Digital dieting: are calorie-counting apps giving you an eating disorder?

Like most obsessions, it started benignly enough; like most modern antics, it began with an app. “I started using My Fitness Pal a few years ago when I embarked on a health kick,” explains one thirtysomething Londoner. “I was seriously exercising for the first time in my life, and wanted to track the calories I was burning while I ran. The app seemed like a really simple way to lose weight and avoid embarrassing and often demotivating WeightWatchers weigh-ins.”

Twenty-three-year-old Helen [not her real name] also used an app to track food intake and exercise, and Instagram for “fitspiration”, idolising images of healthy food and lean bodies. “Tracking my exercise and calorie burn, as well as keeping an online food diary, became an obsessive habit,” she says. “The day would feel ruined if I broke the healthy-eating diet rule.”

She felt “disengaged” from life. Her boyfriend encouraged her to seek help at the Nightingale Hospital in Marylebone, a private hospital that specialises in mental health or emotional problems, eating disorders and addictions. In 2010, it launched the UK’s first specialist Technology Addiction unit.

Dr Bijal Chheda-Varma is a consultant psychologist at the Nightingale, treating patients with eating disorders. She is seeing more and more patients exhibiting these obsessive traits and thinks technology, especially “social media and the unregulated information on the internet”, is “one of the larger contributing factors” to a condition called orthorexia.

“Orthorexia is where there’s a focus on over-exercising and healthy eating,” explains Chheda-Varma. “It is not a clinical diagnosis but it is recognised within the field.” It has similarities to anorexia: “Orthorexia is full of rules: diet rules, exercise rules — must not eat this, must eat that — and if sufferers break those rules they feel really guilty and can be quite punishing on themselves.” Technology normalises this behaviour.

For the thirtysomething, My Fitness Pal used her height, weight and levels of activity to determine a recommended daily intake of 1,200 calories, which is 800 calories less than the recommended daily allowance for women. “I religiously followed the app’s suggested 1,200-calorie plan for just over a year,” she says, “and almost immediately it became a slight obsession. Everything was tallied — down to a single jelly baby. I began exercising more to free up needed calories and would panic if dinner or drinks took me over my daily limit.”

But the technology feels legitimate. Calorie-counting apps are pitched as tech weapons in the healthy, clean-living revolution: using one feels modern, swapping imprecise analogue options (a food diary, say) for something more precise and efficient that you carry in your pocket. Downloading an app doesn’t mean you have a problem.

“It starts with a curiosity,” says Chheda-Varma. “‘Let me see what I’m eating, my friend’s following this diet…’ Then it becomes a real interest, something you want to experiment with. And then it becomes rule-based: ‘I have to eat this way, and I have to exercise in this way’. It turns into orthorexia, a disordered eating behaviour that starts taking over your life. Social events are really impacted by orthorexic thinking.”

Technology is also winningly effective. “Part of the reason the app became so addictive is because it worked so well,” admits the thirtysomething. “I lost nearly two stone and was being complimented on my new shape constantly. There was always a gnawing panic that I might loosen my grip on calorie-counting and undo all my hard work.”