Daisy O'Neill
Abstract
Food tracking applications (apps) can provide benefits (e.g., helping diagnose food intolerances) but can also create harm (e.g., facilitating disordered eating). However, food tracking apps—viewed as a women’s health issue, and critically examined through the lens of feminist HCI—are absent from the discourse of sociocultural, ethical, and political implications of apps designed to track bodily data. We use a walkthrough method to critically analyze three commercial food tracking apps with differing marketing narratives and designs, applying a reflexive feminist lens grounded in a perspective of fat liberation. We articulate how these apps reproduce normativities of food and nutrition, health, and bodies, and how they perpetuate narratives of embodiment, simplification and quantification of health, and neoliberalism and the individualization of health. Our work exposes the normativities of bodies being propagated by food tracking apps, spotlighting how designs and interaction features are situated within prevalent anti-fat narratives.
1 INTRODUCTION
Digital health technologies are playing a growing role in the delivery of healthcare for nutrition. The use of food tracking applications (apps) is particularly pervasive, increasingly recommended as a standard part of care in programs for preventative health and rehabilitation [63, 153], as well as being recommended by national health agencies for use by the general public [11, 52, 53]. Food tracking apps ask users to continuously self-monitor and record the food and beverages they consume each day. Additionally, many food tracking apps include features for self-monitoring body weight, connecting with other users, or receiving educational content. In the healthcare context, these apps are generally recommended for patient use under the guidance of a healthcare professional, such as a dietitian or nutritionist. However, as food tracking is increasingly recommended to the general public, many people also use commercially available apps without the guidance of a healthcare professional. These apps are incredibly popular, with the MyFitnessPal app having more than 100 million downloads on the Google Play Store alone [139].
In the clinical context, food tracking apps hold potential to provide healthcare professionals with a more detailed overview into the nutritional habits of a patient [81], facilitate remote nutrition treatment [42], and reduce the cost of nutrition care [60]. They can also be useful for patient monitoring, such as in diabetes care [49, 130], diagnosing food sensitives and intolerances [27, 100], and tracking the impact of foods on irritable bowel syndrome [78, 155]. For the general public, food tracking apps can be useful for assessing whether one’s diet is nutritionally adequate over a short period of use [110], or by facilitating self-exploration into how food influences personal energy levels [111], mood and emotions [90]. However, research has also shown that food tracking is extremely burdensome [33], has poor accuracy in naturalistic settings [22], and has limited evidence of long-term efficacy for improving nutrition [128]. Additionally, food tracking has also been shown to contribute to a variety of harmful behaviours, such as disordered eating [41, 133] and obsessive food monitoring [85], with dietitians voicing concerns about how food tracking apps facilitate people developing a dependency on the apps [83], and contribute to a patient’s negative relationship with food [83]. Women, in particular, report feelings of guilt and shame associated with the use of food tracking apps [33] as well as increased stress related to food tracking [115].
Food tracking apps are also the subject of strong feminist critique [26, 54, 92] for problematizing women’s bodies [54, 92], weaponizing anti-fatness [92], and coercing extensive self-surveillance practices [127], often in the name of “health” [91, 127]. Lupton highlights that women’s experiences with food tracking apps cannot be understood as separate from women’s “long biographical histories” of existing within patriarchal systems rooted in anti-fatness [92]. That is to say, women do not arrive to food tracking apps as blank slates—even when they are prescribed as healthcare. To truly attend to women’s health, we must acknowledge this reality and critically reflect on the socio-cultural normativities and narratives we embed into the design of nutrition technologies.
With this work, we also contribute to the growing critical discourse on the role of self-tracking technologies in women’s health. In the fields of Feminist Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and women’s health, an increasing body of feminist research draws attention to the sociocultural, ethical, and political implications of apps designed to track bodily data [123], such as fertility [103, 123], menstruation [40, 58], and menopause [9, 25, 71]. However, food tracking apps, viewed as a women’s health issue and critically examined through the lens of feminist HCI, are largely absent from the Feminist HCI discourse. This absence is surprising when considering both the pervasiveness and popularity of food tracking apps [94] and the call for evaluating their impact from feminist scholars outside of the field of HCI [48]. This absence is less surprising however when considering the pervasive and growing anti-fat bias in society [21]. Anti-fat bias has become so pervasive that scholars have argued that the war on “obesity" should not be considered as a public health initiative but is better described as a full moral panic [84]. Anti-fat bias is similarly evident in the HCI literature on food-related technological interventions that focus mainly on accountability, persuasive design, and social support (e.g., [3]), conflating weight loss with improved health.
Food tracking apps have the potential to yield benefits in specific scenarios and contexts (e.g., helping diagnose food intolerances [27]); yet, they can also harm user health and well-being (e.g., facilitating disordered eating [41, 133]). Whether they will result in benefit or harm may depend on specific aspects of their design; such as differing functionalities, interaction attributes, layouts, features, and overall narratives. Researchers and designers of food tracking apps can play a key role in mitigating harm through feature, function, and narrative choices. We therefore argue that it is essential for HCI researchers to uncover the narratives and normativities that individual design decisions within food tracking apps perpetuate.
To provide this guidance, we use Light et al.’s walkthrough method [88] to critically analyze three commercially available food tracking applications—MyFitnessPal [139], Noom [109], and Ate [121]. These apps were chosen because of their popularity, and because they specifically vary in their marketing narratives and available features, further described in section 3. The walkthrough method is well suited to this exploration because it goes beyond simply describing available app features and allows for a critical and reflexive approach, understanding apps as artifacts embedded within complex socio-cultural systems [88]. The walkthrough method has been previously used to successfully highlight the gendered normativities in menstruation and fertility tracking apps [123], examine the HIV-related user experience of online dating and hookup platforms [87] and surface narratives of what is means to be healthy embedded within the design of an mHealth app [96]. The walkthrough method is distinct from the "cognitive walkthrough" method [97], which focuses mainly on platform usability and navigability. During the walkthrough of these apps, we apply a reflexive feminist lens, answering calls to engage with women’s health research "in a more explicitly critical and reflective way" [79] and examine how "beliefs and use of technology (are) embedded in the production and ongoing management of gender in daily life’’ [124]. Our contribution can be understood as a critique-based contribution, which “relies on the use of feminist approaches to analyze designs and design processes in order to expose their unintended consequences” [10].
We present our findings within two overarching categories. Within Surfacing Normativities, we present three themes of how the chosen food tracking apps perpetuate normativities of nutrition and food, health, and bodies. Within Surfacing Narratives, we construct themes of how the apps embed narratives of embodiment, simplification and quantification of health, and neoliberalism and individualization of health. For each theme, we provide illustrative examples found during the walkthrough of the apps.
From our findings, we add to the call of feminist scholars and activists that food is a feminist issue and we argue that future HCI analyses and designs of food tracking apps should be considered through this lens. We then discuss how food tracking apps present conflicting narratives that stem from embracing the popular language of body positivity while still weaponizing anti-fat bias as a motivational strategy, as well as the dissonance between embodied and cognitive decision making. Finally, we present alternative narratives that could be used in the future designs of both food tracking apps, and broader food technologies, that would break from harmful anti-fat narratives, and instead promote approaches to heal our relationships with food and our bodies.
In 2008, Grimes and Harper proposed celebratory technology as a new direction for food research in HCI. In this paper, they called for the HCI community to focus “not on the problems that individuals have with food, but rather on the ways in which people find pleasure and success in their interactions with food” [64]. Two years later, Bardzell’s influential 2010 paper called for a feminist HCI [10], where she asks: "How do we simultaneously serve real-world computing needs and avoid perpetuating the marginalization of women and indeed any group in technology?”. Food tracking apps have generally been viewed in HCI as practical tools that reduce the burden of logging eating behaviours, using computing to serve a real-world need in nutritional healthcare. Our critical walkthrough illustrates that—despite the calls of Grimes & Harper and Bardzell—their designs still embed anti-fat ideologies that perpetuate false narratives of our bodies as meritocracies, ultimately fuelling a patriarchal system of power that depends on the body shame of women to survive.
