Disclaimer: This is based mostly on my personal experience with MyFitnessPal. I realise everyone is different, and I’m open to hearing other opinions. :)
Health-by-Numbers
There are a whole bunch of food tracker apps out there that help you follow your progress as a human. Clearly, there are many people out there who ardently believe the path to health lies in methodically recording and optimising human processes.
The apps entice you with the promise of control over your own body. Through them, you can know yourself. You count exactly how much fuel goes in, so you can balance it with the right amount of exercise. Overeat, undereat, maintain: it’s just a matter of choice. You are in charge.
What about mental health?
The problem I found with this theory of numbers is that it neglects to factor in mental health. Personally, I found that achieving the ‘right’ numbers onscreen did not match up with feeling good and secure in real life.
Let me explain how this all began.
I was following a ketogenic diet (low-carb, high-fat) for a few years, and one day I read an article that made me doubt whether I was getting my macros right. By this, I mean hitting a good ratio of fat, protein and carbs in my diet. For keto, you need to be eating a lot of fat. Like 75-80% of your daily calories.
My partner and I decided to log everything we were eating on MyFitnessPal. While the app doesn’t encourage keto, it does show you a useful breakdown of your macros in pie chart form.
Within a few days of logging our meals, which were very representative of what we ate every day, it became clear we were on the right track. We were eating plenty of fat, and were happy with the variety of vitamins and various other nutrients in our food.
End of story?
Not quite. We probably should have called it a day at this point. Put our phones down and just been content.
But, in my experience, fitness tracking apps don’t breed contentment. Instead, they can send you into a frenzy of optimization.
Enjoying our meal became secondary to logging all the ingredients, before we forgot them. I’d lift a fork of amazing keto lasagne to my lips, only to pause and ask ‘How many cans of tomatoes went into this, again?’. I raced to calculate the exact quantities of food in my portion; my lasagne sat there, cold and unloved.
A Numbers’ Game
Even though the rule in keto is ‘Count carbs, not calories’, I became obsessed with racing the calorie counter down to the bottom.
You see, when you eat below the target for a few days, the number of that daily calorie target creeps down. In my mind, each day’s eating became about how much I could undershoot the target by. As if I was scoring extra points.
If I overshot, even by a measly 60 calories, I would feel terrible. As if I’d failed. Though I knew the calculations were not super accurate, the feeling of failure at going over my target calories was brutal.
I didn’t even want or need to lose weight that badly at the time. But, somehow, the numbers made it more thrilling. Like beating your score on Candy Crush.
I realised one day that I was getting a rush from undereating. And though, thank goodness, I’ve never suffered seriously with an eating disorder before, I could feel that I was beginning to walk a dangerous line.
Enough is enough
That’s when I uninstalled MyFitnessPal, in horror. Because it was not my pal.
Pals don’t egg you on to eat less and less. Pals don’t chastise you for eating an ice cream. Pals understand that mental and emotional wellbeing are crucial to living a healthy lifestyle.
Just to be clear, I think keeping a food diary is totally different. I’m all for food diaries. Food diaries can help you notice bad habits, feel in control of what you put in your body, and identify allergies.
There’s something about the app form, with its graphs and figures, that is addictive. It eliminates the context of you as a person, as if who you are can be expressed in numbers. Logging calories on my phone makes me lose perspective. It skews my sense of self-worth into the numerical.
There are far better ways of establishing good life habits. The more sociable, the better. Get a workout buddy for motivation, see a nutritionist for a tailored, scientific approach. Join us in eXtreme for a bootcamp fitness getaway with your besties. Getting fit can be way more fun than logging your egg white omelette for breakfast.
So, just remember: your incredible body is no Doodle Jump.
Take food tracker apps with a pinch of salt. And resist the urge to log that in your sodium intake.