The First Few Weeks
Learning to Pause Before the Plate
ProsoPlate is now live in the App Store. But before making it public, I wanted to use it myself-not as a developer testing features, but as someone genuinely trying to change their relationship with food. A few weeks in, I have my first real insight to share.
The Hardest Part Isn’t the App
The biggest challenge I’ve encountered has nothing to do with the interface, the features, or the technology. It’s much simpler and much harder: remembering to use it.
When hunger strikes or a craving emerges, my default pattern is immediate action. See food, eat food. The space between impulse and action has been compressed over decades of habit. ProsoPlate asks me to insert a pause into that moment-to stop, open the app, check in with my hunger level, note any cravings before I eat.
This pause is the entire point. And it’s precisely what makes it difficult.
Building the Habit
For the first week or so, I kept forgetting. I’d finish half a meal before realizing I hadn’t logged anything. Sometimes I’d remember only during the Evening Review, looking back at a day with gaps where awareness should have been.
But I kept at it. Not perfectly-just persistently.
Around the two-week mark, something shifted. The pause started to feel less like an interruption and more like a natural part of eating. Opening ProsoPlate before a meal became less of a conscious effort and more of an automatic response. The habit was forming.
Stop. Slow Down.
What I’m really training isn’t app usage-it’s the capacity to stop and slow down. The app is just a tool that creates structure around that intention. Without it, “eating mindfully” remains a nice idea that dissolves the moment real hunger or a genuine craving appears.
With ProsoPlate, I have a concrete action: open the app, rate my hunger, note what I’m experiencing. This tiny ritual creates enough friction to interrupt autopilot mode. And in that interruption, there’s space for awareness.
What’s Next
The app is still very much in development. I’m collecting data from my own usage-patterns in cravings, gaps between anticipated and actual satisfaction, times when mindful eating clicks and times when it doesn’t.
My focus for upcoming improvements is everything related to the Evening Review. This is where the real learning happens: looking back at the day’s eating experiences, noticing patterns, building that “disenchantment database” that Dr. Brewer describes. The Review is where scattered data points become genuine insight.
For now, though, the lesson is simple: the app only works if you use it. And using it means building a new habit-learning to pause at exactly the moment when pausing feels most unnatural.
Two weeks in, it’s starting to click.
ProsoPlate is available on the App Store. It’s built on the Clarity Method, which draws from Dr. Judson Brewer’s research on habit change and craving.