I'm on Oviva and find it annoying, but I would have been annoyed at almost any generic app. I try to comply with it, as I believe it's worth the effort.
Pros: tutorials are good at laying out enough detailed info for you to make your own decisions. It doesn't do that thing of "trickle truthing" that a lot of health articles do, on the assumption that you can handle only part of the information required to complete a task but will become overwhelmed if they tell you all of it.
Cons: generic, so begins by assuming that you're a) totally ignorant and b) want to lose weight (though they give info for those wishing to maintain or gain as well).
- For those wanting to lose weight, suggests (among other approaches) a 1200-1500 calorie diet. 1200 calories is a theoretical minimum for a hypothetical woman to get enough nutrients in a day, but it's caught on as the magic number for weight loss even though it's close to or below a lot of people's BMR (mine included). Fortunately they don't emphasize it.
The tutorials did give me the concrete bit of info I needed: which carbs to count (according to effect on blood sugar), which not to count, and how much. The rest of it amounted to statements of the bleedin' obvious, but that's what you get when you use an app meant for the general population.
Certain things about it are not perfect: you are required to take a picture of your food and tag it with categories. There are tags for red meat, poultry and fish but there is no tag for white meat. You have to fill in a questionnaire at the start and the questionnaire breaks some fundamentals of questionnaire design. It also, on the question about your goals for the program, does not include "reducing blood sugar" as one of the possible answers, even though that was my sole purpose.
A coach will check in regularly and, of course, I was predisposed to be annoyed by the whole experience and so I am annoyed, which is not his fault.
Like many fitness apps and coaching systems, the coach uses praise as reinforcement to the point of absurdity. So if I log that I stretched for half an hour, I might get a great big "well done for keeping up with your stretching, good job" as if that praise were absolutely critical to my motivation. The Couch To 5K app is like this too - butters you up for minutes at a time before the session, as if you were about to lead a team of disadvantaged sled dogs on a rescue mission to defuse a nuclear bomb in Antarctica instead of what you are doing, which is go out for a gentle half-hour jog. (And then it notifies you that you ran for a total of 2 minutes last week. If I were as dependent on praise as the Couch To 5K App thinks I am, underestimating my running time by a factor of 20 would surely cause me complete emotional collapse.)
Another thing that got me heavy praise from the coach was when I ate a meal of plant-based protein. He offered me tips on getting protein into meatless meals. Which is fine, of course, but are meatless meals important in terms of lowering blood sugar? As opposed to other goals such as general health, sustainability, etc? I understood that red meat was the problematic meat for blood sugar, but that poultry and white meat (which, as I mentioned, doesn't have a tag) were OK. If so, then the coach's feedback isn't necessarily focussed on the goal that I have in using the app, which is to reduce blood sugar. I get why a nutritionist would argue for a certain approach but this is a diabetes prevention app and what I want is to prevent diabetes, not make generic improvements to my diet that might be beneficial overall but won't lead directly to my desired outcome, which is lower blood sugar.
Finally, after logging every bite and step in my usual system that I've been keeping up for years, I then re-log it into Oviva with scrupulous honesty, and the day after I ate too many chips the coach made a scheduled check-in and asked me how I felt about my progress in cutting out junk food, with a link to the entry about chips. How do I *feel* about my progress? We both know what he *really* meant was that I ate too many chips, but wasn't willing to be so prescriptive as to say so directly. I find this interaction style frustrating. I knew I ate too many chips, it's perfectly clear from the data that I did so. And how I *felt* about it was pleasingly full of chips, but I didn't think that was the desired answer so I just didn't say anything.
So yeah, Oviva is good in a lot of ways, and if you choose it it's worth trying to comply with it. The important thing is to focus on the information relevant to you and ignore the rest.
