rina's space

may 2, 2025 @ 07:29 pm | est. reading time: 2 - 3 mins | word count 530

why are we “gamefying” dieting now?

if you’ve spent any time online, you’ve likely seen an advertisements for this thing called bitepal. i decided to try it out for half a day only (and delete it lol).
in an essense, they quite literally advertise themselves as “duolingo but for weight loss”. an ai-powered calorie and food tracker, which also doubles up as a virtual pet. you don’t track — your pet dies. and the more you stick to the app, the “healthier” and “happier” your pet will be. so this whole thing “gemefies” dieting, weightloss, which may make it easier for certain people, but there’s also this potential development of the eating disorders, if you get caught up in numbers...

at the start you will be prompted to name your pet, futher establishing a connection, because YOU even named it. you wouldn’t want it to die, right? so you better keep counting your calories!


the app won’t shy away from calling you fat, even if you just technically fall under that category. i’m 5’4 (164cm) and around 70-73kg (i put it as 73 in the app). and lo and behold app is calling me overweight. while technically, yes, it’s correct, i’m far from being fat. it also has this condescending language “almost there! small changes can help you feel best.”. like, shut the hell up. this basically reads as “you’re a fatty but we can’t say so”. to be quite honest it’s not like i care what the app thinks, i like fast food, i like candy, but yeah.


the app also uses faulty ai when you actually try logging stuff. it logs by you providing it pictures of your meals/snacks/drinks, etc. it detected a mug filled with pepsi and ice as "coffee" and worth 100 calories. i had to manually edit it to write it was pepsi...


even after i corrected it, it didn't decrease calorie count. 250ml of pepsi, as manufactured in my country is 70cals, as indicated on the label.


another major flaw is that it tries to guess the weight of the food purely based on image data, which is impossible to get accurately. it glot close but not exact. and now if you can’t or don’t want to check, you’re relying solely on an image-recognition algorithm to count your callories, which you probably want to avoid.



the app wants to be your accountability buddy, but instead it’s just a glitchy little guilt machine with a dead-eyed virtual pet staring into your soul every time you eat something “unhealthy”. like, it marked some white bread as “poor”. like bruh, i am balkan. bread to us, is like rice is to asians. you have bread with most of your meals. between the ai that thinks pepsi is coffee, calorie counts that magically don’t update even when corrected, and a smug tone that makes you want to eat more out of spite, it is giving an eating disorder in the making and not much else. like it dies if you do not count calories for a day?? seriously? like, sorry bitepal, but no one wants to be negged by a tamagotchi with a calorie calculator, at least i don’t. skip the download. your mental health will thank you.

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