One of my personal missions with Confluence Nutrition is to help you become your own health care hero. By this, I mean that you are 100% in charge of your health. And one of the most important ways you can do this is by learning how to be an effective symptom tracker.
Symptoms are your body’s S.O.S. signal. I’m not talking about the kind of symptoms you have when you’re sick with a virus. I’m talking about persistent symptoms that continue, month after month. These are your built-in warning system that something isn’t right, and needs attention.
But figuring out which symptoms to pay attention to and how to organize this information can be confusing. This is especially so if you have A LOT of symptoms. In this blog, I want to share what to note on your symptom tracker, what to use for your symptom tracker, and some of the results that are possible with effective symptom tracking.
My Own Symptom Tracker Story
Years ago, I first reached out to my doctor because I was concerned about my lower abdominal pain. By the time I made the appointment, I was having pain a few days every month, and saw the symptoms getting worse.
I went in for an ultrasound, and it showed I had ovarian cysts. No follow up was recommended.
My symptoms paused while I was pregnant with my second child, but my symptoms returned with a vengeance with the hormonal changes that happened when I weaned him. At this point in my life, I only had 5-7 good days each month. The other days, I had some combination of pain, anxiety, digestive problems, insomnia, acne, and more.
The first important piece of information I gathered from my loose symptom tracking was that my symptoms were obviously getting worse. Over months and years. And this rightfully concerned me.
Symptoms that are worsening over time are a clear sign from your body that it is time to pay attention and seek some help.
From my perspective as a Functional Nutrition Practitioner, your symptoms are pure gold. Even if your doctor seems unconcerned with your symptoms, I want to teach you what symptoms I believe are important to track, how you can track them, and why you would want to.
How to Start Being A Symptom Tracker
For me, the purpose of tracking symptoms isn’t only to note them, it’s to begin to ask WHY they are happening. Because I am working to help resolve problems at their roots, I want to place your symptoms in a context.
For example, if you have a headache, I want to know what you ate earlier that day, how much liquid you had to drink, how your stress level was, how well you slept the night before, and so on.
But to have this information feel useful, it’s necessary to organize it on a day-to-day basis, and to connect food intake, symptoms, stool changes, hydration data, and sleep. It’s best to write down your observations at least once a day, as it can be hard to remember the details much beyond that.
The tool I prefer to help my clients keep track of everything and become a master symptom tracker is a Food-Symptom Diary (You can download your copy here). This tracks food, symptoms, and stool frequency and consistency. If my client needs to track other layers, I will have them note the results on this same form, for consistency and organization.
You could also use a calendar, an app, or any other method you like to collect your information. Just make sure that you can easily see what you’re trying to look at, and generally keep your results to one page per day.
What to Track on a Symptom Tracker
So what kind of symptoms am I talking about here? Well, just about any symptom you can experience is important, though severely uncomfortable symptoms are the most obvious.
Certainly, if your symptoms feel potentially life threatening, like shortness of breath, you should get yourself checked as soon as possible by a qualified medical person.
But if you’ve been checked, and your provider can’t see anything “wrong” on the surface, this doesn’t mean your symptoms should be ignored. On the contrary, this is an invitation to see what you can learn from them.
You will want to track things like:
- headaches
- migraines
- pain in the muscles or joints
- digestive symptoms like diarrhea, constipation, gas, nausea, vomiting, or heartburn
- brain fog
- itching
- skin breakouts of acne, eczema, psoriasis, or other rashes
- fatigue
- insomnia
- shortness of breath
- rapid heartbeat
- anxiety attacks
- mood symptoms, like irritability, anger, sadness, anxiety, frustration, or depression
- frequent illnesses
There are, of course, many more possible symptoms. This is just a partial list. Note the ones that are most present for you.
In addition to this list of signs or symptoms, there are additional metrics I like to encourage my clients to track, depending on the situation. These include:
- blood sugar throughout the day
- medications and supplements
- menstrual cycle and related symptoms for my female clients
- seasonal and moon cycles
- daily waking temperature (basal body temperature)
Other metrics people sometimes look at include activity levels, as with a FitBit or similar device, or heart-rate variability and sleep cycles, as with the Oura Ring.
To get the most value out of this tracking, use the Food Symptom Diary or similar log, and note foods along side symptoms and poop type. The longer you can track this data, the better your results. A good place to start is with one week of tracking.
Here are 5 additional metrics you can add to your symptom tracker to try and make connections about WHY your symptoms are happening.
Blood Sugar Levels
A high percentage of symptoms people experience are rooted in food sensitivities, or eating a combination of macronutrients (protein, fat, and carbs) that leads to blood sugar swings.
Paying attention to this one single piece can truly rebalance many many symptoms. Keeping your blood sugar stable keeps your moods and energy levels constant.
If you are eating too many carbs, or are skipping meals, you may feel more stressed, anxious, tired, irritable, or angry, and you may experience energy slumps, as well as difficulty sleeping. And this can lead to hormonal imbalances downstream. So just by tracking blood sugar and the relative balance of protein, fats, and carbs in your meals, we’ve addressed sleep, moods, fatigue, and hormones.
