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Hey everybody it's Mikki here you're listening to Mini mikkipedia on a Monday and today I want to chat about whether tracking your food is obsessive. Somewhere in I don't know I'd say the last few years but it's probably a an artifact of social media right? Weighing your food has become a bit of a red flag. Writing down what you eat often falls into the same category

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Checking the scale more than once a week suddenly is something that is seen as obsessive. And I sort of understand why, of course, because we've all seen the version of tracking or monitoring that does go wrong. The person who can't like eat a meal without getting out their app, or feels like the day is ruined if they're unable to log their food correctly or remember what it is they ate, or who uses the numbers to

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punish or restrict themselves rather than inform themselves. So of course there are cases like this. But the thing is, is it's really important to sort of ask the question, is this tool serving me or rather than is this tool inherently dangerous? Because obviously they're two very different questions. And I would say the latter is, I mean, almost certainly no, because of course

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Like a tape measure isn't obsessive, a food scale isn't obsessive, a spreadsheet isn't obsessive. They're inert. But what determines whether monitoring helps or hurts you isn't about the tool. It's about why you're using it, how you're using it, what you say to yourself while you're doing it. And today I do want to chat a little bit about a research around self-monitoring, tracking and weighing, where it's helpful.

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where it can go wrong and why the same behavior can be either the most useful thing in your toolkit or actually a problem depending on the person doing it and the framing involved. So it isn't like a moral debate or one that is set up to point fingers at anyone, but it's a conversation worth having. And I particularly think about this at the start of any group when I'm asking them to weigh their food, to...

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write down what they eat to have a bit of this sort of reflective piece. So let's just start with the case for monitoring. And the reality is self-monitoring is one of the most consistently replicated predictors of successful weight management in the entire behavioral literature. Daily self-weighing is the best studied example. Steinberg and colleagues ran a randomized trial specifically testing this.

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and found that participants instructed to weigh themselves daily lost more weight and were more likely to adopt other weight control behaviors than those who weighed in less frequently, something about burying your head in the sand. It wasn't the number on the scale doing the work directly. It was that that daily data point kept people's attention on the goal and prompted small corrections.

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before they became big ones. And that's really important because I cannot tell you the number of times I speak to people and they almost confess to me. It feels like a confession. I don't think it's worthy of, but it feels the way that they're discussing it. They confess to me that they haven't weighed themselves in a few weeks. They already know what the scale is going to say. Like it has this power over them. And I get it. But the thing is, the longer you go in that direction, the

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harder it is to pivot and correct when you need to. And you do also see this pattern in other populations outside of Steinberg and colleagues study. Levitsky and colleagues looked at the classic freshman 15, the weight gain that tends to creep up on students in their first year of university, and found that simply having students step on a scale daily and see the number was enough to blunt that gain without any dietary prescription attached at all. So there was no meal plan,

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no calorie targets, just the feedback loop of seeing that data regularly. And it isn't just about losing weight. I talk to people about this all the time, particularly when I'm talking about weight maintenance, which is arguably, objectively actually, the much harder problem. Buterin and colleagues followed people after weight loss and found that consistent self-weighing was one of the strongest predictors of who successfully maintained their loss and who's regained it.

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The people who kept weighing themselves regularly were the ones who caught the small regains early, while they were still small, rather than three months later when the trend had become a slide. And there is a mechanistic story underneath it all, which I think is pretty useful. Weight, body composition, and eating patterns, they do tend to drift gradually, not suddenly. If you're not measuring anything, that drift isn't visible until it isn't. Until the genes don't fit.

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or the number on the odd occasion you do step on the scale has moved more than you expected. That happens all the time. Self-monitoring, whether it is a scale, a tape measure, or a food log, isn't there to create anxiety about the day-to-day number. It's there to catch a trend early enough that correcting it takes just days to a week, not months. And that's a completely different psychological experience to some of the ways we talk about tracking now.

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where it's framed purely as a source of stress. And look, there are arguments for and against, particularly using body weight scales. And I absolutely understand that. And this is really just an illustration of what we see in the literature and what we hear in social media versus just the realities of sort of everyday life. So what I will say, if you cannot remove that psychological distress from weighing yourself on the scales,

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absolutely do not use them. It is not worth it. But if you can get to this point where it literally is just a number, then it could be a really valuable tool. And it isn't just about weighing actually. The same principle shows up in a much larger meta-analysis by TSDell and colleagues. And they pulled 26 randomized trials and over 21,000 participants looking at

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remotely delivered self-monitoring and tailored feedback interventions for dietary change, with no other human contact involved at all. And they found a small but statistically significant improvement in dietary behaviour in the groups using self-monitoring or receiving feedback compared to the controls. So this wasn't actually coaching. It wasn't accountability to another person. It wasn't, you know,

