A printable PDF for tracking meals, snacks and symptoms. For personal use or clinical practice.
A food diary is one of the most useful tools in nutrition. Whether you’re a dietitian working with clients or someone trying to understand your own eating habits, writing down what you eat changes how you think about food, in an honest way.
This page includes a free, printable food diary template you can download as a PDF. Below the template, we cover how to use a food diary effectively, what to track beyond just food, and when it makes sense to move from paper to a food diary app.
Why keep a food diary?
Most people think they know what they eat. The research says otherwise. Studies consistently show that people underestimate their food intake, forget snacks, and misjudge portion sizes. A food diary closes that gap.
For individuals, a food diary helps you see patterns. Maybe you’re skipping meals and compensating later. Maybe your energy dips correlate with what you ate three hours earlier. Maybe you’re eating well during the week and losing track on weekends. You won’t see any of this without a record.
For dietitians and nutritionists, a food diary is the foundation of a dietary assessment. A detailed food record gives you the data to analyse intake, identify gaps, and make recommendations grounded in what your client is actually eating, not what they think they’re eating. It’s also a conversation starter. When a client brings a completed food diary to a consultation, the session moves faster because you’re working from real data, not recall.
Download: free food diary template (PDF)
Our food diary template is a simple, printable PDF designed for a full week of tracking. It includes columns for:
- Time of each meal or snack
- Food and drink consumed, including quantities and preparation
- Hunger level before eating (1-5 scale)
- Notes for anything relevant: mood, energy, symptoms, location, who you ate with
The template is deliberately simple. The more complicated a food diary is, the less likely someone is to complete it. Seven days of honest recording is more useful than two days of meticulous detail followed by five days of nothing.
The template is free for personal use and for practitioners to share with clients. No sign-up required. Print as many copies as you need.
How to fill in a food diary
A food diary is only useful if it reflects what you actually ate. Here are the practices that make the difference between a record you can learn from and one that tells you nothing.
Record as you go, not from memory. The biggest source of error in a food diary is delay. If you wait until the end of the day to fill it in, you’ll forget the handful of nuts at 3pm, the second coffee, the oil you cooked with. Record each meal and snack as close to the time of eating as possible.
Include quantities, not just names. “Chicken salad” tells you very little. “Grilled chicken breast (palm size), mixed leaves (two handfuls), cherry tomatoes (6), olive oil (1 tablespoon), balsamic vinegar” gives a dietitian something to work with. You don’t need to weigh everything, but be specific enough that someone else could roughly recreate the meal.
Don’t change your eating to look good on paper. This is the most common mistake, and it defeats the purpose entirely. A food diary is a diagnostic tool, not a performance review. If you eat a whole packet of biscuits on Tuesday, write it down. That’s the most valuable data point in the whole diary.
Track drinks too. Coffees with milk and sugar, soft drinks, juice, alcohol. Liquid intake is easy to forget and can account for a significant portion of daily energy intake.
Note the context. This is where the template’s notes column earns its place. Were you eating at your desk while working? Were you stressed? Rushed? Socialising? The context around eating often matters as much as the food itself.
Food and symptom diary: when to track more than food
If you’re working with a dietitian to investigate food intolerances, IBS, bloating, skin reactions, or other symptoms that might be diet-related, a standard food diary isn’t enough. You need a food and symptom diary.
A food and symptom diary adds structured tracking for physical symptoms alongside your food intake. What did you eat, when did you eat it, and what happened afterwards. Bloating two hours after lunch. A headache by mid-afternoon. Disrupted sleep. Fatigue after a meal that should have given you energy.
The value for practitioners is significant. When a client presents with vague symptoms (“I just don’t feel good after eating”), a week of food and symptom data turns vague into specific. You can see correlations. You can form hypotheses. You can design an elimination protocol based on evidence, not guesswork.
Our downloadable food diary template includes a notes column that can be used for symptom tracking. For clients who need more structured symptom recording, consider adding a dedicated symptom scale (severity 1-5, timing relative to meals) alongside the template.
When to move from paper to a food diary app
A printable food diary template works well for short-term tracking. A week of recording before a consultation. A two-week food and symptom diary to investigate a suspected intolerance. A baseline assessment at the start of a nutrition program.
But for ongoing food tracking, paper has limitations. You can’t easily search back through weeks of handwritten records. You can’t analyse the data without re-entering it manually. And for dietitians, a paper diary means either transcribing your client’s records by hand or working from a document you can’t cross-reference against nutrient data.
This is where a food diary app makes sense. And if you’re in Australia, the app worth knowing about is Easy Diet Diary.
Easy Diet Diary: the digital version of this template
Easy Diet Diary is a free food diary app built on Australian food composition data. It does what this printable template does, but digitally, and with the nutritional analysis built in.
Your clients download the app on their phone (iOS or Android), record their meals as they eat them, and the data is there when you need it. No paper to collect. No handwriting to decipher. No manual data entry on your end.
For individuals tracking their own intake, Easy Diet Diary gives you a more complete picture than a paper diary ever could. As you log each meal, the app calculates your intake across key nutrients: energy, protein, fat, carbohydrates, saturated fat, sugars, fibre, sodium, potassium, calcium, and phosphorus. Instead of just a list of what you ate, you can see how your nutrient intake tracks over days and weeks, and where the gaps are.
What makes Easy Diet Diary different from other food diary apps in Australia is the data underneath. It’s built on Australian food composition data, including branded products from Australian supermarkets. When you search for a food, you’re finding products you actually buy, with verified nutritional information, not unverified crowd-sourced entries with inconsistent accuracy.
Easy Diet Diary is free to download and use and has no ads.
→ Download Easy Diet Diary on the App Store → Download Easy Diet Diary on Google Play
For dietitians: from food diary to dietary analysis
If you’re a dietitian or nutritionist using food diaries as part of your clinical workflow, there’s a step beyond recording that a food diary app alone doesn’t cover: detailed dietary analysis.
Easy Diet Diary connects directly to Foodworks Professional. When your client records their food intake in the app, that data flows into your Foodworks analysis. No re-entry or transcription. You open the food record in Foodworks and run a full dietary analysis across 80+ nutrients, compare against Nutrient Reference Values, and generate a report your client can take away.
This is where the paper food diary template, the food diary app, and the nutrition analysis software connect into one workflow. Your client tracks on their phone. You analyse in Foodworks. The consultation is grounded in real data.
→ Try Foodworks Professional free for 14 days
Tips for dietitians: getting clients to complete their food diary
Every dietitian knows the challenge. You give a client a food diary. They come back with two days filled in, one of which is suspiciously healthy. Here’s what practitioners tell us works.
Explain the why. Clients are more likely to complete a food diary when they understand what you’re looking for. “I want to see a typical week so I can give you specific recommendations” is more motivating than “fill this in before your next appointment.”
Make it easy to start. Give them the template pre-printed, or set them up with Easy Diet Diary before they leave the consultation. Removing the friction of “I’ll do it later” increases completion rates significantly.
Tell them honesty matters more than perfection. A complete, honest record of an imperfect week is far more useful than a curated highlight reel. Say this explicitly, because most clients assume they’re being judged.
Start with three days, not seven. If a full week feels overwhelming, start with three days: two weekdays and one weekend day. That gives you a usable snapshot without the compliance burden.Use the data in the session. When a client sees their food diary informing specific, personalised recommendations, they understand why it matters. That makes the next diary easier to complete.
