Free guide · About 12 minutes · no card, no call
Is It Food or Your Hormones?
A 14-day charting exercise to find out whether your bad days cluster — before you cut one more food.
At the end you will know one thing about your body you do not know today: whether your bad days cluster.
What's inside
- Why a three-week gluten trial cannot return a trustworthy answer, and why that is not your fault.
- The moving-scale problem, in one paragraph, with no jargon.
- The exact 14-day exercise: what to log, the 0-10 scale with anchored descriptions, and the under-90-seconds-a-day rule.
- A printable charting template, fourteen rows, ready to fill in.
- How to read your own chart - three named patterns and what each one means for what you do next.
- The language for describing a charted pattern to your own doctor in a twelve-minute appointment.
Maya Chen, MS, RDN, LD
Eleven years as a registered dietitian: the first six in a hospital GI clinic, the last five in solo private practice. Certified Monash FODMAP practitioner, IFNCP certificate. Fully virtual, based in Portland.
Where should I send it?
The guide and the charting template arrive straight away.
Prefer to read it here first, without giving me your email? That is completely fair — the whole guide is on this website.
What you're building
Two axes on one page, and then something either shows up or it doesn't.
A food log has one axis: what you ate. That is why three of them went nowhere. It cannot answer why the same salad was fine on Tuesday and ruinous on Thursday, because the thing that changed is not on the page.
This chart has two. Symptom score down one side, cycle day across the other.
Symptom score against cycle day
Premenstrual window — cycle days 24–28
- Days logged
- 28
- Mean score, days 24–28
- 7.6
- Mean score, rest of cycle
- 3.7
Before you give me your email
What this guide is not.
It is not a diagnosis and it is not a test result. Charting a symptom against a cycle day is pattern-spotting. It does not detect, diagnose, or correct anything hormonal, and I am not going to imply that it does.
It is also not the whole method. Charting tells you which weeks your readings can be trusted. It does not tell you which foods are yours — that is reintroduction, and reintroduction is the part every free handout skips.
And it is genuinely free. If you chart fourteen days and your bad days scatter, you have learned something real about your body and you have not spent a dollar. I will tell you plainly that this is not your mechanism.