“It’s time to track your next meal!” No. It’s time to delete the apps”

Exploring the reality of ‘fitness’ apps and how they can become addictive

Fitness and dieting apps have become increasingly prevalent in the last decade. With the surge in digitalisation and mobile phone usage, there comes a concomitant rise in society’s captivation with self-tracking. Since as early as 2008, many have been enthralled by the prospect of counting calories, tracking step count, and monitoring their exercise routines. However, as society spends more time online, is this habit evolving into a potentially dangerous obsession? Apps such as ‘MyFitnessPal’ and ‘Lose-It’ are currently unregulated by health experts and available to anyone with a smartphone. They prompt users to treat their bodies mechanically – sometimes suggesting lowering daily calorie intake to worryingly low quantities, even below that of a toddler’s dietary requirement. These apps have been commonly linked to negative self-image and disordered eating, causing major concern for vulnerable and impressionable users who are continually surrounded by online body image and social media pressures. 

Taken at face value, these apps may seem great. They are a useful way to help motivate users to get fit and keep track of their progress. However, Rachael Kent – a scholar in the field of digital health, digital media and digital economy at King’s College London believes they are “morally dubious”. She stated; 

“These devices themselves can’t capture what is unquantifiable… if you’re underslept, if you’re traumatised, if you’re experiencing grief or if you haven’t had a meal that day. All these things, it doesn’t matter what you don’t tell it. That’s where the issue can arise and how they can be harmful”. 

The application’s oversimplification of our body’s needs in the form of tracking calories in and calories out potentially promotes unhealthy eating habits. While allegedly endorsing fitness and positive well-being, these apps can have the opposite effect. I spoke to Rachel Cowey, the council lead at Eating Distress Northeast who exposed the dangers of becoming addicted to these apps. Eating Distress Northeast is a 16-plus service and Cowey disclosed that the majority of their referrals are predominantly aged between 18-25. 

“It can be very easy to become obsessive around either counting calories or weighing out food or tracking what you’ve eaten in a day. From what clients and students tell me and from reading up about it… it doesn’t give accurate information about the nutritional value of food and the language used around food is very negative.” 

Furthermore, calories and macronutrient targets generated by these apps are not sufficiently accurate for individual needs. It is recommended to consult with a dietitian for individualized targets and use the app as a tool to input foods to meet your targets.

Although Rachel Cowey typically deals with clients over 18, dieting apps are available to download by anybody. They can instil habits from very early ages which can be extremely damaging to young and impressionable audiences. Erin Cassidy, a 22-year-old student at Nottingham University downloaded her first fitness app when she was only 14 years old and since then has used the app on and off for the best part of the last 8 years of her life. She admittedly still uses them today. 

“It began as just tracking for “health” and to “feel better” and within a year I was having treatment for an eating disorder which took over 2 years to recover from.”

She spoke about how she felt out of control and distressed whenever she was unable to track her meals;

“I would track tablespoons of oil, a dash of milk and even garlic to ensure I knew I was not going over a certain amount in a day. I would stay up late before bed inputting what I was going to eat the next day and I would be terrified eating at a restaurant or with friends where I couldn’t use the app. I think when you are using something that is disrupting your day-to-day life and times with friends and family, you definitely feel out of control without it”.

Erin’s personal experience underscores a distinct correlation between the obsessive usage of online dieting apps and self-tracking, ultimately culminating in negative self-perception and detrimental behavioural patterns. Tracking food intake in this manner is becoming a compulsive addiction for some young users and Rachael Kent summarised the problem; 

“When we’re tracking our diet and calories, we get into a cycle of data acquisition being equated to self-worth and personal validation and I think that can be really addictive and attractive, but at what point does that become harmful? When you’re over-exercising your body or undereating to kind of follow the guidance of an application, a dietary application that doesn’t know your body in its entirety”.

The COVID-19 lockdown has only exacerbated the problem and shown increased use of fitness apps. Rachael Kent’s research within this area shed light on the issue of toxic productivity, enabled by increased screen time during lockdown. Kent described this phenomenon as feeling as though “we should be doing more, being more active and adopting different types of dietary changes…” Consequently, this ties to health behaviour and self-tracking where many began to obsessively track their fitness. For example, from March until June 2020, there were almost one million downloads of the ‘Coach to 5k’ App – a 92% increase compared to 2019. 

As digitalisation increases, the question remains: How can we ensure these apps are safer for younger users? Erin Cassidy, who has first-hand experience with dieting apps, believes that enforcing age restrictions on these applications would be beneficial to prevent adolescents and even younger children from accessing these sites and developing harmful and addictive habits prematurely. While they can be a positive tool for some, Rachael Kent suggests that there needs to be some form of online verification to ensure that clinically qualified professionals are sharing accurate information online, certifying that the younger generation is well-informed. Nonetheless, the implementation of these changes remains pending, and there is a concern that the online dieting culture will only expand.

In the meantime, deleting these fitness apps from our media devices may be the healthiest thing we can do.