“With Instagram, it helped me because I was taking a picture of it - it’s real and it does exist and it does count towards what I was eating. One woman who previously used the MyFitnessPal app to track her diet said she would make excuses to herself about why she didn’t need to log a bag of chips because it was so tiny. In some cases, feeling accountable to other Instagram users and followers caused people to be more honest about their eating habits. The interviewees said that social and emotional support from other Instagram users helped them stick to their own tracking and healthy eating goals, and many strove to provide that support for others. “But when you see a whole tiled grid of them, you have to say to yourself, ‘Wait, I don’t actually have that many special days.’” “When you only have one data point for a pizza or donut, it’s easy to rationalize that away as a special occasion,” said senior author Sean Munson, assistant professor of human centered design and engineering at the UW. Plus, having a visual account of everything one eats in a day - both in terms of volume and quality - can help people spot trouble. “Plus, it’s more socially appropriate for people who are trying to track their diets to snap a photo of their plate when they’re out with friends - everyone’s doing it and it doesn’t look weird.” “The benefit of photos is that it’s more fun to do than taking out a booklet or typing hundreds of words of description in an app,” said lead author and UW human centered design and engineering doctoral student Christina Chung. Some also used the photos as a reference so they could remember to log their food later in the day. ![]() Instead of simply using a traditional food journal or app that requires users to write down or log everything they eat, the interviewees snapped pictures of what they ate in a day - from bowls of healthy fruit to the burrito they scarfed in the car - and shared them on Instagram using the #fooddiary or #foodjournal hashtags. ![]() The research team will use the results to inform the design of tools to support healthy behaviors. In a paper to be presented at the CHI 2017 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in May, the researchers conducted in-depth interviews with 16 people who consistently record and share what they eat on Instagram about the benefits and challenges of using the social media platform to achieve their eating and fitness goals. Instagram users post millions of food photos - whether to show off a sophisticated palate, make friends drool over chicken and waffles or artfully arrange colorful macarons.Ī new study from University of Washington researchers describes how some people also turn to posting photos on Instagram to track food intake or to be held accountable by followers in meeting healthy eating or weight loss goals.
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