2 BACKGROUND
2.1 Food as a Site of Feminist Action and Thought
The intersections of food, gender and power are long-standing sites of feminist thought and action. Throughout time, food practices of growing, preparing, sharing and eating food have embodied feminist values. Globally, women have long understood the value and power of food as care [8, 77, 99], to build [12, 14], nourish [75], and rebuild communities [74], to preserve heritage [74, 80], and as a vehicle of self-expression [1] and creativity [6].
Food has also been a powerful site of feminist resistance – as a medium to resist colonial erasure of cultural [76] and indigenous [107, 143, 149] heritage and knowledge, to fuel and fund activist efforts protesting racial segregation [62], as a site of women’s protest against the rising costs of living [134], and as a powerful tool towards gaining women’s’ voting rights [95]. Feminist food action has also focused on building and maintaining food sovereignty [50] and ecological food systems [143], demanding and creating equitable labour rights and working conditions for women throughout the global food system [38], and fighting food insecurity [28, 47] which disproportionately affects women and girls around the world [148]. Additionally, food has been a key site of fat resistance and liberation, with fat feminist activists speaking out against discrimination and diet culture [61], using food to reclaim fat, queer joy and sensuality [120], and trailblazing fat activists calling for an attitude towards food that “is honest, indulgent and compassionate” [147].
Inextricably linked to these feminist acts of resistance, and central to this paper, is feminist thought on food. Feminist scholars across many disciplines (e.g., women and gender studies, disability studies, fat studies, queer studies, history, literature, health and more) have explored food and eating in relation to women’s lives for decades [117]. It is important to note that feminism has not been immune to racism [36, 45], ableism [101], or anti-fat bias [132], nor has fat activism been immune to racism [118]. However, fat scholars and activists have been essential in their contribution to feminist body politics, although their work is often overlooked and undervalued. These lines of thought focus not only on gendered labour in the domestic and public spheres, but also on the ways that cultural forces conditions women’s physical and emotional relationships to eating and food.
Since the 1970’s—around the time that Feminist Food Studies was established as a field of its own, feminist scholars began to examine the ways that patriarchal culture “deforms women’s relationship with food” [96]. Central to this discussion is the socio-cultural pressure on women to conform to an idealized, unattainable body type [16, 82]. This ideal emphasizes thinness as a standard of beauty [16] and is deeply rooted in racism [140, 152]. Strings highlights how, in the context of the intertwined history of racial slavery and the rise of Protestantism throughout Europe and the United States, anti-fatness emerged as a tool of the elite to structurally punish Black women for not fulfilling the ideal of “compulsory slenderness”, and discipline white women into adhering to it [140]. Feminist scholars call attention to the ways in which women’s deeply intertwined appetites – for pleasure, knowledge, power, and food, have been suppressed by such cultural forces [23, 35] and equated with greed and moral corruption [114]. Feminist thought also highlights the problematic normalization and commercialization of constant dieting and food restriction [17, 70], the role of the media in representing how women should look and behave [16], the stigmatization of certain foods [152], and the moralization of eating habits [5], where certain ways of eating are deemed ’good’ or ’bad’, often with gendered implications.
2.2 (Feminist) Critique of Self-Tracking Technologies
Self-tracking technologies are increasingly critiqued for assuming a position of authority on what is “right” and “wrong”, “good” and “bad” [151]. Feminist critique of self-tracking technologies problematizes the quantification and simplification of the human experience [65, 73, 125, 142]. Critics highlight that these technologies focus on endless self-optimization [34, 131], relying heavily on tactics of persuasion [37], coercion [39] and surveillance [39, 127] to discipline, regulate and control [127, 138, 150] bodies. In these efforts, self-tracking technologies are not “neutral” artifacts and are encoded with many normative narratives, including regarding gender [24, 123, 138], health [7, 131], and bodies [19, 127]. Spiel et al. specifically call attention to ways that anti-fatness intersects with these normativities in technology design [136, 138]. Homewood et al. also demonstrates how they can have long lasting effect, showing that this inscription of societal norms lasts even after use is stopped [72].
These critiques also extend to the design and promotion of food tracking apps. Feminist scholars argue that they contribute to the increasing medicalization and problematization of women’s bodies [54, 92], encouraging women to become constant projects of improvement and optimization [13]. Critics also highlight how food tracking apps weaponize the fear of fatness and mortality [92], and demand that women exert impossible levels of self-discipline to surveil and control their bodies [127] often in the name of public health [91, 127].
2.3 Food Tracking as a Technology of the Self
These critiques are situated in relation to the Foucauldian perspective that power is not just imposed from above by the state or other authorities, but that it operates through more subtle forms of surveillance and self-discipline [55]. From this viewpoint, food tracking tools and practices can be understood as “technologies of the self” [56] — used by people to surveil, regulate and optimize their bodies to comply with normative body and health standards. By using self-tracking technologies, the individual becomes both the watcher, and the watched. This study of the self and its digital traces to generate self-knowledge can be further situated as biopedagogy. Biopedagogy encompasses the ways we try to learn about ourselves and our bodies. This self-knowledge, while frequently framed as “empowerment”, is often undertaken in the pursuit of normative bodily standards (e.g., a certain body weight, nutritional intake, or pattern of exercise) [154]. Practices and labour undertaken to achieve these normative standards (e.g., changing and tracking eating behaviour in the pursuit of thinness) can be understood as "body work”—a concept originating from feminist new materialism [29, 30]. Through these body work practices to maintain or modify the body’s appearance, gender is “continually reasserted and reconstructed” [29]. Feminist scholars argue that the “body work” of self-tracking one’s food must also be understood in the wider sociopolitical context of neoliberalism [127], in which health has become a highly individualized responsibility to achieve and maintain [2, 91].
2.4 Feminism and Food in HCI
While not explicitly labeling their work as feminist, there exists work within the HCI canon that explores the intersection of feminist values and food. Most prolific is the 2008 work of Grimes and Harper who highlighted the fixation of the HCI community on “treating what are perceived as kinds of problems individuals have with food” by building corrective technologies that aim to fix these “undesirable behaviors” [64]. To counter this narrative, the authors proposed the concept of celebratory technology, exploring how food research in HCI might look if “individuals’ current experiences with food are seen not as undesirable, but as positive, productive, even delightful” [64]. Grimes and Grinter then go on to illustrate how this might look like in practice, implementing a collectivist approach to support diet-related health challenges [116]. In this work, they highlight the importance of cultural context in the food and nutrition domains. Other HCI work highlights the importance of recognizing the situatedness of food practices and using “local knowledge to provide local solutions” [31], as well as how technology can support fostering users embodied knowing about the quality of food [46], and approaching food practices as social, communal activities to achieve food sovereignty [44], or support social justice within a food democracy [122].
Figure 1: Overview of the persona trajectory logged into the apps during the everyday use phase of the walkthrough. The guiding story is outlined along the top, and the fluctuations of calories, weight and nutrition over 3 weeks mapped underneath.
A small number of studies within HCI have specifically examined nutrition tracking apps from a feminist perspective. Most closely related to our research are the works of Lupton, who demonstrates the value of feminist perspectives to uncover women’s hidden experiences in the food tracking domain. In her 2018 paper, Lupton analyzes interviews exploring women’s use of health and fitness apps through the lens of feminist new materialism and highlights the negative experiences women have when they “do not meet the scripts associated with the imagined user” [92]. In her 2020 paper, Lupton then goes on to surface the tension women experience between trying to conform to the app’s idea of a “healthy, active, controlled body, while simultaneously juggling the demands of their personal lives, such as pregnancy, breastfeeding, chronic pain or disability [93]. Finally, Lupton analyzes how these demands and normativities are articulated in app store descriptions, finding that food tracking apps are sold with promises of offering reassurance and better control over the body, as well as encouraging greater embodied self-awareness, health and well-being [94]. Our work takes this one step further, by outlining how specific design choices for the interface, functions, and features within food tracking apps perpetuate harmful narratives and normativities.
