Seeing others’ lives on social media can hurt our self-esteem and satisfaction. It turns out that tracking our own calories or workouts through apps can have a similar downside. New research from UCL and Loughborough University suggests fitness apps may discourage rather than motivate users.
The team examined close to 60,000 posts on X, noting that this kind of data is especially useful because—unlike traditional surveys—people often express themselves more candidly and without filters online.
Negative Feedback Centers on Popular Fitness Apps
These posts discussed five major fitness apps: MyFitnessPal, Strava, WW, Workouts by Muscle Booster, and Fitness Coach & Diet. About 13,000 posts contained negative terms the researchers were monitoring, with over half referring to the calorie-tracking app MyFitnessPal.
At first glance, MyFitnessPal appears to provide everything needed to manage diet and fitness. Users can log their calories, track protein and carbohydrate intake, and set customized goals. Too tired to enter meals manually? You can scan barcodes or import recipes, and the app handles the rest. It’s almost like having a personal nutritionist in your pocket.
But many users aren’t thrilled with these apps. Senior author Dr. Paulina Bondaronek (UCL Institute of Health Informatics) noted that the posts were filled with guilt and self-blame, with people feeling they were falling short. Such emotional reactions, she said, could ultimately damage both motivation and overall well-being.
The Limits and Misuse of Self-Tracking Tools
While self-tracking can be helpful, it’s often applied in unproductive ways. Calorie-counting tools remain quite basic and frequently fail to offer individualized guidance. Regardless of how unrealistic a user’s goals might be, the app will still adjust the numbers to fit them.
In one instance, users were told to eat “negative 700 calories per day” to meet their weight-loss targets. Obviously, no one can follow such advice, but it highlights a major concern: these apps can produce recommendations without considering whether they’re safe or even remotely feasible.
MyFitnessPal is also fairly easy to manipulate, since users can choose whether to record a meal or leave it out. This can create a false sense that anything unlogged “doesn’t count.” Many people admitted they skipped tracking indulgent foods—like a post-dinner pint of ice cream—to avoid feeling bad. But this often backfired, leading to even stronger feelings of guilt and discouragement. In some cases, users abandoned the app entirely—and dropped their healthy routines with it.
Activity Tracking and the Pressure for Constant Validation
When it comes to activity-tracking apps, many users found themselves seeking validation—not just from others online, but from the app itself. For some, exercise turned into a compulsive reaction triggered by alerts reminding them they were falling short of their goals.
Relentless monitoring can also strip away the simple pleasure of being active or appreciating genuine accomplishments—especially when there’s no digital record to prove it. People on X described feeling upset when Strava failed to log a personal-best half-marathon or didn’t recognize a streak they were proud of.
It’s worth noting that the study focused exclusively on negative posts, so there’s still no solid scientific data on the benefits people may get from these apps. Still, the potential downsides are difficult to overlook, and the findings serve as a clear signal to developers to rethink the unintended impacts of their tools.
The study—which also included researchers from the University of Westminster—was recently published in the British Journal of Health Psychology.
Read the original article on: New Atlas
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