A free food diary template, three ways.

Pick one

Which template do you need?

A note before you start: if a doctor or another health professional has asked you to keep a food-and-symptom diary, use the form they give you. Those ask for specific details these templates leave out on purpose.

• The daily page — for writing down everything you eat on a given day, at home and out.
• The weekly spread — one page a week, a line per meal, for seeing the shape of your week at a glance.
• The meal-out card — one card per restaurant meal, for remembering places, dishes and people.

Template 1

The daily page.

Copy these columns across the top of a page. One row per meal or snack; leave a line at the bottom for the day.

Template 2

The weekly spread.

Draw seven rows (Monday to Sunday) and four columns (breakfast, lunch, dinner, extras). Write one or two words per box — “toast”, “pho with Hana”, “skipped”. At the bottom, add three lines: best meal this week, new thing I tried, who I ate with most.

Template 3

The meal-out card.

One card per meal out. Index cards, a page in a pocket notebook, or a note on your phone all work. Fill in what you like; skip the rest.

• Date and place: Sat 12 July · Bao House, Lisbon
• With: Rafa and Clara
• What we had: pork belly bao, fried chicken bao, cucumber salad, two lemonades
• Best bite: the pork belly, with the peanut crumble
• Stars: 4 of 5
• Next time: try the tofu one; go before 7 to skip the queue
• One line: Clara’s last night before moving to Berlin.

Keep it going

Five tips for actually using it.

• Write within the hour. Details fade fast; even a two-word note on the way home is enough to jog your memory later.
• Use photos as your rough draft. Snap the plate, fill in the template at the end of the day from your camera roll.
• Keep the “Note” column short. One phrase. Long notes are where diaries stall.
• Leave blanks blank. A diary with gaps is still a diary. Don’t backfill a week from memory.
• Review on Sundays. Five minutes with the weekly spread shows you more than the daily pages ever will.

Digital version

Turning the template into a spreadsheet.

In Google Sheets or Excel, put the daily columns in row 1 (Date, Time, What I had, Where, With, Note) and freeze that row so it stays visible as you scroll. Add one row per meal, sort by date, and use a filter on “Where” to see every meal at a given place. For restaurant meals specifically, our restaurant journal template has extra columns and ready-made formulas.

The shortcut

For meals out, a photo can fill in the card.

If most of what you want to remember happens at restaurants, the meal-out card is the one people keep up — and it is exactly what PlateDiary (made by us) fills in from one photo of the table: the date, the place, each dish as its own save, with optional stars, a note and who you were with. There is nothing to count, it stays on your phone, and it needs no account.