Can an Instagram for food-logging help you reach your weight loss goals?
Most diet and weight loss apps, like MyFitnessPal and Lose It, employ the calorie-tracking method of logging your food. You tell the app what you ate -- say, a slice of pizza -- it then estimates the number of calories you consumed. But this method doesn’t always lead to a healthy diet. After all, a can of Diet Coke has zero calories, but it’s probably not as good for you as a 50-calorie serving of broccoli. A new app called Feast, however, aims to solve this issue by not counting calories at all. Instead, it wants to make food-logging as easy as snapping photos of what you eat.
Using the app is simple, take a picture of your meal, add a brief description (with perhaps a hashtag or two -- #lunch or #dumplings etc.) and then post it. By default, your posts are public so that anyone in the Feast community can see it. You also have the option to make your posts private if you’d rather not reveal your dietary secrets to the world.
That might sound a lot like Instagram, but there are a few key differences. One is that your photos are organized by day, so you can view your 24-hour consumption at a glance. Plus, it has Apple Health integration, so you can view your step-count right in the app. You also have the option to note what mood you’re in or tag friends and locations to each photo, just in case you’re having a group meal or are at a restaurant. Also, importantly, Feast is only for photos of food. Posting every single meal and snack you’ve had on Instagram might be a little too much for your followers, whereas it’s the whole point on Feast.
Feast also claims there’s a little bit of artificial intelligence going on. When you enter in the hashtag, it’ll attempt to guess what the foods are in the pictures. This is still very much in beta, but the company hopes that with more photos, the machine learning will improve. Feast hopes that as the AI gets smarter, it’ll be able to add automated insights by analyzing eating history and other health information.
According to founder Jackie Kim, Feast was born out of a frustration with traditional calorie-tracking apps. She was trying to lose weight for her upcoming wedding and found them too restrictive. “I hated how the food trackers reduced foods to numbers where the goal is to eat as little as possible,” she said. “I wanted to find a way where I wouldn’t have to completely stop eating what I love, while still trying to lose weight.”
Instead, she took to snapping photos of her meals to keep herself accountable and then sending herself Slack messages to describe her mood when eating them (This is based on the theory that the food you eat and what mood you’re in are often intertwined). What she found is that this simple act of food logging made her more mindful of what she was eating. With a quick glance at her visual food diary, she would know if she needed to incorporate more greens in her diet, or reduce the amount of carbs and sugary snacks.
What Kim was doing is something nutritionists call “SMART” healthy eating goals (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-based). Kathy McManus, Director of the Department of Nutrition and Director of the Dietetic Internship at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a teaching affiliate of Harvard Medical School, outlined such benefits of food-logging in a post on Harvard’s Health blog. If you observe that you ate two servings of vegetables per day, she wrote, then you would implement a goal of eating three servings per day on future dates.