Lose It!

 Lose It! – Social Media Platform Critical Profile

Lose It! is a cell phone application dedicated to assisting users in maintaining a healthier lifestyle by having the ability to track their food and activity consumption during the day. Essentially, users enter their information into the app, including height, weight, gender and age, set a goal for either weight loss or weight gain, and from there they choose how much weight they would like to lose/gain weekly. With all of those results combined, the app sets a total calorie goal for the day, and it allocates a specific amount of calories to each meal of the day. As stated on their website, “Lose It! was founded to help real people achieve real weight loss, without the unsustainable gimmicks, fad diets, restrictive foods, on-site meetings, or large price tags of other weight-loss companies.” (2008). Lose It! has a free version and a premium version ($39.99/year), opening up their accessibility to anyone who wishes to test out the app before committing to the process. The premium version gives users access to a lot more features of the app that can help them meet their fitness and nutrition goals, such as carb tracking, sleep goals, nutrition planning, and fitness guides. 

There are a few key people behind the Lose It! application who are there to create a knowledgeable and up to date environment for users: Jenna Wolfe, a TV journalist, lifestyle and fitness expert and author of “Thinner in 30: Small Changes That Add Up to Big Weight Loss in Just 30 Days” (Wolfe), Kristin Kirkpatrick, MS, RD, a nationally recognized nutrition expert and award-winning dietitian (Kirkpatrick), Dr. Roshini Raj is a board certified gastroenterologist and internist (Raj), and Deborah McConnell, MS, CES, a Global Master Trainer for life fitness and hammer strength (McConnell). These four women are active consultants for the app, providing their knowledge, expertise, and experience to help cultivate motivation programs to help users achieve their goals.

The Lose It! app also has a social interaction feature, where users can add their friends, join groups that suit their goals, such as a ‘walking group’ or a ‘11-50 pounds to go’ group, engage in conversations with other users and groups, and track their own activity as well as that of their friends, where they can see badges that have earned, workout activity, calorie bonuses earned, and goal accomplishments. The social interface of the app almost resembles a simplified version of Facebook, as you can make friends, join groups, and share and see progress and goals on a feed-style page. Even the categories of the app are displayed in a similar style to those on Facebook. Perhaps this is done intentionally as a way to make the app seem familiar and friendly to users, not forcing them to learn a new app structure.  

With regards to privacy and the storing of data on the Lose It! app, there are some conflicting perspectives on how data may be shared. Being that the primary purpose of this app is to track what one consumes during the day, users must upload this information into the system. There are several ways to do this, including scanning the bar codes of an item, entering the information manually, or searching for the item in the search bar, which will give several results that have been entered by other users. Although it does make the process of tracking easier for users, it does make one question that if that data is so easy to share, then how easily could my data be shared? According to Zeynep Tufekci, “The advent of digital and networked technologies has caused an explosion in the amount and variety of data available on each individual, as well as the velocity with which such data become available” (Tufekci). When considering this statement with regards to the Lose It! app, there is so much personal and medical data that is shared by users everyday in the network: people share their weight, height, age, and gender to see what their calorie goal should be, people share their interests and occupations when adding friends and joining groups, they share their location with the app in order to prioritize food search results, and users can even link their other fitness trackers such as an Apple Watch app, Fitbit app, Apple Health app, therefore sharing their information with those platforms as well. According to Lose It!’s privacy policy, “We share data that does not personally identify you with third parties such as advertisers and business partners. We share data that does personally identify you with third parties that support our communication with you via email or messages or that provide analytics that permit us to better understand how our products are used. We also share data that does personally identify you in much more limited circumstances, such as when we are required by law or if our company is acquired or merges with another company.” (2019). Although they do provide this information, they are not overly specific about which third parties they are working with and what their policies with information retention and tracking are.

Another aspect of the app that causes some confusion and complication is whether or not the app is good for both general health and mental health of users. Similarly to social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook, the Lose It! app can either be extremely encouraging or extremely discouraging to users, and even more so than regular social media platforms, as it deals with a major insecurity that millions of people face: their weight. People become insecure over not fitting into society’s standard for size and weight, a concept that is driven highly by social media. In José van Dijck’s text “The Culture of Connectivity”, he asks the question of, “To what extent are users empowered or constrained by platforms to fashion their unique identity and stylize their self-presentation?” (32, van Dijck). On social networks, users tend to follow people who they idealize and look up to. Someone who is enduring a weight loss or gain process may follow fitness influencers or models, people who they aspire to become. This combined with the scientific proof that weight loss/gain cannot achieved overnight is recipe destined for failure, as it could potentially harm the mental and physical well-being of an individual. When considering this within the Lose It! app, an individual may want to increase the speed of their goals by eating more or less than the suggested amount of calories and obsessively tracking every single item they consume, therefore becoming addicted to the process in a negative way. The way the app is designed does not help to solve this issue either, as some testimonials claim that the app does not generate entirely healthy recommendations to its users. One review on the Apple App Store states, “The fact that you cannot edit your calories or macronutrients is ridiculous. Telling me that I need to eat 1600 calories to lose weight is absurd, unrealistic, and unhealthy.” (2019). Although some users are able to recognize that 1600 calories per day is not necessarily healthy for a grown adult to consume everyday, many others may look past their recommended number, and go much lower or much higher, putting them even more off track for achieving their goals. Combining this with the negative aspects of other social media platforms, all that is being reinforced is society’s ideal image, not a realistic image.

Overall, the Lose It! app does have its benefits, such as its simplified interface and motivational challenges, it does have its downfalls as mentioned above. When used in moderation, it can be a great tool to achieve a health-related goal, leading to a health-centred lifestyle.

Works Cited:

Van Dijck, Jose. The Culture Of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media. Oxford University Press, 2013.

Tdct3125! “Non-Customizable.” Review of Lose It! 2019.

Tufekci, Z. “Engineering the Public: Big Data, Surveillance and Computational Politics”. First Monday, Vol. 19, no. 7, July 2014.

“Lose It! – Calorie Counting Made Easy.” Lose It! – Weight Loss That Fits, 2008, www.loseit.com/.