"that poop app" isn't just for hippie Gen-Zers, either. If you're a clinical professional in nutrition, GI health, or psychology, chances are you ask your clients to track their symptoms and habits. And sometimes they do - but oftentimes, they come back with empty sheets or vague descriptions, leaving you to guess what's going on.
Even when they do fill it out, their free-form responses are often colored with self-reporting bias or selective memory. Common reference scales like the Bristol Stool Scale or mood surveys are dimensionally limited in the information they can capture. And tracking with text at the level needed to overcome these barriers often leads to clients burning out, or feeling like they're doing menial work writing logs.
"that poop app" would like to change that. By focusing on a picture-and-caption approach to logging, "that poop app" aims to give you all the information you need to know, not what your client thought you needed to know, saving you countless hours of random debugging. Plus, the free-association-style caption helps your clients self-reflect and feel engaged in the process, just as much as you are.
Here's more on what it's like to log foods, poops, and feelings in 24-bit color.
This app is designed for three distinct clinical disciplines:
| Dietitians and nutrition professionals | Gastroenterologists and GI specialists | Psychotherapists | |
|---|---|---|---|
| What they do | Help clients optimize nourishment, manage chronic symptoms, and rebuild healthy relationships with food, whether through clinical Medical Nutrition Therapy (MNT) and behavioral counseling, or a more lifestyle-based approach. | Diagnose, medically manage, and monitor pathological and functional disorders of the digestive tract. | Use somatic, behavioral, and cognitive talk therapies to treat mood disorders and mental health conditions - in and out of the gut. |
| Examples of client goals |
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See a session-in-the-life of TPA for:
Nutritional and gastrointestinal professionals →
Psychological professionals →
The common link between these disciplines is that the mind, gut, and lifestyle are all interdependent. For nutritionists, sticking to a healthy diet often involves conscious lifestyle change, as well as retraining the body's subconscious hunger and satiety cues. For GI specialists, many gastrointestinal conditions are influenced by the mind's control (in particular, the autonomic nervous system (dys)regulating gut motility) and exacerbated by a stressful lifestyle. And for psychotherapists, clients' dietary habits often reflect their mental state and lifestyle, and can sometimes masquerade as purely cognitive or emotional disorders. Thus, having an accurate, unified record of these three domains in one place can make diagnosis and treatment significantly easier.
At first, asking your clients to photograph their meals and poop can feel taboo. However, photos solve three fundamental flaws of traditional text-based logs:
When a client leaves out a core detail about their habits or triggers (e.g. eating "normal" portions that are twice the normal serving size), you as the professional are left to fill in the gaps. This can waste months of sessions on treating the wrong causes of a given symptom, while the "real" cause runs rampant. In contrast, pictures capture everything on a client's dinner plate, exactly as they saw it themselves. Why rely only on a client's narrative voice and selective memory to tell you the objective facts about their situation?
Humans are notoriously bad at estimating numerical quantities of food without meticulous weighing, and current LLMs (used in competitor apps) are often even worse. Thus, quantities logged in text (without precise measurement) can convey false precision, and mislead your diagnosis or judgement of your client's diet. In contrast, a picture is honest: it won't give you a number, but if it obviously looks like too much or too little, you'll know.
Imagine discovering your client has nightshades (tomatoes, eggplants, etc.) as a trigger food for their IBS, but they only ever logged flare-ups and fiber intake in text. You can't confirm your diagnosis without relying on their fuzzy recall, or running several weeks of further tests. With pictures, the information is all there for you to recover - even if you change your tracked variable mid-way through treatment.
It goes without saying, but your clients are humans too, with thoughts, feelings and whims of their own. When they show up with empty or partially-filled logs, it's not just about forgetting. It's about feeling like a mechanical cog in a treatment system, rather than someone able to make a change in their own health.
Many logging apps are cognitively hard to use in ways clinicians don't expect. A "simple" dietary database app leads to "why doesn't this database have the food I'm eating?" → "do I need to grab the scale/measuring cup?" → "what other ingredients do I have again I didn't count?" → "ugh I'll just skip it today." In contrast, "that poop app" is just "take a picture" → "write the first thing on your mind" → done (after an optional tag or two). It's quick, sure, but it's also reflexive: it doesn't force you to think hard when you don't have the energy. This leaves more mental room for someone to appreciate their food/poop as it is, and to be somatically mindful.
The caption in each entry isn't just a "catch-all box of words", even if it allows you to write anything. It's also a place to perform free association reflection. Writing down the first unfiltered thing that comes to mind - even if it's "I hate how this tastes" - helps clients feel more emotionally connected to the process, practice cognitive techniques like radical acceptance, and reflect honestly without judgement or shame. Plus, it also allows the professional to communicate and react much quicker to the client's emotional context.
When clients feel they can be honest with themselves and with you, something magical happens. They start realizing the cause and effect between their actions and feelings, they start wanting to improve their health on their own, and trust you to understand them even when treatment gets hard. Psychology calls it self-determination theory, but to your client, it's "the thing that keeps me logging, growing, and invested in the process, because it's for me." (Even if it takes a little poop talk between humans to get there.)
Critically, these aspects of "that poop app" still apply even if it's used in a psychotherapeutic context! (E.g. if it's used as a reflective or metacognitive device rather than a nutrition or symptom tracker.) So, if you're a therapist, don't be afraid to give the app a try for your clients. They might surprise you with the things they write!
Of course, all this is meaningless without a concrete way to view your clients' logs.
Need an extra layer of functionality on "that poop app"? We've got you covered with our white-labeling and support options!
Finally, as a health and lifestyle startup doing business in a taboo subject, we understand the importance of privacy, compliance, and reducing liability. "that poop app" was built with these regulatory hurdles in mind, and goes above and beyond the bare minimum standards by minimizing possible data exposure to begin with.
These guarantees ensure we can remain almost trivially HIPAA and GDPR compliant, as long as your data upload portal is secure. See here for more details →
So, that's "that poop app". Specifically, how it helps your clients log fully and unbiasedly, how it helps build their self-reflection and agency, and how it can be personalized to your use case. But the real motivation of "that poop app" in a clinical context is simpler. It's about taking a mundane and slightly opaque act of logging, and turning it into something honest, easy-to-read in a session, and motivating for your clients. So, if they want to eat good food, poop good poop, and see how it makes them feel... why don't you give it a try with them?
See pricing →