3 METHOD
We use Light et al.’s walkthrough method [88] to analyze three premium versions of commercial food tracking apps: My Fitness Pal [108], Noom [109] and Ate [121]. These three apps have a variety of marketing narratives, features and functionalities, allowing us to understand food tracking apps from various perspectives. MyFitnessPal has the largest user base [139] and is marketed based on calorie tracking and weight loss; its focus is on restricting calorie intake to reduce body weight. Noom—while having similar features—positions itself as an "anti-diet" approach, focusing on behavioural change and well-being in the pursuit of body weight reduction. Finally, Ate uses a different approach by de-centring weight loss; instead using images to track food, focusing on self-reflection more than accountability.
The walkthrough method “involves the step-by-step observation and documentation of an app’s screens, features and flows of activity – slowing down the mundane actions and interactions that form part of normal app use in order to make them salient and therefore available for critical analysis” [88]. The goal is “not to test whether users respond to an interface in the ways its designers intended, but rather to... critically examine the workings of an app as a sociotechnical artefact” [88]. This method was chosen for its strength in connecting how the seemingly small choices made while designing food tracking apps are situated within a much wider socio-cultural context. In the walkthrough method, analysis is informed by the positionality of the authors, their sensitivities, and their understandings of the world [123]. In this paper, the analysis and framing of the findings were heavily informed by the authors’ feminist perspectives and their sensitivity towards the broader sociocultural context of self-tracking technologies under neoliberalism (as described in section 2). This same level of depth, which combines technical understanding of design considerations, with feminist and critical theory, would be otherwise extremely challenging to achieve using research methods such as interviews with regular app users.
Inspired by Reime, Tsaknaki and Cohn [123], we used 4 questions to anchor our analysis and surface how normativities of nutrition, health and bodies are articulated within the apps’ infrastructure, as well as uncover other embedded socio-cultural narratives: (1) What is a healthy diet according to the app?, (2) What is health according to the app?, (3) Which bodies are valued by the app? and (4) What socio-cultural narratives are embedded within the app?
The walkthrough method has 2 key focuses (I) environment of expected use and (II) technical walkthrough. First, establishing the environment of expected use positions an app within its socio-economic and cultural context. Attention is paid to the app’s vision (purpose, target user base, and scenarios of use), operating model (business strategy, revenue sources and underlying political and economic interests), and governance (how user activities are managed and regulated to sustain operating model and fulfill vision).
Second, the technical walkthrough “requires the researcher to assume a user’s position while applying an analytical eye" [88] to three key stages of app use—registration and entry (setting up an account and accessing the app), everyday use (app activities users regularly engage in), and app suspension, closure and leaving (temporarily or permanently disengaging from the app).
During the analysis, attention is paid to mediator characteristics including the user interface arrangement, functions and features, textual content and tone, and symbolic representation. Light et al. highlight that “an app’s mediator characteristics transform meaning through the interactions they invoke" [88]. They are "embedded with culture because their meanings exist in reference to cultural texts and understandings that exist outside the app” [88].
During the everyday use phase, Author 1 (A1) logged from the perspective of a persona [20] (30 year old, 5’6", cis-gender woman), using a predetermined food menu and weight trajectory, as opposed to tracking her own life. This was chosen to achieve good coverage of varying scenarios and contexts, and to avoid personal harm. The menu was adapted from a meal plan recommended by Dietitians of Canada [112]. The persona story, calorie overview, and weight trajectory—created jointly by Authors 1 and 3 (A3)—can be found in Figure 1. The Authors did not engage with social features such as community forums, social media sharing, or chat functionalities to avoid unethical interactions with other users, as outlined by Light et al. [88]. A3 also downloaded the apps and explored them during the 3-week walkthrough to contribute to discussion of the findings.
Each walkthrough began by finding the app in the Apple App Store, reading the available description, and then downloading the app. The steps of the above-described walkthrough method were then followed. Throughout the walkthrough, all interactions with the app were recorded using screenshots and recordings, along with the initial thoughts of A1, who lead the analysis. The screenshots and recordings were then fully analyzed with close attention paid to the method’s described mediator characteristics. Analysis was done verbally and automatically transcribed within the Microsoft Teams environment.
To facilitate reflexive thematic analysis [15], transcriptions were then uploaded into the qualitative analysis software NVivo [89] and were preliminarily tagged with their referenced mediator characteristic. This process served as further familiarization with the material and was performed by A1 while re-watching the associated screen recordings. Tagged excerpts were then loaded into the Miro platform as individual sticky notes and iteratively coded. Themes were then iteratively constructed. Theme construction was lead by A1 and was based on regular lively discussion between A1 and A3, who met multiple times a week during the analysis phase. Themes were then clustered, where appropriate, based on their relevance to our anchor questions, and are presented below.
4 AUTHOR POSITIONALITY
In the spirit of feminist reflexivity, we find it important to share our positionality in relation to this research. Author 1 is a white woman working in the Western European context. She was previously a daily user of food tracking apps and is now passionate about social movements which challenge the normalization of dieting. She lives in a body that is afforded thin privilege in many scenarios. Author 2 is a middle-aged white man working in the Western European context, who has been academically cultured in the North American context. He has never used food or weight-tracking apps. Author 3 is a middle-aged white woman working in a North American context. She was a long-term daily user of food and weight tracking apps, and now actively and consistently works to let go of internalized anti-fatness.
Figure 2: Left: Noom’s lesson reminding users that there are no "good" or "bad" foods; Middle: two conflicting tips given one after the other in a Noom article; Right: Noom describing that "green" food are better than other foods within their categorization system.
5 FINDINGS
Based on the conducted walkthrough of the Noom [109], MyFitnessPal (MFP) [108], and Ate [121] food tracking apps, we present our findings in 2 categories—(A) Surfacing Normativities (themes: nutrition and food, health, and bodies) and (B) Surfacing Narratives (themes: embodiment, simplification and quantification of health, and neoliberalism and individualization of health). We present each theme with illustrative examples found during the walkthrough. A complete overview of the categories and associated themes and sub-themes can be found in Tables 1 and 2.
5.1 Surfacing Normativites
In this section, we describe - or surface - social and cultural ideals, expectations and norms about nutrition, food, health, and bodies that are embedded into the design of food tracking apps. These norms, - or normativities - represent what is judged as acceptable or "normal" by the apps.
