How long after a meal do symptoms show up?
Hours, usually. Not minutes. Bloating that follows a meal tends to land while you're eating the next one, or in bed. That delay is why most food diaries can't answer the question.
Why the whole day is too wide
A diary that links a symptom to the day links it to breakfast, lunch and dinner at once. Every food you ate that day gets a mark. Over two weeks good days and bad days carry the same foods, and nothing stands out. That's the usual reason a diary says nothing. The answer is in the gap between the meal and the symptom, so write down both times.
Why one hour is too narrow
Go the other way and you miss it. If you only look at the meal you just finished, a symptom at 11 pm gets pinned to the snack at 10, not the dinner at 7. For bloating, NutrUp looks from two hours after a meal through to the next day. Reflux tends to come sooner, so it looks sooner and stops sooner. A symptom in the first two hours after a meal isn't counted for that meal. It sits on the one before.
The hours are per food
Inside that span, NutrUp works out where a food's symptoms actually clustered in your meals. For onion in the sample diary, that's two to eight hours: six of the eight onion meals were followed, and every one landed in that stretch. A different food, or a different person, gets different hours. A food gets its own line once it's in six meals, so the ones you eat most show first, usually about two weeks in. A fixed window for everything is how every frequent food ends up looking guilty.
Eight hours on the Lock Screen
The reason most food diaries stop on day four is the fourth step: opening the app. So after you log a meal, NutrUp puts it on the Lock Screen for its first eight hours: the dish, a clock since the meal, and a line filling toward now. Bloating, Pain, Reflux and Nothing are each one tap, so you can say how you feel the moment it happens, without opening the app. A tap logs it as moderate for now, with ten minutes to change how strong, or undo. At eight hours the line is full and it says what landed, or "Nothing in its first eight hours."
Sample diaryThe clock since dinner, and four words that log in a tap.
The clock does the remembering
In the app, every meal is a line through the hours after it. When a symptom lands, the line stops there and says so: "3h 28m later, bloating." When nothing does, the line runs the whole way and says "Nothing followed." The gap is written down for you every time, and that gap is what a finding is built from.
On paper, the same thing takes two columns: the time of the meal and the time the symptom started. Keep both, including the days where the second column stays empty. The empty days are what make the full ones mean something.
Good questions
How long after eating does bloating usually start?
Hours, for most people who notice it, not minutes. In the sample diary on this page, every bloating that followed a meal landed between three and eight hours after it. Your own hours depend on the food and on you, which is why they should come from your own meals rather than a fixed rule.
Can a symptom this morning be from last night's dinner?
Yes. Waking up bloated counts, and it says more about dinner than anything else. Log it for when it happened, and let the hours between it and the last meal go on the page.
What if I ate twice in the window?
Log both meals and the symptom with its time. One symptom sits on one meal, the one its hours fit, and NutrUp says which. Over two weeks the food the followed meals have in common is what the count finds, whichever meal each symptom sat on.
Why does NutrUp say usually two to eight hours later?
Those are the hours where that food's symptoms clustered in your own meals. They're worked out per food, so onion can read two to eight hours while another food reads differently. A symptom outside a food's usual hours is shown but left out of its count.
NutrUp does the counting.
A food and symptom diary for iPhone. Photograph what you eat, tap how you feel, and in about two weeks see which foods your symptoms followed, with the meals behind each one. No account, and the diary stays on your iPhone. What NutrUp is.
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