
5. Optional reminders for reintroduction days. Settings → Reminders lets you add a note-to-self at a time you pick, in words you choose, such as “Test food, then write it down”. It is off until you turn it on.

Entries that mention the condition label by name are linked automatically, and anything older is gathered when you create it. Every link shows on the entry and can be removed in one tap.

What do I say during an elimination diet?

Short and specific is best:

• “Breakfast, porridge made with oat drink, the Brand X one, a spoon of honey.”
• “Photo of the sauce jar label.” (Then snap it.)
• “Reintroduction day one, about two hundred millilitres of cow’s milk at ten.”
• “Stomach felt tight around eleven, otherwise fine, a 3 out of 10.”
• “Red patch on my forearm, not itchy, noticed it at six.”

Ratings use one 0–10 scale across the app, where the number is how much of the named thing there is. Words are converted and shown, and a number you say always beats the adjective. Sayved never comments on what you ate or how you rated anything.

What can I ask after a few weeks?

Ask answers from your own entries, only when you ask, and without a verdict. Examples worth trying:

• “List everything I ate on the day I logged the rash.”
• “What did I eat in the six hours before each time I logged stomach pain?”
• “When did I last have milk, and what did I log after?”
• “How many days into the elimination was my last symptom?”
• “Show every entry linked to elimination diet, newest first.”

These return your own rows next to each other. They do not say a food is responsible, and with a short log, coincidence is very likely. Take any pattern you spot to your dietitian as a question for your dietitian, not a conclusion. Please do not remove foods from a child’s diet based on a diary alone.

How do I give the diary to my dietitian?

Go to Settings → Doctor report. Choose the person, a period (one month, three months, six months, a year or everything) and the condition label from the list. The result is a day-by-day document you can print, save as a PDF or send. It shows what you logged, with estimates kept as ranges, and draws no conclusions. If you need a broader checklist, see what to tell your doctor.

For a gut-focused version of the same idea, read the IBS food diary page, and see how the nutrition label scanner reads packaged food.

The honest part

Sayved is a personal record, not medical advice and not a medical device. It cannot tell you whether you have an intolerance, an allergy or anything else, or which one. Any reaction involving breathing, swelling of the face or throat, or feeling faint is an emergency; contact emergency services rather than logging it first.

Reading voice, photos and labels, and Ask, are part of Sayved Pro: 14 days free, then $2.99 per month. What you have already logged stays readable, searchable and exportable afterwards at no cost.