Free 7-Day Food Diary PDF: Fill It In for Your GP or Dietitian

A 7-day food diary is a written record of what you eat and drink for one week, with times, amounts and how each item was prepared. Fill it in as you eat, in grams where you can, and don’t change your week to make it look better. Allergy UK offers a free PDF for food and symptoms, and the layout below covers any other request from your GP or dietitian.

What is a 7-day food diary, and who asks for one?

Think of it as the plain record of your real week. A GP or dietitian asks for one when they need to see what you eat before they suggest anything. The NHS pages on food allergy and food intolerance both say you may be asked to keep a food and symptoms diary. The aim is to work out what is triggering symptoms. Neither page says how long to keep it or what to write.

That gap is why the first step is to ask. Your clinician may want three days, seven or more, and may want symptoms, mood or none of them. Their request beats anything in this article.

A diary only records what happened. The British Dietetic Association’s page on IBS and diet says to keep one while you are making changes, and to change one thing at a time so you can see what helped. Which change, if any, is for the dietitian to say.

If your symptoms are new, getting worse or worrying you, book the appointment now. The diary can follow.

Is there a free 7-day food diary PDF I can print?

Yes, for suspected food reactions, although it isn’t built around seven days. Allergy UK’s food and symptoms diary is a downloadable PDF with space for your name and GP and one filled-in example row. The columns are date and time, food consumed, symptoms and duration, and action and response. Its guidance page tells you to note everything you eat or drink, including ingredients and portion sizes, with the time and any symptoms.

I didn’t find a general-purpose NHS form on the NHS pages above. The allergy page sends you to Allergy UK for more on keeping one. If your practice or dietitian has its own sheet, use that one, since they know what they want to read.

For anything else, copy this layout, or the plainer food diary template. Paste it into Google Docs or Word and print it. In Chrome, Google Docs can also save the printout as a PDF. Make seven copies, one per day. If you’d rather have a sheet that adds up the calories, build a calorie tracker spreadsheet instead.

Day: ______ Date: ______

Time	Food or drink	Brand and how cooked	Amount	Where, and with whom	Notes

Then add one page that shows the whole week at a glance.

Day	Date	Anything unusual (illness, late shift, eating out)	Sheet complete?
Mon
Tue
Wed
Thu
Fri
Sat
Sun

How do I fill in a 7-day food diary?

Write each entry as you eat, name the brand and the cooking method, and give an amount you can check. Four habits do most of the work.

First, write it at the time. A review of studies that compared reported intake with energy measured by doubly labeled water found a widespread bias toward underestimating intake. The review didn’t test when people wrote things down. Still, an entry made in the evening is the one that misses the biscuit with the tea.

Second, give amounts in grams or ml when you can, and a household measure when you can’t. On packaged food, the NHS says the label gives nutrition information per 100 g or 100 ml and sometimes per portion. It warns that the manufacturer’s idea of a portion may differ from yours. Write what you ate, not the printed portion. If the calories matter too, a food tracker template gives every food a row for them.

Third, include the extras: the butter on the toast, the milk and sugar in the tea, the oil in the pan, the glass of wine. Fourth, say where you were and who you were with if it changed what you ate. “Sunday lunch at my sister’s” tells a dietitian more than “roast dinner”.

These lines are invented to show the level of detail. The amounts only illustrate the format and are not a guide to what anyone should eat.

Time	Food or drink	Brand and how cooked	Amount	Notes
07:30	Porridge oats made with semi-skimmed milk	own brand, microwaved	40 g oats, 150 ml milk
07:30	Tea with milk and one sugar	teabag	1 mug
13:00	Cheese and pickle sandwich	supermarket meal deal	1 pack	ate at desk
16:00	Digestive biscuits		2	with the second tea
19:30	Chicken, rice and broccoli	grilled, boiled, steamed	120 g, 200 g, 80 g	oil in the pan, 1 tbsp

Only “sandwich” on a line leaves a clinician guessing. So does a week you changed to look tidy, because it hides the very week they asked about. If you did change something, such as skipping meals for a day, write that in the notes. A clinician can work with an odd week recorded honestly, and can’t do much with a week you tidied.

What can a week of records show, and what can’t it?

A week shows a pattern. You see when you eat, what repeats and which days differ. It doesn’t give your exact usual intake. A 1987 USDA study followed 29 adults for a year and asked how many days of records it took to estimate usual food energy to within 10%. For the group’s average the answer was 3 days. For one person it averaged 31 days.

Your clinician is reading a close look at your habits, not a measurement. That’s enough for a conversation. Flag weekends and illness. If your weekdays and weekends look different, the useful week is one that includes both, and you can ask whether your clinician wants that. If you were ill on Wednesday, say so. Once the appointment is behind you, a food journal you read back is the longer-running version of the same habit.

Print or paste the sheet now and write down the next thing you eat, with the amount.

What do I do if I miss a meal or a day?

Write what you remember, mark it as from memory, and carry on. Missed entries happen. Write “forgot Thursday lunch” rather than leave a blank, which reads as a skipped meal.

If you lose a whole day, don’t restart the week. The exception is a clinician who asked for seven days in a row. Tell them which day is missing, since they may prefer an extra day at the end to a rewrite.

Bring the original sheets, or a clear copy, to the appointment. If the diary starts to feel like something you can’t stop checking, or eating feels out of control, tell the person who asked for it.