A personalised AI-powered nutrition application Fitza calls itself India’s first-ever intelligent virtual nutrition coach. This app enables people with personalised guidance to lead healthier lives. It offers personalised and sustainable nutrition plans based on age-old practices, user likes and dislikes, grandma recipes and natural homemade remedies with proven outcomes and most importantly addressing immunity building. It adapts to your body type, i.e. body prakriti and doshas, and intelligently changes your meal plan to drive meaningful results. Fitza CEO Nikhil Behl expressed how the pandemic has accelerated the adoption of everything digital including fitness and nutrition apps and more. Excerpts:
Q. How can nutrition-related apps help people consistently make better food choices?
There is evidence to prove that app-based interventions can be effective for improving dietary intake, nutritional knowledge and self-efficacy. Research has suggested that users’ adoption of and use of the health/nutrition apps is associated with significant behavioural modifications towards a healthier diet and lifestyle and this increasing intrinsic motivation helps them become more engaged, persistent, and stable in their behaviour, which leads to improved health outcomes. The nutrition apps are not about asking the user to improve their food choices but to facilitate the process of being self-compliant, realising their body, mind, and heart’s requirements and raising awareness about conscious living.
Q. How effective has recommending the right nutrition to balance the doshas proven to be?
The results are magnificent. It is a simple understanding that our body is made of five elements: water, fire, air, earth, and ether energies. When one understands their Prakriti (body type) and chooses to balance all the elements with a nutritious diet and intelligent lifestyle practices, the doshas come into alignment organically and life as a whole, and not just the physical being, turns out to be bountiful.
Q. Personalised nutrition technologies are a new paradigm in health and wellness. How does your app cater to this growing trend?
Wellness and healthy lifestyles have become mainstream. Interest in fitness apps and revenue from them grow as fast as the number of people striving to be fit. Diet and nutrition apps fall under this category but have their distinct feature and functionality requirement.
According to a Statista survey, a significant percentage of respondents aged 18 and above regularly use nutrition and diet-related apps. Fitza carefully analyses ailment recovery goals, food preferences, pre-existing conditions and allergies to generate detailed and personalised daily diet plans. Evidence-based, personalised meal plans, search options, body Prakriti analysis, pocket guides dietary analysis, push notifications, reminders, follow up on compliance and plan adherence, and visual charts to display progress are some of the key features that we believe, when delivered digitally, are likely to be an important route for sustainable intervention.
Q. What were the main barriers that you faced before launching this app? What was your vision and how do you plan to achieve it?
Not any such barriers but I like to call it the journey of enlightenment. It has been a wonderful process to learn and deeply understand the user journey, streamlining ailment recovery goals, and the attitude of the app about presenting the nutrition and health care program virtually, integrating 2000 recipes and much more. We believe affordable specialised nutrition care should be available to all who need it. But millions of people lack the access and support they need to successfully manage their chronic conditions. We are here to change that with this app. We have factored in the following to achieve this:
Human First – providing nutrition care and support for the long run, building meaningful connections to support each person’s long conditions.
Access to All – We are making proven outcome-based nutrition care accessible and affordable to everyone.
Clean and Simple – From registration to management, we are breaking down the basics to make care for complex conditions as straightforward and transparent as possible.
Q. Where do you see gaps and opportunities in the health and nutrition sector?
I can only see opportunities from where I stand today. This pandemic has offered us an opportunity that’s inspiring us to value ourselves. I see employers reviving their working style and caring for their employees’ well-being. I see many of the businesses integrating healthcare setup to their present work environment. I see wiser eating, sleeping, and spending choices made by all of us. I see myself healing from the unhealthy patterns while developing the Fitza space. I see our community seeking intelligent care and cure support.
The health and nutrition gaps that we could refer to in the earlier days were the opportunity to create healthy possibilities today and we are here today meeting the lifelong health and fitness goals of our community so I cannot afford to see gaps anymore.
Q. Do you agree that the pandemic has given a push to the fitness & nutrition apps?
The pandemic has accelerated the adoption of everything digital. It’s evident in key trends across business verticals. This has led to technology influencing behavioural change akin to the tail wagging the dog.
The pandemic has gifted an amazing timeline to all the fitness and nutrition apps as well as individual coaches/guides to empower intelligent minds to move beyond the survival mode. Over the last few centuries, there has been a thick line between desires and deservingness when it comes to the human mind; where we could desire our conditions and consequences based on our familiarities but that chain of limiting to desires and abandoning deservingness’ is broken now. We are seeking clarity and taking the journey inward to find our healthy space. Apps like this are the manifestation of such genius minds coming together to emphasise enhancing the process of health, balance, and harmony restoration.
Q. Do you think nutrition is a form of preventative measure of self-care to lead a healthy life?
Self-care is a priority today. The importance of healthy eating and living, as a preventive healthcare measure, can’t be overemphasised. But limiting nutrition to a preventive measure is scratching the surface. Nutrition is a way to explore your infinite potential. “From food are born all creatures, by food they grow, and to food, they return.” (Upanishads). The food we eat determines who we become.
Addressing nutrition and preventive healthcare, for example, everyone can lower their chances of developing diabetes with appropriate nutrition and exercise, and early detection is needed so that blood sugar can be controlled. Similarly, people suffering from heart disease also need to adopt an active lifestyle and a good diet. In the backdrop of the gruelling concern of obesity and diet-related non-communicable diseases such as diabetes, hypertension, and cardiovascular ailment in our country, it becomes imperative for people to be stakeholders in deciding what to eat.