Beth Granter

The Evil Facebook Diet App

So I clicked this Facebook ad today:

Facebook Diet App Ad

Cos I’m trying to put some weight on. Seemed like a good app, I started adding the food I’d eaten today and it counted my calories for me. Then went to put what activities I’d done. It asked me to put in my weight and target weight first so it could calculate stuff.

It then gave me this absolute bullshit:

Evil diet app

What an absolute bitch of an app. Fancy telling underweight people they ought to lose weight! I don’t normally swear but this has really got me angry. How small minded and down-right dangerous! This app had the potential to be really useful for people trying to put weight on and they’ve just decided to only serve fatties.

I’m deleting this app right away and suggest out of support for the skinnies you do the same. I’m also going to write on the app wall about how rubbish this is.

Posted by Beth Granter @ 10 April 2010

4 comments

Tags : ad , Advertising , app , diet , facebook , health

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Apr 13, 2010
8:06 pm

#1 Beth Granter :

I got the following generic response from their customer services:

Hi Beth,

Many thanks for the feedback.

We are constantly working to make the application better so we’ll be sure to take your comments into account.

We appreciate your patience and wish you well.

The FatSecret team

—–Original Message—–

I am deeply concerned that this app insists you must lose weight even though I was trying to use it to track my goal of gaining weight. It is dangerous for people who may have eating disorders and who need to gain weight and I don’t see why it needs to only work in one direction.

Jul 8, 2010
1:03 pm

#2 ed :

For me, however, it might just work!

Aug 19, 2010
6:16 pm

#3 Nathanael :

It’s a DIET app. It’s for people who want to LOSE WEIGHT. Complaining that a weight loss app is ill-suited for putting on poundage strikes me as a bit like asking the waiter to bring you a fork for your soup and then blaming the manager for the dribbles down your shirt.

Aug 20, 2010
3:17 pm

#4 Beth Granter :

Hi Nathanael,

The word ‘diet’ doesn’t mean ‘lose weight’, it means ‘what you eat’. From Wikipedia: “In nutrition, diet is the sum of food consumed by a person or other organism. Dietary habits are the habitual decisions an individual or culture makes when choosing what foods to eat.”

If you read the original ad I clicked, it’s about tracking what you eat and says nothing about losing weight.