| A. Surfacing Normativities | |
| Subcategory A: Food & Nutrition – What is healthy nutrition according to the app? | |
| Theme | Subthemes |
| Foods (do not) have moral value | Foods have moral value |
| Foods do not have moral value | |
| (Un)healthy food is: | Healthy food is: |
| Unhealthy food is: | |
| A healthy relationship to food is: | Adding foods, not restricting them |
| Complicated because of societal expectations | |
| Focusing on nutrition and not on weight loss | |
| The role and power of food | Food as a creation or expression of joy |
| Food as a creation of other emotions | |
| Food as fulfillment of emotional needs | |
| Food as energy | |
| Food as medicine | |
| Calories as most important property of food | |
| Subcategory B: Health – What is health according to the app? | |
| Theme | Subthemes |
| Health is: | Health equated with thinness |
| Health equated with reduced caloric intake | |
| Health equated with happiness | |
| Health equated with strength and masculinity | |
| Health equated with energy | |
| Disordered eating behaviour | Facilitating disordered eating behaviour |
| “Safe-guarding” against disordered eating behaviour | |
| Weight loss is: | The most important goal in nutrition tracking |
| Not the most important goal in nutrition tracking | |
| important to maintain for long-term health | |
| Subcategory C: Bodies – How is fatness articulated by the app? | |
| Theme | Subthemes |
| Fatness is: | Fatness is something to be afraid of |
| Fatness is something to be ashamed of | |
| Fatness is funny | |
| Fatness signifies laziness | |
| Fatness signifies a poor social life | |
| Life will be better when you lose weight | |
| Diet culture and "body positivity" | Lose as much weight as you can, as fast as possible |
| Weight loss is always an admirable, positive thing | |
| Weight loss is an emotional experience full of guilt and worry | |
| Acknowledgement of bodies existing within diet-culture | |
| Appropriation of body positivity | |
Table 1: Surfacing Normativities: Themes and Subthemes
5.1.1 Normativities of Nutrition and Food.
The first theme includes underlying ideals and norms of nutrition and food. What food is considered healthy by an app is articulated through the pictures and graphics used throughout the app, which foods are recommended or deemed to be avoided in the text-based content, how food is automatically categorized by the app, or how the app behaves in response to logging a certain food. “Healthy” food is overwhelmingly depicted by all apps to be fresh, unprocessed, homemade, whole grain, and comprised of mainly fruits, vegetables and lean proteins. “Unhealthy” foods, on the other hand, are most often depicted as being pre-packaged, high in sugar, alcoholic, ordered from restaurants, or consumed at social gatherings. All apps fail to acknowledge the financial, locational and time barriers that prevent access to the foods which are framed as “healthy”.
All three apps state explicitly in their educational content that there is no such thing as “good” or “bad” foods—that foods do not have moral value [All]. However, there is a dissonance between what is communicated explicitly, and what is then communicated by the features of an app. This dissonance is most pronounced within the Noom app. Noom brands itself as “not a diet”, frequently communicating in their educational content that users can “eat all kinds of foods... Food is not "good" or "bad" or "fattening" or "powerful". It’s just food” (Fig, 2; Left). In a content piece titled "The Only 7 Habits You Need", users are told in Tip # 5 to “lose the labels” of good and bad food; however, in Tip #6, users are then encouraged to “ditch sugar-sweetened drinks” [Noom] (Fig, 2; Middle). This effectively labels sugar sweetened beverages as bad food to be avoided, which seems to contradict the idea of "losing the labels". This dissonance is also prevalent in Noom’s traffic-light food categorization system, in which food is labelled Green, Yellow and Red. While they describe that “orange doesn’t mean “bad”, and green doesn’t mean “good” they then qualify that green “does mean "better” [Noom] (Fig, 2; Right).
Figure 3: Options for tagging logged food in Ate app.
The apps also articulate what the role and power of food is. During the everyday use phase, it becomes clear that both Noom and MyFitnessPal place strong emphasis on calories being the most important property of food. However, food is articulated as holding other powers, such as providing energy [Noom, Ate, MFP] or acting as medicine [Ate, MFP]. There is also acknowledgement of the emotional aspects of food; expressing emotions through food [Ate], fulfilling emotional needs through food [All], or experiencing them in response to food [All]. The Ate app places particular emphasis on the emotional experiences a user has surrounding food. For example, when logging a meal, users are able to track the reasons why they eat, how they were feeling at the time they chose what to eat, and how the meal made them feel after eating (Fig, 3). When answering these questions, users are able to select multiple response options, which seems to acknowledge the plurality of co-occurring experiences one can have in response to food.
Figure 4: Left: Noom asking the user if they have an active eating disorder diagnosis; Middle: Noom recommending that users with an active eating disorder seek professional support and preventing them from continuing in the app; Right: An example of a trigger warning at the beginning of an Ate app article.
5.1.2 Normativities of Health.
The second theme developed based on the walkthrough data surfaces ideals around health—what constitutes health, the equation of health with weight loss, and how attention for disordered eating is approached in the apps. Health is articulated through the pictures and graphics used throughout the app, described in educational articles and made visible through options offered in onboarding forms and quizzes.
Within the apps, health is equated with being happy [Ate], active [All], outside in nature [All], physically strong [All] and having a lot of energy [All]. Most prominent within both MFP and Noom is the equating of health with thinness and reduced calorie intake. During the registration and entry phase for Noom, users are asked to complete a lengthy quiz which asks about their goals and wishes. Users are immediately asked, “what is your main reason for wanting to lose weight?”, to which one answer option is “become healthier”. This immediately equates improved health with losing weight. This continues into everyday use of the app. For example, on the 4th day of using the Noom app, the user is greeted with a task to fulfill titled “A Little Inspiration”. The article then reads “Others have found success along this path to health, and so can you. That being said, there’s someone we want you meet...”. When clicking to the next page, a before and after photo of a white woman appears, saying “This is (a Noom user)...she lost more than 19 pounds with Noom”. This further conveys that to succeed in "achieving health", the user must lose weight.
The framing of weight loss as the ultimate route to health also permeates how the value and function of food tracking is understood in the apps. During the registration and entry phase of using the MyFitnessPal app, the very first question asked of the user is whether they would like to use the app to “lose”, “maintain” or “gain weight”, with lose weight being positioned as the first answer. While losing weight is not the only available option, the lack of an “I don’t care” option immediately positions the function of food tracking in relation to changing one’s body mass. The Ate app, on the other hand, does not mention weight loss at all in the registration and entry phase of using the app, and the inspiration the user is given for setting a first lifestyle goal includes “feeling happy and healthy” or “having more energy”.
Also related to health, it is important to raise the prevention and facilitation of disordered eating behaviour within the apps. There is attention to disordered eating in all three apps. Noom, for example, asks the user during the on-boarding quiz "do you have an active diagnosis of an eating disorder (e.g., bulimia, anorexia, or similar diagnosis)?”. The author wondered whether a previously diagnosed eating disorder or the awareness of disordered eating behaviour without a formal diagnosis should also be indicated. If the user indicates yes, they are not able to progress any further in the app (Fig, 4;Left, Middle). The app instead re-directs users to an eating disorder support page run by the National Eating Disorder Association of America [4]. They can return to the Noom home page within the app, but if the user attempts to re-do the quiz, they are unable to change their original answer and are again not allowed to enter into the app. This can be easily circumvented by uninstalling and reinstalling the app. Additionally, both MyFitnessPal and Noom do not allow for a target body weight below a body mass index (BMI) of 18.5, the threshold for the “underweight” BMI category. Ate also provides trigger warnings on educational articles that discuss calorific information about food (Fig, 4; Right).
Despite these mechanisms for prevention, disordered eating behaviour is facilitated by all apps. In MyFitnessPal, female users can set a consistently low-calorie goal of 1200 calories,which is under the daily required calories for many bodies to function [51], especially if they are active, which the app also promotes. Whilst in Noom, the app celebrates a user for logging less calories than their set calorie goal, and weight loss is praised, regardless of how it was achieved. For example, the authors tracked only 1000 calories for 3 days and then logged a reduction in body weight. This weight loss was still celebrated by the app (Fig 5; Left).
5.1.3 Normativities of Bodies.
The third theme includes underlying assumptions of bodies that are embedded into the food tracking apps—what bodies are valued, desired and celebrated, and which are to be feared, ridiculed and avoided. These body norms are surfaced through the bodies represented in images and graphics within the app, the options given as answers to quizzes, and the suggestions given for desirable goals.
Figure 5: Left: Noom celebrating weightloss acheived through under-eating; Middle: MyFitnessPal projects how much the user will weigh in 5 weeks based on their daily food log; Right: An article about body positivity showing a banner picture of a thin white stomach with the words "I am more than a body" on it.
