Tracking my Nutrition

Struggles with S Health

The health behavior that I chose to monitor over the last three to four weeks was my nutrition. While I was selecting an application to use to track my nutrition, I realized I needed to be able to enter what I was eating on the go so I needed it to be a mobile application. There were hundreds of nutritional apps on the app store but I only found a few that I thought would help me. I decided to use S Health because I liked the big simple buttons on the user interface as well as how many different options were in the food database. The serving sizes were also very easy to manipulate for your meal. The app allowed me to search for each type of food and enter the amount of servings (in grams) that I ate. It also allowed me to enter the exact time that I ate each meal and whether it was for breakfast, lunch, dinner or snacks.

           

Home page of S Health

                                                      

The app, S Health also provided me with push notification options to help me remember to log my meals when or soon after they are eaten. S health also showed a bar graph in which your nutritional intake in calories was pitted against previous days so you could compare days of nutrition quickly, and also see if you had missed any days completely.

The last section of the S Health app was the rewards section. This was only composed of badges that you had earned by the app by completing various tasks or accomplishments. The only badge that I ever received from the nutrition app was for a perfectly balanced meal that gave me an arbitrary score of 81.

The screenshot shown to the left gives the breakdown of what the recommended intake was for me based on my height, weight, and nutritional goals that I provided the app with when I first started using it. My main goal was to gain weight and muscle and the app provided me with the correct proportional information to achieve that goal (I hope). I have always been a picky eater that does not like very many vegetables and sticks to a lot of quick, not-so-good-for-you foods. Another goal that I was hoping would stem from this nutrition tracking was to find some new foods or recipes that I enjoyed and that were also healthy for me to eat. A final goal of mine for this short period of nutritional tracking was to see if I could find a correlation between the types of foods I eat (and their nutritional value) and the way I felt that day. I had always heard that eating healthy foods makes you feel better throughout the day because of less fat and chemical intake.

                                        

Adding a Food Item

 The Good

After using the app quite a bit for the past three to four weeks, I have developed a list of areas where I think the app excels in what it was designed to do for its users. Unfortunately this list is not very long. I feel as if the user experience design of the interface in the app is very nice. There are not a lot of bold colors or graphics that scare the user and background color is mostly always white. It gives pretty obvious cues to what can be clicked and what cannot, even though I never had a person of a different age group run through it to see what they thought they could click on. This would have been a good UI test. The app also keeps track of your profile and looking at your profile is a quick way to see what you have done in previous weeks. It automatically counts steps and other health behaviors besides nutrition can be tracked as well with S Health.

The Bad

There were a ton of areas where I felt like the app let me down and could have been improved. The first and most obvious barrier to actually reaching my nutrition goals was simply forgetting to log my meals each day. This could have been solved by a notification that was audible as well as tactile that told me something important about how logging my meal intake could benefit me that day. It wasn’t until about 2 weeks into the tracking that I finally figured out how to get notifications from S Health to pop up. I had to go into my phone settings and change the option for that specific app, as well as the settings link in the app to turn on notifications for meal tracking. I thought this was especially peculiar because S Health is a default app on all Samsung phones. Someone less familiar with the operating systems of phones would never have figured out the solution.  Even after I started receiving notifications about meal tracking, they would come at random times when I was not eating. I usually only saw them when I checked my phone and I probably ignored them 90% of the time because there was no motive given for me to record a meal. The text on these notifications usually read "Feel like logging a meal today?", in a nonchalant fashion.  

One functionality that I would have liked to see incorporated into the app is a scanner mode that you can just scan the bar-code of the food you are eating and the food is found in the database and automatically added to your meal, instead of you having to search for it. It would save the user time and confusion about how many servings to enter. You could have just told it whether you ate the whole package or a fraction of it. I know that this technology is available in other nutrition tracking apps.

S Health also never gave me any suggestions on what types of food I should eat in my next meal so I could meet my caloric goal and keep within the correct ratios of carbohydrates, fat, and protein. I didn’t expect it to give me step by step recipes but some recommendations of high protein or low fat food items would have been helpful in reaching my goal. As it was, I rarely had a very high nutrient balance score or hardly any well balanced meals. 

Caloric breakdown after a day of tracking 

The Ugly (The Results)

The results of my nutrition tracking experiment after 4 weeks were not spectacular. Due to the notification debacle combining with me just being lazy or forgetting to log meals, I only ended up with 11 days where I recorded meals. Some of these days I didn’t even record all of my meals, maybe just one or two. Out of these 11 days recorded I only reached my caloric goal of 3000 calories three times. There are a lot of possible explanations for why I didn’t reach my goal. I could have forgotten to record meals or snacks during days that I actually recorded. I also could have selected the wrong amount of servings, resulting in less calories accounted for than I actually consumed. And it is entirely possible that I did not reach 3000 calories very often. I actually lost weight during these four weeks instead of gaining it and accomplishing my goal. I would have preferred if the app would have notified me on days where I was close to 3000 calories to “eat something!” before I went to bed.

Expectations vs. Reality

 Actual vs. Recommended (units)

When I first started tracking my nutrition I expected that I would track every meal with ease and that I would learn a lot from the data that the app visualized for me. I thought I would come out of it with a better sense of what foods I need to eat more of and what I thought was holding me back from gaining weight. I also never imagined it would be such a hassle to track what you eat. I found myself feeling too lazy to even open the app and search for the food I was currently eating, even if I had time at that moment. In reality I lost weight during this time and I feel like I have no new knowledge of my personal nutrition needs. I saw the data the app provided but it really didn’t translate into what I needed to eat in real life. Food recommendations would have been immensely helpful. As shown in the screenshot on the right, I needed about 2000 more mg of potassium on a particular day, yet I don’t know what foods contain potassium besides bananas so I had no way of reaching that benchmark without doing more external research.

In order to successfully track my nutrition I think I would need much more than an app. I would definitely need a different app than S Health based on it's notification flaws, lack of bar-code scanning, and lack of food recommendations. Looking back at my experience with the app, it would have been more productive to take a few minutes at the end of the day to enter all of the foods that I ate that day. This way I would have more data entry and I could reflect on my nutrition decisions at the end of the day and think about what I ate that was good and what was bad. I never really took any time over the past four weeks to reflect on my nutrition and start to make more responsible eating decisions.

I also think it was unrealistic for me to set a goal to gain weight over a short period (4 weeks) just by using a free app on my phone to track my calories and meals. I would need a much longer time frame as well as a regimented workout program to see significant weight gain.