Of those individuals, 73.1% identified the app as a contributor to their eating disorder symptoms. Of the participants, 74.3% reported using this app as a form of calorie counting.
To investigate this, the study’s 105 participants took the following measures: the Eating Disorder Diagnostic Scale, a brief self-report measure used to diagnose eating disorders the Eating Disorder Examination-Questionnaire, a 38-item questionnaire designed to measure behaviors and attitudes associated with eating disorders over the past 28 days and two additional questions asking if the participant used this application to track calories and if they felt the application contributed to their eating disorder. The researchers hypothesized that the application would be highly utilized in individuals with diagnosed eating disorders and that a large percentage of individuals would also self-report impairment from using this smart phone application. In this specific smart phone application, users were able to log their weight, food and water intake, exercise, and observe any changes through descriptive charts. In 2017, Levinson, Fewell, and Brosof decided to explore this by directly investigating the use of one of these popular applications and its effects on individuals with an eating disorder diagnosis. How do health-tracking apps affect individuals with diagnosed eating disorders?Īs health-tracking applications have become more and more popular among smart phone users, researchers have started speculating how these apps might affect individuals with diagnosed eating disorders. This means that the inflexible thinking appears to strengthen as an individual with this characteristic continues to track their calories. The researchers suggested that monitoring an individual’s caloric intake on a device such as an app, might actually intensify the rigidity associated with calorie counting. In another study focused on the effects of calorie-counting applications on college students, Simpson and Mazzeo (2017) found that those who identified regular calorie tracking on a smart phone application also endorsed disordered eating. This is concerning since smart phone use has become such a staple in society. Concerning specific smart application usage, 26.1% of participants in one study described that fitness/exercise/weight loss applications further perpetuated their disordered eating behaviors and attitudes (Tan, Kuek, Goh, Lee, & Kwok, 2016).
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For example, in a paper reviewing research on pathological dieting, it was suggested that 35% of “typical dieters” developed disordered eating attitudes and behaviors and 15% of those individuals continued to further develop symptoms and meet partial or full criteria for an eating disorder (Shisslak & Estes, 1995). Dieting, in general, has been identified as a potential risk factor for developing eating disorders (Stice, Marti, & Durant, 2011). These smartphone applications have the potential to help individuals with specific health-related goals, however they also have the potential to trigger, maintain, or worsen disordered eating symptoms (Miller, 2015). The applications also offer guidance for their users to stay “on track” by adding notifications and positive reinforcement for logging behaviors.
These phone applications often provide toolboxes that help individuals set goals, make plans to achieve these goals, and to monitor their progress on these goals - a set of capacities referred to as self-regulation (Anderson et al., 2007). Such application design is grounded in research identifying that individual capacities for such goal planning can help facilitate changes in behavior (Anderson et al., 2007, Franco et al., 2016). For example, an individual who desires to increase their daily vegetable intake might make a grocery shopping list, plan in time to go shopping, make a plan for when said vegetables were going to be consumed, and subsequently track their progress. The overall intention of these phone applications is to help people lead healthy lifestyles.
Over the years, various diet-focused smartphone applications have emerged.
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