The most articulated body in the apps is the fat body. Fat bodies are framed as signifying laziness [Noom, MFP], low self-worth [Noom], and living an unfulfilling life [Noom, MFP]. This is most profound in the registration and entry phase of using the Noom app during the on-boarding quiz. After inputting a desired goal weight, the user is asked to choose their main reason for wanting to lose weight. The options include “improve physical appearance”, “engage more with family and friends”, “become healthier” and “feel better day to day”. This is further articulated by being asked whether the user relates to the statement “My weight has affected my ability to socialize or engage with friends and family”, and later being given the option “having a more vibrant social life” in response to the question “when I think of reaching my happy weight, I see myself...”. While these associations between thinness and forming and maintaining friendships may resonate with people who have internalized this narrative, they also re-enforce the flawed notion that having a fat body prevents people from having a vibrant social life.
This narrative around fat bodies makes weaponizing the fear of fatness a prominent approach for motivating users. In MyFitnessPal, for instance, the degradation of fatness is less overt but still present. For example, after completing their daily food log, users are presented with a projection of their weight 5 weeks into the future if they were to eat the same way that they did on that day (Fig, 5; Middle). While not explicitly stated, a projected weight gain seems to serve the purpose of warning users of an undesirable future as motivation for changing what they eat the next day. Weight loss is also constantly celebrated through testimonials and before and after pictures [Noom, MFP], implying that thinner people are better and happier than fat ones. The Ate app is the only app to show fat people being happy. There is however, one article in their blog that fat shames new fathers who gain weight after the birth of their child, framing this weight gain as something negative that must be immediately rectified through a "Dad Bod Transformation".
These anti-fat narratives are in stark contrast to the marketing narratives of the apps. The language of body positivity and anti-dieting have been appropriated and used throughout the marketing and education materials of Noom, My Fitness Pal and Ate. Noom, in particular, markets itself as an “anti-diet”, saying that they are “not about weight loss, but about re-imagining your relationship with food”. However, that is in stark contrast to their sole focus and celebration of weight loss in the app. Ate, which is the least focused on weight loss of all the reviewed apps, also uses the language of body positivity. This is present in their educational material, for example in a blog article which pops up in the news feed during everyday use and states: “while beauty standards are slowly becoming more inclusive for people of all body types, one can still feel insecure and anxious about their physical appearance. This is likely due to growing up with unattainable societal expectations of how people should look still ingrained in their systems.”[Ate]. This is, however, portrayed with a banner photo of a thin white stomach with the words “I am more than a body” written on it (Fig, 5; Right). These examples demonstrate how the apps harness the language of social movements against anti-fatness, while simultaneously employing anti-fat bias and weight stigma, resulting in a presentation of conflicting narratives that undermines their message of body positivity.
5.2 Surfacing Narratives
In this section, we describe—or surface—the underlying stories, perspectives and ideologies that shape the design of food tracking apps. By making these stories—or narratives—explicit, we can better reflect on their impact. In this section, we surface narratives relating to embodiment, simplification and quantification of health, and neoliberalism and individualization of health.
| B. Surfacing Narratives | |
| Subcategory A: – Embodiment | |
| Theme | Subthemes |
| Food as an embodied experience | Recognizing and honouring hunger |
| Tuning in to bodily knowing | |
| Eating as a physical experience | |
| Ignoring embodied experience | Mindfulness as regulation |
| Hunger is something to trick yourself out of | |
| Subcategory B: – Quantifying and Simplifying Health | |
| Theme | Subthemes |
| Quantification of nutrition | Nutrition is a caloric equation |
| Representing food in numbers | |
| The act of self-tracking improves health | Tracking your weight improves your health |
| Tracking your food improves your health | |
| Self-tracking is a difficult task | Tracking your food is a difficult thing to do |
| Tracking your weight is a difficult thing to do | |
| Simplification of health | Health is easy if you follow what we say |
| Health can be affected by things outside of your control | |
| Health is holistic | |
| Subcategory C: Bodies – Neoliberalism and the Individualization of Health | |
| Theme | Subthemes |
| Individualization of health | Bodies are problems to be solved |
| Bodies must be a constant project of improvement | |
| Health as work | Weight loss is an exercise of willpower |
| Food & health require emotional labor | |
| Food and pleasure (do not) need to be earned | Food and pleasure must be earned |
| Food and pleasure do not need to be earned | |
| Bio-pedagogy | Encouraging self-reflection and understanding |
| Self-reflection as punishment for nutritional choices | |
| Paternalism | “Experts” know best |
| The app knows best | |
| Providing for personal choice | |
Table 2: Surfacing Narratives: Themes and Subthemes
Figure 6: Left: Noom recommending that users fill their stomachs with a 3 pound watermelon to avoid hunger; Middle: MyFitnessPal recommending drinking 2,5 - 3,5 litres of water to avoid hunger; Right: Ate suggesting to eat from a smaller plate to feel more satisfied with less food.
5.2.1 Embodiment.
This theme highlights the ways in which food tracking apps facilitate or encourage users to tune in to, respect, or ignore bodily sensations and cues. This includes recognizing and honouring hunger, tuning-in to bodily knowing, and acknowledging eating as a uniquely physical experience, as well as the encouragement of tricking oneself out of hunger.
All three apps share educational articles about the importance of learning to recognize hunger and honouring it by eating in response [All]. For example, in the MyFitnessPal app, users are assigned a task to “...assess your hunger until you realize you’re hungry. Then eat your snack.” In addition to determining when and how much to eat in response to hunger cues, Noom and Ate also highlight that users have an embodied knowing of what is needed and desired to eat. For example, in a Noom lesson, users are taught “when you allow yourself to eat anything, you can really trust your body to guide your choices”. The Ate app draws particular attention to the physical experience of eating food. This is highlighted during everyday use within the Experiment function. Experiments are framed as small daily habits to “experiment with and see if they work for you” [Ate]. One of the first suggested experiments is to “take the first bite with the eyes closed to focus exclusively on the experience of eating without any visual distractions so that you can taste the true flavours”. This physical experience of eating is also highlighted in the tracking functionality of the Ate app, where users can track, amongst other things, whether they feel “satisfied, still hungry, happy, unsatisfied, stuffed or sick” after a meal. Being able to select multiple options acknowledges that one can feel simultaneously both “stuffed” and “happy” (Fig, 3).
While this mindful approach to eating seems encouraging, there is also a pervasive narrative in the apps that mindfulness should be used for self-regulation. For example, in the Noom app, there is a quiz question that emphasizes how “mindful eating slows you down and increases your self-awareness. This way you eat fewer calories and make healthier food choices.”. This narrative also extends to the Ate app in experiments such as “put food on a plate—eating out of a bag disguises portion size and awareness is skewed. Placing even small snacks and desserts on a plate before eating it helps visualize portion size.”. These examples re-appropriate the idea of mindfulness as something that can be used to ultimately reduce the amount of food consumed.
In addition, there is also a pervasive narrative that hunger is something to trick yourself out of. For example, in the MyFitnessPal app, users are assigned a task to “try drinking 2,5 - 3,5 liters of water today" because it is important for "feeling full" (Fig, 6; Middle), while in the Ate app, they recommend “eating from smaller plates...seeing a small plate completely full can be more satisfying than seeing a larger plate less full” (Fig, 6; Right). The most prominent proponent of this idea is the Noom app, which is built fundamentally upon the idea of calorie density, which refers to the number of calories in a specific mass of food. Choosing foods with lower calorie density (where one can eat more volume for the same number of calories) focuses on keeping the body full with fewer calories consumed. Within Noom, foods are categorized based on their calorie density, and users are encouraged to switch "red” (high calorie density) foods for “green” (low calorie density) food. Examples given by the app include replacing a quarter pound burger with a quarter pound of arugula, or that “eating an entire 3lb watermelon only has 409 calories. Eat that and be full for hours (but maybe a little sick to your stomach)” (Fig, 6; Left). These examples demonstrate how the apps employ the language of mindfulness and embodiment, while at the same time encouraging disregard and distrust for embodied knowing.