If you’re not sure if blood sugar is an issue, you can track this too with an at-home glucometer. You can buy one at your drugstore or over on Amazon (make sure you buy test strips too.) You want to check your values at :
• Immediately after waking, first thing in the morning (functional range: 78-88 mg/dL)
• 40 minutes after breakfast (functional range: <135 mg/dL)
• 40 minutes after lunch (functional range: <135 mg/dL)
• 20 minutes before dinner (functional range, if >2 hours since last food: 78-88 mg/dL)
• Just before bed (functional range, if > 2 hours since last food: 78-88 mg/dL)
Add these values to your food-symptom diary or other tracking tool.
If your sugars are higher than the suggested values, begin to track that backwards to your previous meal or two. Which foods may be triggering your elevated blood sugar?
(To read more about blood sugar, you can read Balancing Blood Sugar 101: How and Why)
Medications or Supplements
Make sure that you are taking note of your medications and supplements on your tracking sheet as well, as their side effects can be responsible for symptoms.
Menstrual Cycle Symptoms and Rhythms
If you are a woman, tracking your monthly menstrual cycle can also be important and can shed some light on your symptoms. Do your headaches correlate? How long are your cycles? Do any of your symptoms connect to your ovulation, or your bleeding time?
In Toni Weschler’s book Taking Charge of Your Fertility, she explains the method of tracking your monthly cycle, either for pregnancy achievement or avoidance. She uses a method of tracking daily waking temperature (basal body temperature) and cervical fluid quality.
I used this method to plan both my kids’ births, and avoid pregnancy until my hysterectomy during the first 15 years I was married.
Seasonal and Moon Cycles
Another interesting data layer to add to the equation is moon cycles and seasonal cycles if you have noticed changes during the month or year. Tracking these may be best done on an annual or monthly calendar.
Basal Body Temperature
Basal body temperature can be useful not only for tracking menstrual cycles, but also for tracking thyroid function. A basal body temperature of 97.1 or less can indicate an underactive thyroid gland, and would suggest a need to investigate.
For more information on interpreting this, check out the Take Your Temperature page on Stop The Thyroid Madness.
Symptom Tracker Results
The biggest trick is putting all your symptom tracker data together. This is why shorter periods of tracking with one sheet of data per day is what I recommend.
After you have a collection of days, you can look back over your record and take note of when your symptoms appeared. Can you see any patterns connected to the foods you ate? Did your acne flare after eating a particular food, or after you stayed up really late? Does your afternoon fatigue relate to what you ate for breakfast? Review your data and begin asking questions.
So often, the symptoms or clusters of signs you are experiencing are a consequence of one or more of your behaviors or choices, and you can make good headway against them by changing your behaviors.
Tracking this way has helped me solve many of my health mysteries. One story I like to tell involves my previously chronic constipation.
Though there were many actions I took to help resolve this problem, when I started using a food-symptom diary, I finally figured out that broccoli was a significant constipation trigger for me. Every time I ate broccoli (one of my favorite vegetables), I would stop pooping 1-2 days later, for a day or two. It was an easy enough thing to forego broccoli temporarily while I sorted out the other factors (which included SIBO, but that’s another story!).
A few years later, I was confused after my partial hysterectomy. Because I was no longer bleeding, I couldn’t exactly tell what my cycle was doing. I knew that I needed some hormonal support, but my other symptoms didn’t make it clear.
By taking my basal body temperature, I found that I WAS still cycling, but that my cycles had become irregular. So I learned that I was entering peri-menopause, which helped me craft my best support strategy. It also helped me understand some symptoms I was seeing on the outside, like acne flares.
I had a client who was able to figure out that the reason they had chronic, daily diarrhea was because of a melatonin supplement they were taking in order to help with sleep.
I had another client who learned through food-symptom tracking that tomatoes, a high histamine food, were contributing to their frequent hives.
One more client could clearly see that gluten and dairy were causing her bloating and extra morning trips to the bathroom.
Conclusion
Sometimes the solutions to your health problems don’t involve fancy protocols or pills, just some common sense changes that address what’s true for your very own body. If you are willing to take the time to look a little deeper, and learn to be a symptom tracker, you may find the root causes, which save us a life of worsening symptoms and increasing medical costs.
Now it’s your turn…if you’re confused about the source of your symptoms, download the Food-Symptom Diary and try your hand at tracking your symptoms. See what new information you can learn about your symptoms.
Tracking your symptoms to learn about your body’s non-negotiables is only one stop on the Road to Recovery. To see what else is needed to find your way to your personal remission or long-term plan, grab your free copy of Roadmap to Recovery here.
If you find you have more questions than answers after completing your Food-Symptom Diary, I invite you to schedule a free 30-minute Assessment Session with me, and I’ll help you make sense of what you found.
