The Program Helped Meet Health Goals but Could Be Improved Through Individual Support and Body Positive Language
Participants overwhelmingly indicated satisfaction with the content and that it helped them move toward their specific health and well-being goals. The program helped accomplish goals related to food (eg, reframing eating, working with craving, savoring food, and healthier choices), learning mindfulness (eg, specific practices, application in eating, and relearning practices they’d forgotten), and increasing self-care or kindness (eg, silencing internalized oppression and decreasing self-judgment). However, several participants indicated that they would have liked an individual support component and education on dietary choices:It was totally relevant. I feel like that’s what it is all about like breaking habit loops and trying to get at the things underneath of why you’re eating. Not demonizing like “Oh well, you just need to like restrict calories, you need to have more willpower and just stick to this and drive yourself harder,” but it was about trying to understand like what’s going on inside. In addition, several participants believed that the app could be improved by addressing self-kindness and the relationship with their body directly by creating content that celebrates diverse body types (ie, body positivity). Specifically, they believed that the program should prioritize content focused on fat is beautiful, “fat is not a bad thing” (PID 9825), reducing the focus on weight reduction as a goal and educating on how the body changes as people age:To change people’s perspective about sizes because people get hung up on numbers. Unfortunately, this still does some numbering. Like, with weight numbers, but the number is the same for everyone, so the, the number of 185 looks different on so many different people. And so, if there was a way to kind of incorporate how they’re just numbers, they’re not really defining anything else. 