5.2.2 Quantifying and Simplifying Health.
This next theme highlights the quantification and simplification of health within the food tracking apps. This theme is characterized by the prevalence of the quantification of nutrition and health, and the simplification of health by, for example, the suggestion that the act of self-tracking alone improves health.
The quantification of health is most obvious within the MyFitnessPal app. Within the app, there are many different numerical breakdowns available for users – micro-nutrients, macro-nutrients, calories consumed, calories burned, etc., and nutrition is rendered into a mathematical equation. Each time the MyFitnessPal app is opened, it greets the user with an equation—“Calories Remaining = Goal - Food + Exercise”. This is kept front and centre during app usage by being prominently displayed at the top of the app (Fig, 7; Left). Swiping right reveals additional quantified values, such as the remaining fat, sodium and cholesterol available for the day. Users can customize which 3 nutrition values are displayed; however, calories are always displayed and cannot be turned off. Further, the Weekly Digest feature summarizes the week in numbers, where users can view how many days of food were logged, their cumulative weekly calorie goal, the total calories logged that week, and how many calories were burned through logged activity (Fig, 7; Middle). All-Time Stats are also shown for the total number of foods, meals, and steps logged since downloading the app including a log-in streak. Within the Week View, calories are summarized in a simplified graph, with green showing the number of calories logged under the user’s calorie goal, and red showing the number of calories logged above the goal (Fig, 7; Right).
There is also a simplification of health, in which the apps conceptualize health as being easy to attain if you follow their simple steps. This simplification is both overt, such as in Noom’s marketing slogan that “Noom makes it easy”, as well as more covert such as the many articles in MyFitnessPal’s news feed that promise simple fixes for health such as “Live by This Simple Rule to be Instantly Healthier” or “ Make This Simple Change to Start a Healthy Domino Effect”. The act of self-tracking is also presented as a simple activity that alone improves health. Noom consistently references that “Studies show that people who log their meals are significantly more likely to lose weight”, while rewarding logging attempts with colourful animations of confetti exploding because "consistency is the key to success. Kudos for consistently logging your meals today.”. This connects the user’s biggest motivation/fear (i.e., losing weight/ not re-gaining weight) with the necessity to provide the app with data.
Counter to this simplification of health, all apps also acknowledge that health can be affected by things outside of your control, such as by having a chronic illness [All] or going through a global pandemic [All]. The apps also express health as a holistic pursuit, impacted by many factors in addition to nutrition, such as stress, sleep, environment, and one’s social life. This once again highlights a conflicting narrative, where health is both a simple, quantifiable pursuit, as well as an all-encompassing holistic endeavour.
Figure 7: Left: Showing the equation used by MyFitnessPal to determine how many calories a user has remaining for the day ; Middle: MyFitnessPal comparing the user’s cumulative weekly calorie goal, vs. consumed calories; Right: MyFitnessPal showing users a simplified graph of calories over (red) and under (green) their calorie goal.
5.2.3 Neoliberalism and the Individualization of Health.
This theme highlights how narratives rooted in neoliberalism and the individualization of health permeate the analyzed food tracking apps. Neoliberal principles emphasize individual responsibility over communal or governmental approaches. This theme is characterized by the framing of health as an individual endeavour reliant on personal willpower and as a pursuit requiring continuous labour. It also unpacks the embedded narrative that food and pleasure (do not) need to be earned, the emphasis placed on promoting and facilitating bio-pedagogy, and the way paternalism permeates the apps.
Throughout the food tracking apps, bodies are framed as problems to be solved. Bodies are constructed as things that can be optimized, sculpted, managed, and approached as challenges to overcome. Bodies are also expected to be constant projects of improvement. During the everyday use of the apps, it becomes clear that one can always be healthier, thinner, eat better, or feel better. For example, while mimicking everyday use of Noom during the walkthrough, 3 days of meals which meet all nutritional recommendations and stay within the allotted calorie range were tracked. Additionally, a weight decrease on target with the apps recommended weight loss goal was logged each day. On the third day, after completing the daily food log, a pop up appears that says “tap analysis to see how you can make your next meal an even healthier choice”. While the promotion of eating even healthier food might initially seem a positive thing, there is no recognition in that moment of the effort required to eat and log nutritionally “perfect” meals for three days straight. Optimizing one’s nutrition is instead rendered into a Sisyphean challenge with no end in sight, despite the app’s zones, goals and targets features suggesting that finite success is possible.
In this way, the pursuit of healthy nutrition is made labourious—requiring daily physical and emotional labour from the individual to alter, improve and track their nutrition to succeed. At a fundamental level it requires a substantial amount of labour to track everything that one consumes in a day. Not only does the data input take time (although some methods, such as Ate’s photo-based approach, reduce the burden) but remembering to track your food multiple times a day also requires labour. Scrutinizing, assessing and reflecting on every food choice takes time and emotional energy, too.
Food tracking apps also frame the user as responsible for the physical labour of planning, acquiring, preparing, carrying, eating and tracking the food that the user, and their families, eat. This is seen in MyFitnessPal’s weekly plan reminders to “make your grocery list and go shopping”, “Do your homework before you ever leave home (to go to the grocery store)” and to “always read labels and ingredient lists”. There are also explicit and implicit demands for ongoing emotional labour while using the apps. Most prominent is the framing of healthy nutrition and weight loss as an act of willpower. Noom, for example, regularly prompts users with quizzes which test them on what the “secret to success” is. The correct answer is to “simply believe”, which implies that if a user simply believes hard enough, all their wishes will come true. Noom demands additional emotional labour through self-recognition of mental patterns, with lesson material focusing on “identifying thought distortion” and “training your inner elephant” where the elephant is “our impulsive, irrational, emotional side”. There is general ignorance towards the labour required to fulfill the demands of the apps, and this labour is left invisible.
Figure 8: Left: Noom’s user tiers based on how mamy Noomcoins they have earned; Middle: A user earning a Noomcoin; Right: The app asking the user if they would like to spend Noomcoins to activate a "Treat Day" and maintain a streak after a period of non-use. Figure 9: Left: Showing how a user might explore which foods they eat when they are hungry in the Ate app; Right: Exploring logged food photos in the Ate app using the day view.
There is also a pervasive narrative within the apps that food and pleasure must be earned. This is most prominent with the introduction of “Noomcoin” (Fig, 8; Middle). Noomcoin is an in-app currency that is earned when a user fulfills three criteria—logging their daily food consumption, logging their daily body weight, and completing all assigned lesson material. These coins can then be "spent” to buy "treat days" in which the user will not lose their progress or streak in the Noom app (Fig, 8; Right). MyFitnessPal also centres the “earning” of food, through the notion that if you have exercised, you have “earned” extra calories to consume. Ate, on the other hand, presents a counter narrative, framing their tracking as “on path or off path. There’s no wrong answer. It’s a simple reminder for myself. Regardless, I will enjoy my meal”.
Another pervasive theme is the promotion of self-reflection to increase self-understanding. Reflection is encouraged in all three apps, with Ate offering the most customizable and personal experience for the user, mainly due to the use of tags and images. For example, if a user is interested in reflecting on how their emotional state impacts their eating behaviour, they can use the Insights tab to view the food they logged in association with their answer to the question “How am I feeling?". Since Ate is a visual medium, using mostly images to track what was eaten, the possibilities for self-reflection that are meaningful and personal to the user are much broader than with solely numerical overviews. For example, a user can reflect on how colourful the collection of images is, who or what is present in the background, the location of the image, how aesthetically pleasing the food is, or which memories the images bring to mind (Fig, 9). Within Noom and MyFitnessPal however, options for in-app self-reflection seem to surface more frequently in response to the user making what the app would deem poor choices – either consuming too many calories or having poor nutrition. For example, in the Noom app, after a day of logging less nutritious and higher caloric food, the authors receive a pop-up saying “logging is a great way to reflect on your food choices. What did you learn today that you can carry with you throughout your journey?”, implying that if you eat too many calories, you need to reflect and learn about your mistakes so that you won’t make them again.
