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Food tracking apps are a tool that many assume will HELP their relationship with food... but they might actually do the opposite.
Food awareness isn’t bad, and in some capacity, these tools may have been designed with the intent to help us become more conscious of what we eat.
But, in combination with the pressure that comes alongside diet culture and various emotions around foods and our bodies, food tracking apps can make our relationship with food feel really conditional.
For example:
It only counts if you track it...
The app might tell you if a food is “good” or “bad”...
Feeling like you’ve either “passed” or “failed” depending on how perfectly you track your day...
With this, we start to have “scorecard syndrome”. We are so consumed with fulfilling x, y, and z, that we forget the real purpose of eating in the first place - to nourish our body, provide for its energy needs, and for food to just be a part of our life.
All these really great things can get clouded by an app telling us whether or not we deserve to feel accomplished.
When we don’t fulfill the apps' expectations, guidelines, or goals, we feel ashamed, incapable, and this is exactly the opposite of what we intended to use the food tracker for in the first place. It was meant to motivate us and instead it burdens us.
My advice? Proceed with caution. Having a tracker that tells you what is considered successful can really rob you of the entire process of learning to find a healthy relationship with food & yourself.
While we might have good intentions to become more aware of what we're eating, using apps can encourage us to obsess about when what, and how much we eat! We then lose our ability to trust ourselves and our decisions around food.
I'm here to help you stop relying on a food tracking app and instead learn to trust your body's own hunger and satiety cues while developing an intuitive eating style that works for you (which is FAR better for true, sustainable wellness).
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