BellyMystery
I built this because my son needed it.
I'm Ola. My son has a food intolerance, and for a while we had no way to prove it, only a feeling that something he ate kept making him feel bad.
Tracking it by hand didn't last.
When we finally sat down with a dietitian, the first thing she asked us to do was log what he ate and how he reacted. That makes sense. It's how you find a pattern in something as messy as food and symptoms. So we started the way most families do: pen and paper.
Pen and paper works for a few days. Then life happens. You forget to write down a snack, or what time the stomachache started, or whether it was after the yogurt or the sandwich. By the next appointment we were reconstructing weeks from memory, which is exactly the kind of guessing we were trying to get away from in the first place.
We've kept working with dietitians since then to get to the bottom of it, and every time, the same problem came back: the tracking is the hard part, not the eating.
So I built the tool I wished we'd had.
I'm a software developer, so I built an app that could keep up with actual family life: log a meal in seconds, tap to record a symptom or a stool, and let it keep an organized log instead of a stack of receipts and half-remembered notes. When something stands out, like reactions after most dairy meals, it checks that against a pack of referenced medical sources and explains it in plain language, the kind of context I wish I'd had at 11pm instead of guessing.
BellyMystery doesn't diagnose anything, and it never will. It can't tell you what's wrong with your kid, and neither can I. What it can do is remember what you can't, so the next time you're in a dietitian's office, you're not saying "it happens sometimes." You're the parent who showed up with the evidence.
Bring the pattern to a dietitian before changing anything
A pattern is a starting point for a conversation, not a diet plan. Cutting out foods on your own, especially for a kid who's still growing, carries real risk: missed nutrients, a food reintroduced the wrong way, or chasing a pattern that isn't actually the cause. Any change to what your kid eats should be worked out with a dietitian or your child's doctor first.
That's the whole reason this exists. Not because tracking is an interesting problem to build software around, but because we kept standing in our own kitchen trying to remember what our son ate three days ago, and we wanted better for the next family in that spot. So logging had to be fast enough to actually stick: a few taps, a photo instead of typing, and a reminder that shows up right when it matters. Hopefully it can help you too!!
Try it free, then one payment, not a subscription.
Log meals, symptoms, and stools free for 2 days, no card required. After that, one payment unlocks the full app for as long as you're figuring this out. No subscription, nothing to remember to cancel.
Have a question, a suggestion, or your own version of this story? I read every email myself at [email protected].