The attitude of paternalism is also prevalent in other parts of the Noom app. This is made visible through Noom’s pervasive narrative of being "based in science" and "backed by experts", therefore knowing what’s best for the user. Throughout the on-boarding process of Noom, users frequently encounter statements such as “Why is Noom different? Noom is based on real psychology.”, “...we are psychologists, helping people change for the better is kind of our thing” and “Weight loss isn’t rocket science, it’s psychology-science". Paternalism is also visible in the way that Noom employs quizzes and game throughout the app to test users’ comprehension and agreement with the lesson material. These quizzes must be completed with high accuracy to advance within the app space. Finally, Noom’s “Grocery Grab” game—a brightly coloured gamified quiz where users must race against the clock to correctly identify which colour category each food falls into—feels particularly patronizing and infantilizing.
Overall, our findings demonstrate how seemingly small decisions made during the design and development of food tracking apps, accumulate to perpetuating much wider, harmful normativities and narratives about food, bodies, and health.
6 DISCUSSION AND IMPLICATIONS FOR DESIGN
6.1 Food Technologies are Feminist Issue
Our findings illuminate the ways in which harmful narratives and normativities about food, bodies and health are deeply embedded into the design of food tracking apps. Anti-fatness is especially prominent throughout, with our findings highlighting how food tracking apps perpetuate the characterization of the fat body as immoral, undesirable, and fixable. We show how health is equated primarily with thinness throughout the app’s functions and features, and that thinness is presented as the accomplishment of hard work, positioning fatness as a failure of willpower, effort, and character. If we understand technologies as situated, cultural actors [88], it is no surprise that we find anti-fat bias is structurally embedded within the design of food tracking apps. Our findings echo what fat justice scholars and fat liberation activists have been highlighting for years—pathologizing (turning fatness into a disease) and weaponizing fatness is structural and pervasive [18, 43, 57], especially in domains which label themselves as “care” [84]. This causes widespread harm for fat people, including chronic stress [144], shame [104], poorer medical care due to weight-stigma [145], and avoidance of medical care altogether [104]. It is also important to note that this harm is compounded along intersecting marginalizations, with anti-fatness being deeply rooted in racism [140] and ableism [106].
However, technology-enabled support for nutrition is likely to remain for the foreseeable future, with designers playing key roles in their development. By providing designers with concrete examples of how normativity and anti-fat bias show up in the functionality, interaction attributes, layout, features, and overall narrative of food tracking apps, we hope to support technology designers in moving away from using the fear of fatness as the primary motivation for nutritional behaviour change.
In this re-imagining, feminist HCI practices offer a promising way forward. However, food and nutrition have not yet been solidified as a feminist issue within HCI. With this work, we add to the call of feminist scholars and activists that argue that food is a feminist issue as an experience that has been uniquely socialized under the patriarchy, is closely tied to body-politics, and as a long-standing site of feminist resistance [86, 156]. By adopting feminist design practices within HCI when designing food technologies, systems and services, we can move away from framing women’s health and bodies as a "problem to solve" [135] and instead embrace the complexities of women’s experiences with nutrition. Feminist approaches have demonstrated their worth in challenging and imagining futures for other areas relating to gendered health and bodily data, such as fertility [103, 123], menstruation [40, 58], and menopause [9, 25, 71]. However, we see intersectional feminist design approaches becoming particularly powerful in the food domain when practised through the lenses of fat liberation and activism. For example, embracing the feminist practice of "troubling” [66] food and nutrition by "curiously visiting still possible futures" [135] for future food technologies together with fat activists.
Food and nutrition technologies designed with a centred narrative of fat liberation must fully divest from anti-fatness and diet-culture, and work to deliberately dismantle the systemic oppression of fat people [57]. This task is not to be underestimated and cannot be done without designers and researchers working to actively unpack their own belief system [69] around food, bodies, and health. As Payne et al. advocate, it is essential for researchers to “engage fat people in research on technology and choose projects, research questions, and methods that centre fat people’s voices, needs, and desires” [119]. Fat people and activists “should be understood as authoritative sources of knowledge” [102] and designing should be participatory [98] and rooted in advocacy [10]. In this, it is especially important to attend to the intersections of the fat experience with race [119]. To genuinely shift the narrative around food and health, it is essential that HCI realigns the core values embedded within the design of nutrition technologies towards feminist futures.
6.2 Conflicting Narratives
Food tracking apps seem to find themselves at a crossroads of conflicting narratives. Our findings surface how on the one hand these apps are rooted in anti-fatness, capitalizing on the deeply ingrained societal anti-fat bias to manipulate and control eating behaviour. On the other hand, decades of fat and feminist activism have finally trickled up into the public consciousness and with that, the appropriation of body-positive language, intuitive eating and anti-dieting language into food tracking apps.
We see that the apps appropriate the language of body positivity, saying that all bodies are worthy and beautiful, while at the same framing fatness as something to be avoided at all costs, correlating fatness with a lonely, unhappy life and harnessing the fear of fatness as the primary tool for motivation. The issue is, there is an inherent conflicting narrative in the "body-positive" position that self-acceptance can solve systemic discrimination. Body positivity positions user’s difficulties as a problem of mindset—they simply need to work harder to improve their confidence and body image to feel better about themselves. However, without an accompanying commitment to intersectional fat justice, anti-racism [113, 129], and disability justice [137], food tracking apps will perpetuate a solution of individual mindset change for a wide-scale structural problem that continues to privilege bodies that are white, straight-sized, cisgender, and able.
This conflict is perhaps representative of a broader societal tension in which the push for individual body neutrality or positivity must grapple with how to also achieve liberation, in which we disengage from the enduring patriarchal forces that capitalize on women spending all their time, energy and money on making their bodies smaller. After all, if women are kept busy, their energy is diverted away from challenging patriarchal structures and advocating for true nourishment and liberation [105]. Within our findings, this tension is made tangible.
The food tracking apps also present a series of other confusing and harmful contradictory narratives through their functionalities, interaction attributes, features, and content. For example, tension arises between the framing of health as a complex, subjective and holistic state, while also equating ultimate health with thinness and selling health as a simple equation—calories in, calories out. Furthermore, we see dissonance in the way that an anti-diet mantra of “foods have no moral value, there is no such thing as good or bad food” is consistently taught in platform content, while at the same time foods are categorized, recommended, or prohibited based on how many calories they contain. This dissonance between embodied sense making and cognitive decision making is also evident in the way content items employ the language of intuitive eating, encouraging users to trust in their embodied knowing, letting their bodies guide what, when and how much to eat. This is starkly contrasted by the constant flow of hacks for tricking your body into thinking it’s full, interface reminders of when logged food is over the daily quota or is “off path”, and tips on how to resist eating while controlling emotional and irrational temptations and cravings.
These conflicts may not have always been present within the space of food tracking apps—particularly before it was en vogue to value all bodies. The emergence of these conflicting narratives, interestingly, may mark a potential turning point towards a feminist future, that has been fueled by the labour of fat liberation activists and fat justice scholars [61, 67, 126, 141, 146]. Addressing these narrative tensions will require further research and attention both within the feminist HCI community and beyond, along with a commitment to justice for all.
6.3 Alternative Future Narratives
We now turn our attention towards the future. We do not claim to have definitive answers for how to realize feminist futures for food technologies; however, we offer a starting point of alternative narratives to explore. It is important to note that we do not encourage a simple re-framing of existing food tracking apps using the watered-down language of body positivity that apps such as Noom have adopted. We instead call for a re-imagining of how technologies could acknowledge the complex and pluralistic realities of our relationships to food and our bodies.
