I made the review below in september, when everything was fine. Now we’re at it summing up calories again, because my son stopped eating enough for a while – and dropped almost 2kg.

Ok this is a review! But it’s not mainly an UX, design or graphical review as you would probably expect. It’s most of all a subjective opinion on the qualities of an app that’s really been a great help!

(screenshot from ShapeUp Club.com)

The need for a digital tool for controlling food intake / an eating disorder

This year we’ve gone through a very tough period with our 12- year old not eating – and suffering immensely from the physical and psykological sideeffects. We were strongly advised to force a rapid weight-gain and to write down everything he ate (or didn’t).

I started out the diary with pen and paper but got frustrated with this low tech way of doing things. I’m amazed with the lacking of more professional tools for parents having children with eating disorders (…and other challenges…will post on that later).

So going through the appstore on my iPhone I decided to try out the ShapeUp Club app. Of course the focus from the vendor was on loosing weight but I imagined that it would be possible to reverse the focus and use the same tools for weightgain.

It was free and amongst other things it promised:

ShapeUp Club is a food and exercise diary for iPhone & iPod Touch. Lose up to 2 lbs/week, or just keep track of your eating habits.

✓ Personalized weight plan
✓ Set individual weight & nutrition goals
✓ Ability to customize everything (such as daily calories & nutritional information)
✓ Track calories, nutrients, fruit & water
✓ Food database with 400 000+ items
✓ Track body measurements (waist, body fat, hips, arms etc.)
✓ Visible progress from charts
✓ Write daily comments
✓ Before and after photos
✓ Password protection
✓ ShapeUp Club is free and without ads
✓ Works without an Internet connection
✓ Complete backup and sync with website, ShapeUpClub.com

Luckily I was right! We’ve tried and used almost all functionality and it works as promised. You have to pay a monthly fee to get access to all features, though.

I would like to add focus to the areas that really made sense to us:

The daily nutrition need with a weight gain of approximately 500 gr / week was correctly calculated.The database contains a lot of (danish) recognizable products and whats more you yourself can add any product you want – if you known the nutritional values. They’re printed on almost every product in Denmark anyway.

Graphical indications of red and green clearly showed to my son whether or not the daily goal was reached – and he or we could say: ‘It’s necessary to eat some more’.

The (web)login information was shared with the clinical team of doctors etc. so they were able to follow the status when needed.

Every family member could add information from mobile phones and website, so it was easy to add the values of eg. an icecream ‘on the go’

Last but not least the possibility to pdf and print a report of data from a period can be very useful for communicational purposes.

This app was everything I needed at the moment and I would really recommend it to other people in need of keeping track of their daily food intake.

No review of usability etc today! I still need to figure out some generic headlines and a way to grade and maybe compare.