HealingWell
Search Close Search
☰

what are your best tips on keeping a food/symptom diary?

Support Forums
>
Ulcerative Colitis
✚ New Topic ✚ Reply
❬ ❬ Previous Thread |Next Thread ❭ ❭
Posted 6/22/2010 5:20 PM (GMT 0)
I am entering remission now, and would like to fine tune my diet.  I eliminated coffee and dairy with great results, but I still get symptoms such as stomach pains, gas, and once or twice a week a spot or two of blood on a bm.  I have been reading alot on the forum about those who have had great results with the scd, or gluten free, candida diets, wheat free, etc.  How do I tell if those foods bother me, becasue right now I am having very subtle symptoms and I am trying to look for a correlation in what i ate and those symptoms, but I am not sure about such things as transit times and when you would see a symptom from a food?   immediately, an hour later, a day later?? 

Maybe I am way off, but I feel if I tweak my diet and avoid stuff that inflames me, the better chance I have a staying in remission.

 

Posted 6/22/2010 7:09 PM (GMT 0)
The fact that you are somewhat stable now helps. When I was full flare it was almost impossible to tell what foods bothered me because 90% did.
Trying wheat/gluten-free was pretty easy for me and I had results fairly quickly, bleeding stopped. Everyone is different though and it isn't that dramatic for most. I actually could not have told through a food diary that wheat/gluten was a problem, there were no obvious symptoms at all unlike other foods. I actually thought bread was good to settle my stomach and ate it often. So in that case a food diary would not help at all.

As far as how many hours after eating you might notice problems, it won't be like an allergic reaction, it'll be much more subtle, maybe the next morning or 24 hours later.
You have to be a detective.
You know what your colon is acting like right now so by introducing or removing foods one by one you can tell in a couple of days--are you better than before or worse.

You might google "elimination diet" and see if there are any tips there.
I could tell when I ate fruit that I had more D, same for dairy and juice.
I am really careful about introducing supplements, doing it one at a time, so I can tell exactly what effect each one has.
Keeping a food diary has two effects: first you don't have to rely on memory which is highly inaccurate and second, knowing you have to write it down may make you NOT eat something you have on the "OUT" list.

Something important I learned is this: just because you aren't able to tolerate certain foods right now does not mean you'll never be able to eat them again. I have found this to be true in my 5.5 months on SCD. I am able to eat/drink many things in moderation I couldn't tolerate without getting D previously. It's not a life-sentence. Really.

I LOVED fruit and bread and milk in my pre-UC life but had to eliminate them to get better. I probably will not eat bread again for a very very long time but I can eat some fruit and have some dairy now without problems. I am choosing to stay 95% on SCD right now because I have the goal of being 100% better and because what I'm eating makes me look and feel pretty great. It's gotten easy to plan meals and shop once my mind got adjusted to the changes.

Anyway, yes, food diary is good but not all foods show obvious reactions. What your body feels like and acts like after a week with a food or without a food is a pretty good indicator.

Good luck.
Posted 6/22/2010 7:33 PM (GMT 0)
My tips:

It's best to keep a food/symptom diary when not flaring. Medicine can mask the effects of food.

Start with one item--perhaps something that is on the BRATTY diet. Add something that is anti-inflammatory--something like ginger or turmeric. Then switch to another item on the BRATTY diet the next day.

E.G.

Day 1: Ginger tea.

Day 2: Rice with a bit of turmeric and butter for taste.

Day 3: Yogurt.

Day 4: Toast with cinnamon and butter.

Day 5: Salmon with rice.

Day 6: Spinach and sunflower seed butter with bananas.

.
.
.

Keep trying different things, but give each item 24 hours.

The digestive system can become more sensitive to foods the worse the flare is. Things to watch out for are lactose, fructose, other sugars, sugar substitutes, wheat, yeast, gluten, saturated meats, fried foods, spicy foods, pro-inflammatory foods...
Posted 6/22/2010 7:51 PM (GMT 0)
I don't think diet has any effect on UC when in remission, but I do keep a diary when flaring and this is the system I use:

I have a notepad with two columns (I basically split the page down the middle with a line)

On the left side I document everything I eat and the time I eat it.
On the right side I document every BM and/or pain I experience along with time.

This makes it easy to look back at patterns of symptoms and compare them to certain foods to see if there's a correlation.

