Food & symptoms · Migraine Triggers
A migraine trigger tracker that accounts for the prodrome
Chocolate is the best illustration of why migraine trigger hunting goes wrong. Plenty of people are certain chocolate triggers their migraines. For many of them it's the reverse: the prodrome — the hours before the pain — causes a carbohydrate craving, they eat chocolate, and then the attack arrives on the schedule it was always going to keep. You cannot untangle that by remembering. You can untangle it with timestamps.
For anyone trying to separate genuine migraine triggers from coincidence.
Why this is hard to keep track of
- The prodrome causes cravings that then get recorded as triggers
- Triggers stack rather than acting alone, so single-factor thinking fails
- The lag between exposure and attack is often 6 to 24 hours
- The diary gets abandoned exactly when attacks are frequent enough to matter
Worth recording
- When the attack started, how long it lasted, how severe, what you took
- Prodrome symptoms and when they began, which is the part that matters
- Food, alcohol, sleep, cycle and weather
- Painkiller days per month, which is a clinical number in its own right
Cadence
A line when an attack starts and one when it ends
In practice
Say it once, in whatever words you have
The moments most worth recording are the ones where filling in a form is the least realistic thing in the world. A sentence, typed or dictated afterwards, is a much lower bar — and it carries the context a checkbox would have lost.
Called 4 tools
log_attack(started: "15:00", severity: 7)log_prodrome(symptoms: ["sugar craving"], from: "11:00")log_context(alcohol: "wine", sleep: "poor")find_pattern(metric: "attacks", group_by: "preceding_factors")
Every figure here was counted from entries you made. The model picked which tools to call — it doesn't interpret, diagnose, or decide what anything means about anyone.
And then ask
The question the log can answer
Months of entries hold real answers to the questions you've been guessing at, and reading them properly has always meant a spreadsheet and a free evening — which is not a thing anyone in this situation has.
Ask in plain language. The answers come back with the numbers behind them, including when those numbers are too thin to mean anything yet — which is the more useful answer more often than people expect.
Called 3 tools
get_history(topic: "migraine-triggers", window: "6m")find_pattern(group_by: "antecedent")compare_periods(metric: "events")
Counts and averages over your own entries, nothing more. Where the data is confounded or too thin, the answer says so instead of rounding it into a conclusion.
The reason most people start
Something to actually bring to the appointment
You get fifteen minutes, once, after waiting months for it. The questions are specific and the honest answers are all some version of "I don't know, it's hard to say".
What this gives you: Attack frequency and painkiller days per month — the two numbers a neurologist asks for and the ones that decide whether preventatives are on the table.
- Export the date range you were asked about, as a file you can print
- Counts and timings rather than an impression of the worst week
- Your own notes kept alongside the numbers, in your words
- Nothing shared anywhere unless you choose to share it
What it won't do
- Diagnose anything, or suggest that it could
- Score a person, or rank them against anyone else
- Set a target for fewer events, or a streak of good days
- Recommend a treatment, a therapy, a diet or a medication change
- Share your record with a school, a clinician or anyone else on its own
It's a notebook that can do arithmetic and answer questions about itself. Deciding what any of it means is a job for you and the people advising you.
Early access
Start with what you're already trying to hold in your head
Tell us what you've been trying to keep track of and we'll set it up with you — recording the thing that's actually useful, at a cadence that survives a bad week.
- Founding accounts lock their price for life
- No card, no trial clock, no notifications designed to make you feel behind
- Export everything you've logged whenever you want
Also tracked
The rest of the picture
These overlap constantly, which is the point — the answer to a question about one of them is very often sitting in another one's data.
Elimination Diets
A sentence after meals, and whenever something changes
Low FODMAP
Logged through each challenge, reviewed at the end of it
Food Intolerance
A sentence after meals, symptoms whenever they show up
Food Allergy
Logged after the event, once everyone is safe
Gluten & Celiac
Logged when something goes wrong, plus a weekly line
IBS & Gut Symptoms
A line a day, more during a flare
Eczema & Skin Flares
A line a day during a flare, weekly otherwise
Keep the record without it becoming another job
Founding pricing is locked for accounts opened during early access.
Founding accounts lock their price for life. No card required.