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discipline or willpower, was people getting objective feedback about their own behaviour and adjusting that accordingly. So I think that's pretty interesting as well. Importantly of course is that, you know, people talk about tracking being good or bad, but tracking isn't just one behaviour. Pen and paper, a photo of your plate, a calorie counting app, a body weight spreadsheet, a spreadsheet of your food, a tape measure once a fortnight. These

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obviously are very different experiences and they're not just these interchangeable versions of the same thing. So interestingly, there was a systematic review by Wallace and colleagues that looked at people's lived experience of health tracking technology. And there was five recurring themes across the research. What motivates people to start? What causes them to stop? The actual process of logging food day to day? The reification of data?

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the number starting to feel more real or more important than how they actually feel, the emergence of disordered eating and compulsive exercise in some users, and a genuine goal, achievement, and positive reappraisal in others. So out of this, it's not that the tracking technology itself is good or bad, but you can tell by these themes that that self-monitoring obviously can support the development of healthy short-term habits in some people.

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but it may contribute to disordered eating and worse mental health outcomes in others. And that's using exactly the same technology, which of course makes sense because as individuals, we are going to respond quite differently to different interventions. Now that reification of data theme is interesting. It's like the clearest articulation of where tracking tips from useful into unhelpful.

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It's the moment the number stops representing information about your day and starts representing your worth, your discipline, or your success as a person. A food log is only meant to answer that question of what actually happened today and does it need adjusting? It's not meant to answer the question, was I good today? Once you start having that thought process of that second question, that's when you really need to question

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what that relationship is to the app and whether it's worth it. Because to my mind, it is not. Too often, our sense of self-worth is caught up in how quote unquote good or bad, how aligned or otherwise we were to our overall health goals. So obviously super useful until it isn't. And there is this real body of research linking dietary and weight self-monitoring to disordered eating. So.

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Han and colleagues have published several longitudinal studies following young adults over years and they've repeatedly found that using weight-related self-monitoring apps, particularly when the motivation was explicitly weight management, was associated with an increase in disordered weight control behaviors over time, things like fasting, skipping meals or using diet pills.

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There was a systematic review by Anderberg and colleagues that reached a similar conclusion, finding that diet and fitness app use was associated with higher rates of disordered eating symptomology, body image concern, and compulsive exercise, particularly among more frequent users. And of course, this is super important to acknowledge. It's very real, but to suggest that every person that tracks their food or their weight

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in this way is inherently obsessive and going down this track I think is quite clearly false. Now, Jopes and colleagues, they ran a 12 month randomized trial that put adults classified with overweight or obesity into different self monitoring groups, daily weighing, using MyFitnessPal or monitoring hunger against a control group. And they directly measured eating disorder symptoms and behaviors like

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binge eating and self-induced vomiting or bulimia throughout. And they found there was no evidence that any form of monitoring increased disordered eating over the year. Hanan colleagues also ran another RCT actively introducing dietary self-monitoring via MyFitnessPal to university women who had never tracked before. And they found no change in eating disorder risk, anxiety, depressive symptoms, or

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body satisfaction after a month of tracking. And when Roth and colleagues pulled the evidence across 28 studies and over 17,000 participants in a systematic review and meta-analysis, the overall association between rate-related self-monitoring and eating disorder symptoms in the general adult population wasn't statistically significant. So, obviously, the conclusion that we draw from this isn't that tracking is safe.

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It's not that tracking is risky, it's that self-monitoring itself doesn't appear to reliably cause disordered eating when it's tested experimentally, but it does show up alongside disordered eating in the people who are already using it in a particular way for a particular reason. Individual factors are likely to determine whether self-monitoring tips into something harmful. It's not the self-monitoring itself that's doing the damage. And that distinction

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is important. So, you know, why does this even happen? There is a well-developed psychological framework that does explain this. Self-determination theory draws us to distinction between autonomous motivation, so doing something because you understand its value and it aligns with goals you've actually chosen, and controlled motivation, doing something out of guilt, pressure, or a feeling that you have to.