As a starting point for the design of future food tracking apps, we call on designers to first critically consider whether a food tracking app is the right direction at all. We propose that there are some scenarios in which detailed food tracking via an app is warranted and valuable, and many scenarios in which alternative approaches seem better suited to support people’s relationships with food and nutrition. We see food tracking apps as useful tools for short periods of time (i.e., identifying intolerances [27], understanding a new diagnosis [49], or assessing nutritional adequacy of diet [110]). In these scenarios, however, the goal of capturing a complete and accurate history of food intake does not outweigh the importance of building these apps in a feminist way to reduce harm. We purposefully say reduce harm, rather than eliminate harm, because we do not believe that we can ever fully separate the act of food tracking from the sociocultural context of anti-fat bias and neoliberalism, regardless of the purpose of the application (e.g., as a clinical diagnosis tool vs. a commercial product).
To reduce harm within apps that do continue to facilitate food tracking for specific scenarios such as those outlined above, we argue that every app must safeguard against initiating, facilitating, or re-triggering disordered eating beliefs and behaviour. Our findings show how existing strategies, such as asking users about active eating disorder diagnoses during registration [Noom, Ate], are inadequate and easily circumvented. Such questions must be extended to also ask about prior history and might also consider screening for unrecognized disordered eating behaviour or beliefs. We also encourage designers to avoid asking only about formal eating disorder diagnosis—which has a history of anti-fatness [68] and is inaccessible to many—but also recognizing user’s own understanding of their experience with food. How the app reacts to these questions heavily depends on the scenario of use—a monitored clinical scenario might connect users to a professional to discuss safety and value, while a commercial app might prevent registration altogether. Beyond the registration process, apps might also include trauma-informed onboarding material for all users acknowledging the socio-cultural context of food tracking, education about warning signs during use which would indicate that the tracking app is contributing to disordered eating or harming mental health or provide resources to learn more. Regular check-ins should be pushed throughout use, encouraging users to continually reflect on their experience and catch warning signs early on.
In our findings, we highlight how many normativities are communicated through symbolic representation within apps’ imagery, icons, and graphics. Designers seeking to adopt a neutral approach to food and bodies can communicate alternative narratives by choosing images and graphics of people of various races, genders, age groups, and abilities, with different body sizes and compositions, experiencing a wide variety of emotions and activities. In her 2007 article "Headless Fatties" [32], Cooper calls attention to the way that fat people’s faces are often cropped out of photos which dehumanizes them into “symbols of cultural fear”. Designers can purposefully push back against this narrative by choosing photos of fat people enjoying food, experiencing joy, being active, enjoying nature and having fun with friends. Apps can further disengage with normative assumptions about bodies by avoiding visualizing them as something that is linear and stable (e.g., in line graphs) but instead using organic, fluctuating visualizations. Similar considerations can be applied to food imagery, where designers must pay attention to which foods are represented in symbols and imagery as “desirable” vs. “non-desirable” (i.e., cookies – bad, apples – good), as well as avoiding visualizations in which food or calories are represented as a finite measure to spend (i.e., countdown rings).
Our findings also surface how body, food and health normativities serve as the foundation for many functions of food tracking apps. Functionalities which track and celebrate weight loss are particularly problematic. We encourage designers to think very carefully about whether weight tracking is truly necessary. If weight is an essential metric to collect, (e.g., understanding sodium intake and fluid retention in heart failure), then we encourage designers to avoid congratulatory feedback on weight changes. Similarly, we recommend decentering calorie tracking and instead focusing on other values of food such as nutrients, fibre, bacteria or other values important to users. These metrics should be self-defined by the user and apps should avoid functions which “punish” the user for not recording a target amount (i.e., losing progress, points, etc.). We recommend that all food tracking apps allow for customization of displayed metrics. We also find that weight loss and the fear of fatness are used as a main motivational strategy to encourage users to comply to regular tracking requests. Alternative strategies to encourage users to create an accurate and complete short term food history might include providing positive feedback for completeness of tracking in and of itself or emphasizing reflection on emotions and body sensations.
Ultimately, our findings illuminate how if our goal is to support people’s relationship with food, nutrition and their bodies, we must move beyond food tracking apps.
We believe that starting from narratives of liberation, joy, abundance, and embodiment offers fertile ground for designing nourishing futures. From a perspective of liberation, we imagine exploration of how technologies might support disengagement from normative beliefs about food, health and bodies, how they might acknowledge and support people working through food shame or guilt, or how they might demand equitable, weight-neutral nutrition care from healthcare providers. Other alternative narratives to consider might be abundance and joy. Designing for food and nutrition while centring abundance must divest from all current narratives of restriction in relation to food (restricting calories, quantities, desires or experiences), and expand understanding of food and nourishment rather than focus on deprivation. We imagine designs might explore how to cultivate new joyful, pleasurable, or memorable food practices, how to amplify and preserve cultural or generational food knowledge, or explore how to design for food not as an individualized task one must complete in name of health, but as an experience that can bring communal delight. Grimes & Harper’s celebratory technology paper offers wonderful inspiration here [64]. Finally, we also feel that narratives around embodiment are exciting to explore in future work, expanding beyond HCI’s longstanding traditions of cognitivism. We can imagine exploration of how digital technologies and tools might support tuning in to bodily knowing about food and hunger, or how tools might facilitate the documentation of bodily food experiences for self-driven reflection, or for communicating with others, such as healthcare professionals.
6.4 Limitations
Outcomes of both the walkthrough method and reflexive thematic analysis are constructed through the lens of the authors’ own positionality. As Reime et al. highlights, “researcher’s positionality matters when employing the walkthrough method, as it guides the researcher’s attention and restricts what knowledge they can produce” [123]. While effort was made to attend to intersectionality, and to “actively engage and explore” [123] with our positionalities—both in terms of our personal identities as well as our relationship to food tracking, diet culture and anti-fat bias—this paper ultimately presents a view on food tracking made sense of through our experiences as able-bodied, white, cisgender women from the global north. We have never experienced extreme food scarcity, nor have we been unable to meet our basic needs—such as accessing transportation, healthcare, or clothing—due to our size. We encourage further research into food tracking apps from perspectives different from our own, as well as closer analysis of food tracking apps through the lenses of disability and race justice. Our results are also limited to a representation of the way that food tracking apps behave when a profile is set up with biological sex indicated as female, and gender indicated as woman when the profile is activated. The use of this persona, as well as the predefined use scenario, left little room for the production of counter-narratives and uses [59]. Future work might therefore explore the ways in which users appropriate food tracking apps for unexpected uses. Future work could also investigate how food tracking apps behave when other combinations of biological sex and gender are selected, as well as attend to how normativities of gender are reproduced within food tracking apps.
6.5 Conclusion
In this paper, we use the walkthrough method to critically reflect on and surface the underlying narratives embedded within the design of three food tracking apps—Noom, MyFitnessPal, and Ate. We found that food tracking apps perpetuate harmful normativities of nutrition and food, health and bodies, as well as socio-cultural narratives of embodiment, simplification and quantification of health, and neoliberalism and individualization of health. We add to the call that food is a feminist issue, and discuss an emerging tension between food tracking apps appropriating the language of "body positivity” while simultaneously being rooted in anti-fat bias. Finally, we present alternative narratives that could be employed in the design of future nutrition technologies that divest from harmful anti-fat narratives, and instead promote approaches to heal our relationships with food and our bodies.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This project is funded by Stichting Frits Philips Institute for Quality Management. We would like to thank our reviewers for their thoughtful insights that helped improve our paper, as well as members of the VIXI lab for their support. Finally, we would like to acknowledge the contribution and labour of feminist activists and scholars before us who have laid the foundation for this work.
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Index Terms
- Unpacking Norms, Narratives, and Nourishment: A Feminist HCI Critique on Food Tracking Technologies
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