By empowering users to monitor diet and exercise statistics and customize goals, health-focused phone apps and wearable technology are making wellness a much more individualized, self-driven experience. Calorie counters, diet trackers, phase counters, fasting trackers, water-intake trackers, and other health trackers are among these apps. Adults who are increasingly motivated to increase their success and living conditions love them. However, these fitness apps for eating disorders influence weight and diet tracking to an unhealthy level which gives rise to appearance-centric culture. Fitness apps already attract people with disordered eating problems due to their detailed repositories of food items and nutrition statistics. They encourage the user to reduce intake, increase energy expenditure and set increasingly extreme goals. 

When we speak about eating disorders, we’re referring to disorders of body image in which you assume you’re fatter than you are, that you’re carrying more weight than you do, and so on. And anxiety is basically the underlined part. There is anxiety about these problems, and something that feeds that anxiety will further disorder the body image and the issues that surround it. When you start using a health tracking app, such as a calorie counter or a move counter, you can find yourself looking at these apps up to 20 times per day. And each time that you look at it and you feel like you’ve not met your desired target for the day, your anxiety goes up. The moment your anxiety goes up, the chances are that the symptoms of the eating disorders start to increase. The most concerning issue is immediate design flaws that may jeopardize people’s health. Individuals can enter custom calorie requirements as low as 500 calories and extreme regimes like losing a kilogram per week using apps like MyFitnessPal and Lifesum, while intermittent fasting apps like Zero provide premium services that allow fasting to last many days.

On the other hand, there are a number of eating disorder treatment applications available that could be beneficial to those suffering from eating disorders. Any of these apps reflect or endorse evidence-based clinical principles like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). Self-monitoring, which is also a characteristic of CBT for many mental illnesses, is one of the most significant features that some apps have. Self-monitoring is a method used to treat eating disorders that include keeping track of what you eat as well as your thoughts and feelings. Self-monitoring with an app has many benefits over paper monitoring. Although both exercise and eating disorder treatment self-monitoring apps use tracking, their emphasis is different. Numbers and data, such as caloric intake, are primarily monitored by fitness apps. On the other hand, eating disorder treatment apps are more concerned with monitoring the emotions and feelings associated with eating rather than the specific numbers. This is a crucial difference between using fitness apps for eating disorders and customized apps for eating disorders. Individuals with eating disorders should make their choice carefully.