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The Current Approach
Existing nutrition tracking platforms focus almost entirely on tracking calories and macronutrients and not the timing of meals
Current platforms are typically programmed with preset diets for users to follow, which does not focus on creating unique plans that work for individuals
They also tend to focus on physiological outcomes, paying less attention to how users feel throughout the day
It's Time to Create an Approach Tailored to Individuals
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A New Way to Monitor Nutrition - Designed to create your Nutrition plan
An ideal meal timeline proposed at the beginning of each day based on eating habit data, wake time, and recommended bedtime
Stay on track of hydration target with a live progress meter
Log meals throughout the day using a familiar activity tracker interface
Input water consumption throughout the day
Live Prototype
Add a Meal
Live Prototype
Add Glass of Water
Full Day Overview
An overview of the user's meals, snacks, and water consumption
Red - Too much time has passed between meals/snacks
Yellow - Indicates meals/snacks were nearly too far apart
Green - Optimal spacing of meal/snack times
Journal Addition
User drags blue dots up or down to record perceived energy level throughout the day
Generate additional datapoints to inform meal time & hydration suggestions as well as activity & recovery recommendations
Push Notifications
Engage users with meal, snack, and hydration reminders
Help users establish beneficial eating and hydration habits
Promote healthy, user specific refueling
Approach
Throughout the design process of these features, my priority was to identify the lowest barrier to entry for tracking insightful nutrition data in the WHOOP app
Personal experience, conversations with other WHOOP users, and analyzing reviews of meal trackers led me to focus on the timing of meals as the foundation of this feature
I believe this would fit seamlessly with other WHOOP features as well as add beneficial data to recovery scores and recommendations
In my opinion, the common approaches seen today (calorie & macro counting, diet recommendation, and “what I eat in a day” posts from social media influencers) miss the mark on how we should approach wellness through nutrition
What I have always valued about the WHOOP approach is the baseline data collection period which promotes listening to your body, adding insights from the data, and learning what works best for you
Foundation
These features would serve as the starting point to engage users on their nutritional journey
Next Steps
Once a user’s eating habits are aligned with their circadian rhythm, then experimentation with other diet changes - such as caloric and macronutrient intake - can be added
Expanding the meal and snack log to include what the user consumed during a meal allows more accurate, evidence based recommendations to be made
Future
Nutrition is a highly unique and complex field of study. Creating a dataset with this level of insight into eating behavior, as well as linking it with user activity and lifestyle data, could have considerable research applications