Recovery Record: Eating Disorder Management from the Privacy of a Mobile Phone

Review by Michelle Fee, RD, LD

I was recently introduced to a new iPhone and Android app for eating disorders care called Recovery Record.  According to the founder, Jenna Tregarthen, it was developed “to reinvent the monitoring experience” to provide clients with discretion and positive feedback and to provide treatment professionals with higher quality data.

The app provides a client with different tools including a food diary, thoughts diary, and meal alarm reminders.  It gives users the opportunity to log their hunger/fullness levels and emotions around meals, any eating disorder behaviors used (restricting, bingeing, purging, over-exercise, etc.), and the time and place of meals.

Any time a user enters data into his/her log, the app provides affirmations and pictures to encourage the user.  For the clients I have using the app, this has been one of the most well received aspects.   Positive, real-time feedback has helped clients stay engaged in the difficult, not-so-perfect recovery process.

Recovery Record allows treatment providers to set up accounts to receive client data.  When an account is set up, the professional receives a four-digit code.  Clients can enter this code into their account, and their logs then stream into the provider’s website account.   I am now able to pull up my clients’ food records during session without excuses from clients that they lost them, or did not want to write the food down.

The application is relatively new and still has some kinks to work out, such as improving the presentation of client data and simplifying the printing of data from the provider website.  Recovery Record provides the opportunity for clients and professionals to submit feedback so that they can modify the program to best fit users’ needs.  It is currently free to clients and professionals, but will have a fee in the future (amount unknown).

I highly recommend Recovery Record as a tool to help clients in support of their journey to health and wellness.  It helps clients to more consistently and easily track their behaviors and progress, it provides clients great inspirational support along the way, and it gives treatment providers valuable information.