Diet Culture Reviews: Fitness Apps
There are tons of fitness apps out there that want to fix you. Maybe you think they’re genuinely helpful or are blissfully unaware of these toxic maelstroms. Maybe you’ve been burned before. In any case, let me tell you a bit about how they work. Then I’ll show you some gory details.
1. They find you where you’re most vulnerable
Chances are, you’ve seen the ad while scrolling past some fitspirational content on social media. Suddenly there’s an image of someone who looks more like you, and it’s clear they’ve been miserable for a long time, but now they’re taking charge and changing their life.
The fitness app marketers will probably also hit you up with a special offer that’s only available to you right now. Because that’s when you were feeling like you should be a little bit less like yourself, and more like the content in your feed.
2. They make you acutely aware of what’s “wrong” with your body
I wrote it like that because you may have some health concerns, and those concerns are valid, and you should be talking to health professionals about such things. Those aren’t the “wrongs” these apps are going to pick up, though; generally speaking, they’re going to tell you that you need to be skinnier. Personally, I call bullshit on that. If you are actively seeking ways to improve your health over the long term, there are much better goals to shoot for, such as building better cardiovascular fitness, looking after your mental health, improving your sleep quality, or getting more fruit and vegetables into your diet. Some of the apps will even mention these things, but mostly they’ll want you to get skinnier.
Many fitness apps will do this without regard for your fitness goals or your current body composition. They might even do this even if you choose specifically tell the app that you don’t want to lose weight, which is what happened to me again tonight, which prompted me to finally write this story. Yep, I ignored all the weight loss prompts, said I wanted to run faster, entered my current weight, and entered the exact same number in the target weight box, and still Joggo told me how much weight I should lose. (It was like my Asana Rebel experience all over again.) Now, I used to teach university level mathematics, and I’m reasonably confident that m-m=0 for all values of m, but somehow the app thought there was a difference in there and it was a few kilograms I needed to lose.
Now there’s a gaslighting element in here that really doesn’t sit well with me. I just said I don’t want to lose weight; why is this app telling me I do want to lose weight? Cue creepy ex-boyfriend voice: “I know you better than anyone. I know you better than you know yourself.” Erm, no, thank you.
But there’s more to it than that. By reinforcing that you’ve got work to do, they’re reminding you that you need the app. You’re not enough. You need to fix yourself. (Please believe me, you don’t.)
3. They take the credit for your hard work and blame you for poor results
There’s pretty strong evidence that weight loss generally leads to weight gain in the long term. (Also, weight cycling is really bad for your health.) So if you listen to the app’s encouragement to lose weight, there’s a good chance you’ll “succeed” in the short term and then regain weight in the long term.
Public health messaging has probably already convinced you that body weight is totally within your control and that, if you’re not skinny, you’re failing as a human. (It’s not, and you’re not.) So, when you get the same message from your “fitness app”, you’re probably primed and ready to blame yourself. It’s the same thing diet companies like Jenny Craig and Weight Watchers have been doing for years. They take credit for unsustainable weight loss and, despite research that shows the most likely long-term outcome is weight regain, they blame that part on you…and lure you back.
4. And they keep charging those subscription fees
Now the app producer has established that their “fitness app” was “fixing” you, but that you can’t be trusted to do it on your own, they might offer you a special promo to keep the money flowing. But even if they didn’t, you’re probably ready to double down on your efforts and keep paying that weekly or monthly subscription.
Why does this bother me so much?
That’s a fair question. I’ve got a whole lot of thin privilege, and no lived experience of weight stigma, so it’d be easy to conclude that I’m just an outraged keyboard warrior. Hell, maybe I am. But I still find this sort of business model and marketing campaign repugnant.
I’m studying towards a career in health. Health means different things to different people, but it should never mean harm — and that’s what these fitness apps do. (And so does diet culture more generally.)
What’s up next?
I don’t need to seek out diet culture to expose it because it’s all pervasive. But what I hope to do is share some of my experiences with fitness apps and their harmful marketing practices, and open your eyes to what they’re doing.
I will be singling out some of these “fitness apps”, but not because they’ve done anything especially vindictive; only because they’re the ones who most recently invested in a campaign to make me worry about my body shape and size.
