When does wanting to be healthy become unhealthy?

A few weeks ago, I began using a weight loss app that a friend introduced to me. I’ve been trying to lose weight and the app provides an easy way to keep track of how many calories I eat compared to how many calories I lose though daily exercise. I set the amount of weight that I wanted to lose over the next two months and it gave me a schedule for how many calories I could eat per day to keep pace with the goal.

The app was free, it conveniently gave me a daily track of how much I could eat and it was easy to use. It seemed like the perfect app for losing weight.

However, I recently began to understand the dangers of a weight loss app like this one.

I noticed myself becoming obsessive with keeping track of what I ate. My day-to-day opinion of myself would depend on whether or not I stayed under the amount of calories I was allowed. If I ate too much for one meal during the day, the idea to skip the next meal certainly came to mind. If by the end of the day I ate too many calories, I’d stay up later to work it off.

I was slowly becoming a slave to the app and to calorie-counting. In my desire to be more healthy, I was contemplating unhealthy habits such as skipping meals or overworking my body. I never fully got to that point, but in this short amount of time using the app, I realized how easily someone could begin making those choices all in the name of losing weight.

This app certainly has its place in living a healthier life style, but, as with anything else in life, obsessing over a good thing can make it a bad thing.