For the right nutrition

Fitness is a big thing in India now, and there is a sharp rise in the number of people striving to get fit. While some want to get fit to lose weight,  others want to keep lifestyle related diseases at bay. As we all know, fitness is incomplete without the right nutrition and lately, people have realised that following the right type of diet is as important as breaking a sweat at the gym. Also, many health problems are related to nutrition. 

PurpleTeal Technologies India Pvt Ltd’s smartphone app and service called Tweak & Eat, helps you eat right and in the right manner. Tweak & Eat provides real-time nutritionist advice to subscribers, hand-holding them, meal by meal, to eat healthy, lose weight, manage diabetes, etc.

How it started  
Anand Subra, chief knowledge officer, PurpleTeal, says that they were always looking for new ways to improve people’s lives and periodically meet at some location to brainstorm new ideas. They understood the amount of effort required to use some of the health and wellness apps, and felt that these apps appealed more to the power users who used these apps for record-keeping and seeking validation from other users. 

“Most likely, the users already established ‘healthy’ diet and exercise habits and were using fitness apps to further hone their habits. Power users were deeply engaged with the quantitative aspects of the app and revelled in data entry, analysis and feedback. In contrast, ‘average users’ would consider these requirements to be very onerous and were likely to stop using the apps in a short while, so we felt that we should come up with a much easier approach, one that would appeal to the average user, and require far less effort, but also provide useful functionality for power users,” quips Subra.   
 
Subra says that when they consulted their friends and others asking them for an ideal weight-loss app, based on their experience with apps, they found out people don’t just need information and actionable tips/instructions, they also needed hand-holding. “They felt they were left to their own devices at meal times, especially in certain situations like eating at a buffet, eating out with a group, or someone pushing them to eat unhealthy food etc,” he adds. Tweak & Eat also supports integration with devices like Fitbit, iWatch etc and enables personalised reminders to be set for breakfast, lunch, dinner and other mealtimes. 

Their vision is to keep everyone healthy, looking good, and feeling great. “Our mission is to transform health and wellness across the globe. If someone is aware that diet is important for good health, s/he must not find it difficult to remember and follow their diet plans or principles. They need specific, real-time advice and guidance at the ‘point of consumption.’ We make it easier for people to make long-term dietary changes through incremental changes to each meal,” says Subra.  

Why is it different  
Subra points out that most of the fitness and wellness apps that are available tell them what all they ate and how they could do better next time, after they had already eaten their meals. Users would have to remember the instructions and make sure they followed them.  

“However, we felt we could do a whole lot better by hand-holding our users as and when they were actually eating their meals and we would give those actionable instructions and useful information just before they ate and that would make all the difference so that they wouldn’t need to remember their coaching instructions from their last meal, and they wouldn’t need to enter any data,” he adds mentioning that in effect, Tweak & Eat is like having a nutritionist looking over the user’s shoulder as they are eating. 

 He points out that they came up with an approach to allow people to eat what they normally did, but with a ‘tweak’ (meal-modification) under the guidance of qualified nutritionists. “All the user would have to do is to take a picture of their meal and send it to us, and within a minute, our nutritionists would send back a tweak — no data entry, no remembering anything and it couldn’t be made any easier than this!” he exclaims.