Apps for Your Wellness Journey (Without All the Diet Talk)

Written by Naima Sullivan MS, RD, LDN

Edited by Sarah Criscuolo MS, RD, LDN, CSN, CPT

 

As helpful as nutrition and wellness apps can be, many come with a heavy dose of diet culture. The daily weigh-ins, calorie limits, and constant tracking can quickly turn into unnecessary stressors. For many of our clients, popular food and exercise trackers have actually triggered disordered eating and obsessive behaviors. Some apps claim to be different – “weight loss without dieting!” – but are really just diets repackaged with positive language like “sustainable health habits” and “mindful eating.”

So, how do you know if an app is actually a diet?

Here are some things to look out for:

• Promises of weight loss
• Calorie counting, targets, or limits
• Point systems
• Good food/bad food language (or those dreaded traffic lights)
• Weight tracking
• “Before and after” marketing

If you’re looking for body-positive, evidence-informed tools for your wellness journey, check out these apps used and loved by our dietitians and clients.

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Eating Disorder Recovery – Recovery Record

Recovery Record harnesses the power of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) to help those recovering from eating disorders. It is a platform for recording your meals without calories and other nutrition details and allows you to track your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. We love that you can link up with your dietitian or therapist directly in the app so they can see your progress and chime in with guidance and encouragement. There are dozens of tools and skills that you can unlock for extra support.

Recovery Record has an affiliated app, Nourishly, that has many similar features but is geared towards general nutrition and conditions like diabetes, cardiovascular health, and gastrointestinal issues. You can track and learn about many aspects of your health with Nourishly, including movement, mental health, and sleep. It just might be the only app you need!

Full disclosure, we love Recovery Record and Nourishly so much that we include them as a free benefit to our nutrition clients!

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Family Feeding – Easy Bites

Created by a team of feeding specialists, the Easy Bites app is a fantastic resource for parents and caregivers hoping to help their little ones develop a healthy relationship with food. Covering topics from introducing solids and family meal ideas to tips and strategies for picky eaters, Easy Bites is like having a digital how-to guide for family feeding at your fingertips. With the free version, you can access daily tips, a library of mini lessons on child nutrition and behavior, and family-friendly recipes. You can upgrade to a paid subscription to access even more content. What we love most about this app is that it promotes a responsive and body-positive approach to feeding children.

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Food Allergies – Fig

If you have food allergies or other dietary restrictions, figuring out what you can eat can be a real struggle. Fig helps you find the foods that are right for you and avoid the foods that aren’t. After you create your “fig”, a profile of your dietary restrictions and preferences, you can use the app to search through a database of over 300,000 products to find the foods that fit your needs. Fig’s barcode scanner allows you to quickly scan products while you shop, taking the frustration out of grocery shopping. The basic version of Fig is free and you can upgrade to a paid subscription for more benefits.

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Cooking – Pursuit

Based in nutrition and behavior science, the Pursuit app helps you improve your cooking skills while building the habit of preparing more meals at home. You can scale recipes to the number of servings you need and easily swap out ingredients based on your preferences. The app even creates an easy to use shopping list. Once you are ready to cook, the app walks you through each recipe step by step and has videos demonstrating the techniques used.

The recipes range in difficulty so you can go at your own pace while you build your confidence in the kitchen. It’s a great app for people who are just learning how to cook, or for those who want to cook more regularly but don’t have the bandwidth for complicated and time-consuming recipes. We are so excited to be able to offer our nutrition clients free access to this innovative app!

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Intuitive Eating – Peace with Food

We tried over a dozen mindful and intuitive eating apps and most of them, while not explicitly weight loss oriented, still give off the vibe that they are trying to get you to eat less. Peace with Food feels different. It was created by a team of eating disorder specialists who have distilled the fundamental concepts of intuitive eating into a simple app. The app is centered around the hunger/fullness scale and sends you reminders throughout the day to check in on how you are feeling. You also check in before and after you eat. You have the option to journal about what you ate, as well as your thoughts and feelings about the experience. You can look at your “rhythm” over time to better understand your habits. While the app won’t replace your dietitian or therapist, it’s a great tool to support you between sessions. After a free 7-day trial you can subscribe for a small monthly fee.

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Sleep – Insight Timer

Insight Timer is essentially a library of guided meditations focused on a variety of health and wellness topics, including sleep. You can choose from experiences like white noise, nature sounds, guided meditations, or bedtime tales. One contributer even reads you Wikipedia entries in a soothing voice to lull you to sleep! The app also offers options just for kids. The platform is very user friendly and feels like an interactive sleep timer.

There is a free version with hundreds of meditations, or you can subscribe to Insight Timer Plus to access premium content. One important disclaimer about this app is that there is some weight loss-related content, but you have to dig around to find it. There is lots of body-positive content as well. Knowing this, you can still have a great experience free from diet talk.

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The right technology can be a great complement to the work you are doing to improve your health and heal your relationship with food. At Karuna, we can help you navigate the options that are out there and find evidence-based tools that are just right for you.

This list reflects the opinions of the author based on personal experience with each of the products shared. We have not received any compensation for this post.