My doc says that if a food is going to irritate you, it should happen w/in 24hrs

Posted 6/22/2010 8:45 PM (GMT 0)
I keep an excel spreadsheet where I list the food I eat and suppliments I take and what time. I also keep track of BMs, pain, and pharmaceutical medications. Then I have a little comments section on the bottom where I can just write little notes if something strange happened. Each day is just a new sheet and I label the sheets with the date.

I am still really confused about diet but my problem is that prednisone does weird things to me in terms of pain, so it's just really hard to tell at this point what's working and what isn't in terms of diet. I think once I am off pred I am going to try a full elimination diet to get some clues about food...

At the moment I am trying to avoid gluten. As far as I know for gluten you should notice a difference in a couple of weeks but you have to go 100% gluten free and it seems like every few days I eat something and then think, duh! That wasn't GF! And I reset my little timer. I noticed a difference when I started avoiding dairy right away, but I think that's because of lactose intolerance, not UC. If I eat ice cream you can practically hear the ice cream's little journey from stomach to output. Kind of gurgles the whole way through funny? Yes, also embarrassing and uncomfortable. lol ;o) My next thing is potatoes. I think my colon hates potatoes... I noticed a lot of pain this past weekend and I ate potatoes twice on Friday. So for that I guess like the next day I felt bad. It seems like people say a lot they feel bad the day after they eat something bad for their UC. So, that would be my guess. Soonish if it's your stomach or small intestine objecting. And like the next day if your colon is objecting. :o)
Posted 6/22/2010 9:43 PM (GMT 0)
I tried the food diary in the past. What I noticed is that one week certain foods would not bother
me, but the next week they would. For me, a lot of it had to do with the amount of food I ate
rather than what I ate. It seemed as though a little bit of everything was better than a whole
lot of one thing. Everybody is different and you have to find what works best for you.

Good luck...
Posted 6/22/2010 10:51 PM (GMT 0)
offee...are you not on rowasa nightly? If not..why?

q
Posted 6/23/2010 4:17 PM (GMT 0)
I was on nightly until I started improving, then I went to every other night, now its every third night.  I have formed bms no mucus and rarely rarely blood small amts streaked through (actually only like 2x in the past 3 weeks or so after tapering to every third night.  my urgency is improved, I just have gas, bloating and occasional stomach pains.  Do you think that still warrants nightly rowasa? 

Posted 6/23/2010 6:22 PM (GMT 0)
with any bleeding, I'd be on nightly...especially if it was streaked on the stool...


how long were you on nightly? how long on every second night?



It's no biggie except financially to go back. But best in the long run.

or you can use suppositories on the between nights if you have them..that could work if the inflammation is low rectally. But, in truth, I'd do nightly again.



q
Posted 6/23/2010 7:20 PM (GMT 0)
i was on nightly for months and months.

 

what is a taper schedule that seems to work for you and others here?

 

 

Posted 6/24/2010 4:57 AM (GMT 0)
varies...you mentioned you tapered after you had no symptoms. OK....but how long were you on every second night? or did you just skip to every third night?

q
Posted 6/24/2010 5:34 AM (GMT 0)
I'd reccommend starting off simple and adding foods adn monitoring your body.
Steamed fish, steamed chicken to start, then add a few things, bean sprouts, alfalfa, cucumber.
See how you go!
Jeff
Posted 6/28/2010 12:55 AM (GMT 0)
I keep a food diary in my blackberry. If you don't have a blackberry just ignore this, but there is a "free" spreadsheet program called gridmagic that I downloaded and use. I keep three columns, date, event and details. Events are very short form BM (bowel movement), Food, Event (I know my column is already called event, but if I do some special treatment or something I call it an event), and rarely Vomit. The details column tracks the food or bowel movement information. I don't use it, but I am going to adopt the type numbers in the bristol stool scale and this will really shorten then details.

In order to get the files off the blackberry you have to email them to yourself. If the file is too large then they want you to buy the program, so I keep each month in a separate file. I have nice colour coded columns and I can type pretty fast in the BB.

I could email you a sample file if you are interested. The gridmagic files work in excel, so I always thought that I would try to chart and do trends on my food and bowel movement activities some day. I am getting close to a years worth of data.
✚ New Topic ✚ Reply