Eat4Thought: A Design of Food Journaling
This addresses the need for deeper self-reflection in dietary tracking for individuals seeking to improve eating habits, but it is incremental as it builds on existing journaling tools.
The authors tackled the problem of limited self-reflection in food journaling by developing Eat4Thought, an app that tracks emotional, sensory, and spatio-temporal meal elements, with initial evaluation showing support for user reflection.
Food journaling is an effective method to help people identify their eating patterns and encourage healthy eating habits as it requires self-reflection on eating behaviors. Current tools have predominately focused on tracking food intake, such as carbohydrates, proteins, fats, and calories. Other factors, such as contextual information and momentary thoughts and feelings that are internal to an individual, are also essential to help people reflect upon and change attitudes about eating behaviors. However, current dietary tracking tools rarely support capturing these elements as a way to foster deep reflection. In this work, we present Eat4Thought -- a food journaling application that allows users to track their emotional, sensory, and spatio-temporal elements of meals as a means of supporting self-reflection. The application enables vivid documentation of experiences and self-reflection on the past through video recording. We describe our design process and an initial evaluation of the application. We also provide design recommendations for future work on food journaling.