Calorie tracking apps are endless in any online store. Each has their own flavor of tracking, data entry, and visuals. A good looking app may help make it easier to engage with and use the app, however, the interplay between client expectations and what they see is equally important.
Within range or out of range?
Take the Noom app for example. This app categorizes foods into green, yellow, and orange categories. Eat the green foods, less of the orange ones. That’s the idea.
In addition, to the Noom food categories, the app provides a range of calories to hit. It’s pretty slick and adjust based on your activity levels if you let your phone talk to your activity data too!
Enter Applied Behavior Analysis
How consistently you fall within this range matter most when it comes to weight loss, if that’s your goal.
That is, how often are you under, within, or over the prescribed calorie range.
Angela transitioned from the Nutrisystem to the Noom app in the middle of our coaching process. This is fine, client preference on data collection always take precedence.
So here we see, Nutrisystem data versus Noom data:
All things being equal, there appears to be variability between calorie logging between the two apps. We are comparing apples to oranges, possibly. That is, calorie tracking may be different or easier between them among other things.
My goal as a behavior analyst and Angela’s coach is to evaluate the effectiveness of following a specific calorie range, not set the range themselves. I will let the nutritionists and dietitians that consult with app companies take care of that for us.
In Range Or Out of Range?
Angela’s initial (informal) goal was to take baseline data in Noom to best understand her eating patterns. Specifically, within the Noom app how often did she fall under, within, or over the prescribed range.
Of the days we tracked, NO days were above the targeted range in Noom:
As Angela stated her goal is to lose weight, these data, and more importantly her weekly performances are a great start at the beginning of this coaching process.
Why The Focus On The Range?
We have one caveat to these calorie data: her physical activity data are connected to Noom.
What does this matter?
Each day her range updates based on her daily activity as measure by calories burned. For example, if she expends a lot of energy one day (e.g., a long run, heavy lifting day), then the Noom app will auto-calculate a higher range for her to hit and still be on track to lose weight.
Behaviorally speaking, we aligned our efforts and goals to hit this range as often as we need to hit her weight loss goal. This fine-tuned decision is key behavioral pinpoint that will allow us to systematically evaluate her progress over time.
