Version 1.5 - Less Friction, More Seeing
I almost over-engineered my own app.
ProsoPlate started with a simple idea: track what food promises your brain, then track what it actually delivers. The Gap between the two does the work. Not willpower. Not discipline. Just honest observation, repeated over time. That’s Dr. Judson Brewer’s reward prediction error research applied to your lunch.
But somewhere between version 1.0 and version 1.4, I kept adding. More questions. More inputs. More data points after every meal. Ten separate things to tap before you could put your phone down and get on with your life. I built a contemplative app that was starting to feel like a tax return.
So version 1.5 is mostly about what I removed.
The Post-Meal Flow Is Shorter Now
Here’s what Brewer’s research at Brown University actually requires for the disenchantment mechanism to work: you need to pay careful attention to the eating experience, and then honestly rate how rewarding it was. That’s it. The Reality score - your single -5 to +5 rating of “How rewarding was that, really?” - is already an integrated assessment. When you sit with that question for a moment, you’re already checking your body, noticing your emotional state, scanning for satisfaction or regret. The number IS the summary.
I had been asking people to do that assessment AND separately rate fullness, AND tag body sensations, AND tag emotional weather, AND write free-text insights. All immediately after eating. That’s not mindfulness - that’s data entry.
Version 1.5 strips the post-meal moment back to what matters: The Reality. One honest number. The body investigation moves to the 15-minute Clarity Check, which is where the science says it belongs anyway - that’s when the initial dopamine rush has faded and you can actually feel what the food did to you.
Fewer taps. Same mechanism. The intervention is the attention, not the form-filling.
What I Didn’t Remove
The pre-meal steps - Hunger check and Pull rating - those stay. I considered cutting them too. They looked like data collection. They’re not.
The Hunger check trains interoceptive accuracy. That’s your ability to accurately read signals from inside your own body. Lisa Feldman Barrett’s research on constructed emotion shows that people with poor interoceptive accuracy are worse at regulating their emotional states - they literally can’t tell the difference between hunger, anxiety, and boredom. Every time you pause before eating and honestly ask “How hungry am I, actually?” you’re training a skill that most adults have let atrophy.
The Pull rating - “How strong is the craving right now?” - creates a moment of cognitive defusion. In ACT terms (Steven Hayes, Russ Harris), you’re stepping back from the craving and observing it rather than being fused with it. You’re not the craving. You’re the person noticing the craving. That two-second shift changes everything downstream.
So the pre-meal checks aren’t friction. They’re the intervention. Removing them would have broken the app’s core mechanism. I’m glad I caught that before shipping.
Multiple Photos Per Meal
Small change, obvious in hindsight. You can now capture more than one photo per meal - and quick-log items (snacks, drinks, that biscuit) get photos too.
Why this matters: the photo isn’t for Instagram. It’s for your evening review. When you sit with your Mindful Awareness Timeline at the end of the day and see the actual plate next to your Promise and Reality scores, something clicks. Visual memory is stronger than numerical memory. You don’t remember what you rated that Tuesday lunch. You remember the plate.
The Mindful Awareness Timeline
This got the most attention in 1.5. The timeline - where your whole day is laid out with cravings, meals, gaps, and patterns - has been redesigned to be more informative and more pleasant to use.
I won’t pretend there’s a dramatic story here. I looked at my own data every evening for months. Some things were hard to read. Some patterns were invisible because the layout didn’t surface them clearly. I fixed the things that bothered me as a daily user. That’s it.
The evening review is where the Clarity Method actually lands. Brewer’s research shows that real-time awareness during eating starts the process, but the consolidation - the moment where your brain actually updates its predictions - happens during reflection. When you see a week of Gap scores trending negative for the same food, you don’t need anyone to tell you what’s happening. You just… see it.
The Redesigned Start Meal and Log Meal Flow
The whole flow from “I’m about to eat” to “I’m done” has been tightened. Fewer screens. Cleaner transitions. The same contemplative micro-practices - Hunger, Pull, Promise, photo, eat, Reality, Gap - but with less friction between them.
I removed dark mode entirely. It didn’t work well with the violet-teal palette and it was doubling my design work for marginal benefit. One clean, light interface. Done.
What Hasn’t Changed
The Clarity Method is the same. Promise before eating. Reality after. The Gap reveals what your brain oversold. Repeated honest observation erodes the false reward predictions over time - not through willpower, but through the same mechanism that Brewer documented in his clinical trials with smokers and emotional eaters.
Still no subscriptions. Still £1.49. Still no accounts, no cloud, no one looking at your data. Everything stays on your device.
Still built by a 52-year-old father in London who needed this tool himself and has lost weight using it.
One Thing I’ve Learned
The hardest part of building a contemplative app is resisting the urge to add more. More features, more data, more insights, more cleverness. The whole philosophical foundation - Satipatthana, Stoicism, ACT - points in the same direction: pay attention to what’s actually here. Not more. Not better. Just clearer.
Version 1.5 is ProsoPlate getting out of its own way.
ProsoPlate is available on the App Store for £1.49. One purchase. No subscriptions. No ads.
prosoche.co · @father_bart