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Texera and colleagues who reviewed the weight management literature through this particular lens found that the autonomous motivation was consistently associated with better long-term outcomes, while behaviors driven by guilt or external pressure tended to be far less durable. Palatia and colleagues found the same split specifically around eating regulation. Autonomous forms of regulating your eating were linked to healthier patterns, while controlled regulation

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was linked to more dysfunctional eating and was actually a negative predictor of healthy eating altogether, understandably. And there are other studies by Gertin et al, by Donake and colleagues who have also come to similar conclusions. And if you're interested in the literature, I can absolutely point you there, just let me know. So I do want to touch on the role of self-talk here. It is that moment to moment experience of doing it and

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Importantly, when you talk to yourself and think of yourself with this higher self-compassion that is associated with meaningfully lower eating pathology and reduced body image concerns with self-compassion based interventions consistently outperforming control conditions, which is super interesting. So, Kalika and colleagues looking specifically at orthorexia and you might be

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familiar with this term, it's that obsessive pursuit of healthy eating that can itself become disordered. And they found that self-compassion moderated the relationship between orthorexic tendencies and quality of life, meaning that the same restrictive pattern was less damaging in people who related to themselves with more kindness while doing it. So this is a thing, right? The number on the scale, the entry in the food log, the trend line on the spreadsheet,

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None of that has an emotional tone on its own. You supply the tone. I'm up 400 grams this week, better pay attention to my sleep and my weekend intake is completely different from I'm up 400 grams this week, I've absolutely ruined everything and I'm useless, what's the point? Clearly, same data, same tool, but the difference is entirely of how you talk to yourself about what that number means. And that difference does make a big psychological difference.

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to your entire experience, both with tracking, but your long-term outcomes as well. So what is important here is that you need to choose the form of monitoring that fits your actual goal, rather than just defaulting to what most other people do. So if you want general awareness of your eating patterns, why not even just keep a food diary to build that awareness of how and what you eat, and then stepping back once you've built the skill so you're not

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constantly sort of trying to dial in and track every single gram for the rest of your life because honestly that would just drive you insane. So it's important that you utilize things like MyFitnessPal or Weighing Yourself or anything like that as tools that help serve you for a particular purpose not because you feel like you're not allowed to eat something until you've logged it or you can't eat it if you can't track it properly.

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And you wanna be using trends rather than single data points on the scales as well before deciding whether or not you need to make drastic changes to your overall nutrition plan just because you're up half a kilo from the salty meal that you had last night. You also wanna notice your own self-talk while you do it as well. So if you find that logging a day of eating leaves you feeling more informed and more in control,

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then that's awesome. That tool is doing what it should be doing. If it leaves you feeling ashamed or if you feel like you need to compensate drastically, or like the whole day is now a write-off, that's worth paying attention to because it might be telling you something about the motivation or the mindset that you're bringing to it. So if that happens continuously, you need to sort of establish whether you need a different kind of tool, maybe a food journal rather than a food app.

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whether you just need a break from monitoring altogether, whether you just need some support around the self-talk rather than the actual tool itself. So you always want to treat monitoring like it's this time-limited thing rather than it's permanent by default. There are very few people that can legitimately track from now to the end of time. And of course we all know them and that's amazing for them. However, it's not.

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the default for most people, just so you know it. Even if a bunch of people around you are doing it, it is something that you can use as information while it's useful. And you can take those skills into real life without having to track every single gram or yourself every single day. You can use it for a couple of weeks to sort of build this accurate picture of your actual portions and patterns. And then you just step back to just spot check every so often. And this is really helpful with regards to

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weight maintenance, know, tracking your food three to five days a month, for example, writing it down three to five days a month is a really good way to sort of assess whether you're still sort of dialed in and making informed and good choices for your, the goals that you've set. And it helps you, helps sort of bring you back to that line that you want to be in. you know, monitoring isn't good or bad and it's not sort of right or wrong for any particular person.

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in every form. Like if you've got a history of disordered eating, if tracking has previously become compulsive or obsessive for you, if tracking your weight does the same, or if you notice that logging food consistently tips you towards guilt rather than awareness, I think that that could be worth sort of working with a professional to sort of figure out what support looks like if it's not tracking or what a modified version of that might look like. For most people, most of the time,

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the research doesn't support the idea that a food scale or a tracking app is inherently a step towards disorder. It does support the idea that self-monitoring done with intention and without self-punishment attached is one of the more reliable tools we have for actually achieving the goals that people set for themselves. So rather than thinking about, you know, whether or not you should be logging, think about why you want to be doing it and what you're saying to yourself while you do it. So,

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that's really important because I love the way when I was reading something about this, it said it's not, you know, the tool isn't the problem, it's the tone that you bring to it. So yeah, anyway, hopefully that was somewhat interesting for you. I find this area fascinating because I'm in this monitoring space all of the time and get all of the feedback and all of the different concerns that people have. And hey, this is just sort of where it sits in my head as well. So let me know.

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anything and everything, I'm over on Instagram threads and X @mikkiwilliden , Facebook @mikkiwillidenNutrition, head to my website, @mikkiwilliden.com and book a one on one call with me. All right team, you have the best week. See you later.