Printable Food Diary (Free PDF)

Twenty rows are grouped into four blocks that are already labelled breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks, with five lines each. Every row has a time, what you ate or drank, the portion, and a wide column for how you felt afterwards, which is often the column that turns a list of food into something useful. A heavier rule separates the meals so the shape of the day is visible at a glance.

Choose whether you want a calories column before you download. With it, you get a narrow column per row and a day total field at the foot; without it, the food and portion columns are wider and the day ends with a note on your appetite instead. No calorie figure is printed on the sheet in either version, because what is right for one person is not right for another.

Under the table there are fields for glasses of water and for movement, and a ruled panel headed questions or notes for my doctor or dietitian, which is what makes a week of these sheets worth bringing to an appointment rather than describing from memory. The date, the line about your energy, mood and sleep, every table cell, the three summary fields and the notes panel are all form fields, so the day can be typed up in the evening or written as it happens. One page, US Letter or A4.