Crumbs

Abstract

Many people struggle with efforts to make healthy behavior changes, such as healthy eating. Several existing approaches promote healthy eating, but present high barriers and yield limited engagement. As a lightweight alternative approach to promoting mindful eating, we introduce and examine crumbs: daily food challenges completed by consuming one food that meets the challenge. We examine crumbs through developing and deploying the iPhone application Food4Thought. In a 3-week field study with 61 participants, crumbs supported engagement and mindfulness while offering opportunities to learn about food. Our 2×2 study compared nutrition versus non-nutrition crumbs coupled with social versus non-social features. Nutrition crumbs often felt more purposeful to participants, but non-nutrition crumbs increased mindfulness more than nutrition crumbs. Social features helped sustain engagement and were important for engagement with non-nutrition crumbs. Social features also enabled learning about the variety of foods other people use to meet a challenge.

Does Journaling Encourage Healthier Choices?

“…Most journalers' healthier food choices are significantly influenced by their gender roles and environmental contexts, suggesting that their food choices are still largely subconscious [45]. Overall, our study helps to further investigate the claim about the journaling effect on healthier food choices [13,14,18] using a large-scale data. From the public health perspective, we find that their effectiveness in helping people achieve healthy eating behaviors as defined by evidence-based outcomes are marginal at best.…”

“…Our work is complementary to previous food journaling research [13,14,18,19]. While many studies aimed to qualitatively characterize various aspects of the self-tracking practices, few studies have taken a computational approach to examine the broader impacts of journaling on the healthy eating behaviors of food journalers.…”

“…Much research in personal informatics has focused on characterizing the use of tools and technologies to track one's own personal data for self-discovery and behavior change in a variety of domains [19,41]. In particular, a few researchers have explored the use of mobile food journals and other online tools for dietary self-tracking in recent years [13,14,18]. Cordeiro et al identified several key challenges related to the journaling tools and practices, such as unreliable data and negative nudges [14].…”

“…Cordeiro et al identified several key challenges related to the journaling tools and practices, such as unreliable data and negative nudges [14]. To overcome tracking burden and promote mindful eating, Epstein et al proposed a lightweight food journal [18]. Recently, Chung et al [11] studied the practice of food tracking amongst Instagram users and the role of social support on their healthy eating pursuit.…”

“…Journaling: Food journaling can promote mindful eating [13], leading to weight loss [26], and healthier behaviors [18]. Furthermore, the health benefits were greater amongst highly active journalers [9].…”