Your Fitness App Might Be Making You Miserable

That notification reminding you to log your lunch? The streak you just lost because you forgot to track yesterday’s workout? The calorie target that seems mathematically impossible to hit? According to new research, these features of popular fitness apps are not just annoying. They might be actively undermining your health.

A study published October 22 in the British Journal of Health Psychology analyzed nearly 59,000 posts on X (formerly Twitter) about the five most profitable fitness apps, and what researchers found was striking: users frequently reported feelings of shame, disappointment, and demotivation. Some gave up on their health goals entirely.

“Few studies have looked at the potential detrimental effects of these apps,” said Dr. Paulina Bondaronek, senior author of the study and researcher at University College London’s Institute of Health Informatics. “In these posts, we found a lot of blame and shame, with people feeling they were not doing as well as they should be. These emotional effects may end up harming people’s motivation and their health.”

When Algorithms Set Impossible Goals

The research team used artificial intelligence to filter through the mountain of social media data, identifying 13,799 posts expressing negative sentiment. They then grouped these into themes that painted a troubling picture of how people actually experience fitness tracking in the wild.

One of the most startling findings involved the apps’ calorie recommendations. Users reported being told they needed to consume “negative 700 calories a day” to reach their goals. Another wrote with dark humor: “If you allow MyFitnessPal to prescribe your calories you’ll end up with a deficit that’s unachievable, unsustainable and very unhealthy. You could also starve to death.”

The problem, researchers found, is that these apps prioritize user-set weight goals over public health recommendations. The algorithms simply work backward from your target weight, sometimes generating dangerous advice in the process. One user discovered she could not log breastfeeding, an activity that burns significant calories, highlighting how poorly personalized these supposedly customized tools actually are.

The rigid quantification itself seemed to drain joy from activities. When one runner achieved a personal best in a half marathon but the app failed to record it, their social media post focused entirely on disappointment rather than the achievement. It is a phenomenon researchers have seen before: measuring an activity can decrease the pleasure of doing it.

The Shame Spiral

Perhaps most concerning were the emotional responses users described. People wrote about feeling “pestered” by notifications reminding them they had eaten “unhealthy” foods or exceeded sugar limits. Some admitted to avoidant behaviors, like one user who warned themselves: “do NOT put Percy pigs into MyFitnessPal.” Another confessed to “back to eating lotus biscoff spread out of jar,” a sign of complete disengagement.

This shame-and-blame dynamic runs counter to what behavioral science tells us about sustainable change. “We need to learn to be kinder to ourselves,” Dr. Bondaronek said. “We are good at blaming and shaming because we think it will help us to do better but actually it has the opposite effect.”

The study found that when users did stay motivated, it was often for the wrong reasons. One person described themselves as “miserably stuffed” but planning to go to the gym anyway to compensate for exceeding their calorie target. That is extrinsic motivation driven by guilt, not the intrinsic enjoyment that research suggests is necessary for long-term behavior change.

Dr. Lucy Porter, co-author from UCL’s Division of Psychology and Language Sciences, emphasized the irony: “Listening to users’ reports on social media has shown that fitness apps can sometimes leave users feeling demoralised and ready to give up, which is the exact opposite of what these tools are supposed to do.”

The study focused on negative posts specifically, so it cannot assess the overall balance of harms and benefits. Most of the analyzed posts (more than 8,400) related to MyFitnessPal, with Strava and Weight Watchers also generating substantial discussion. The researchers acknowledge these apps likely help many people, but argue the negative impacts deserve serious attention.

Their recommendations are clear: fitness apps need to move beyond rigid calorie counting toward a more holistic focus on wellbeing. They should leverage social connection rather than isolating users in individual struggles. And crucially, they need to prioritize intrinsic motivation, helping people find genuine satisfaction in healthy behaviors rather than gamifying guilt.

As one researcher noted, self-monitoring and action planning are powerful behavior change techniques. The problem is we may be overusing them, and in ways that ignore decades of psychological research about what actually motivates humans over the long term.

British Journal of Health Psychology: 10.1111/bjhp.70026