The food chart (green / yellow / red)
The patient's own sorting of their foods into eating now, working on, and not yet. Patient-owned, never nutritional, and never a task list.
In ARFID mode, patients can sort the foods in their ledger into three zones: eating now, working on, and not yet. It is the traffic-light hierarchy used in feeding therapy, kept to the version that belongs in an eating disorder app.
Two different tools share the name "green/yellow/red foods". The other one — the traffic-light diet, front-of-pack labels, the colour systems in consumer weight apps — grades the food on nutritional virtue, and it is contraindicated here: in one cafeteria study 47% of students said such labels might exacerbate an existing eating disorder. Pippa's zones say nothing about a food. They say how this person currently relates to it. Nothing nutritional feeds a zone, and nothing ever will.
The three zones
| Zone | Means |
|---|---|
| 🟢 Eating now | Eaten comfortably today, without significant distress. The core of their current diet. |
| 🟡 Working on | Had a taste, or could with some effort. Often foods similar to something already green. |
| 🔴 Not yet | Not able to try right now. A real answer, and a reversible one. |
Foods that have never been sorted sit in not sorted yet. That is not a fourth zone and it is not "red" — the ledger seeds itself from everything they have ever logged, so that is simply where most foods start.
Three rules built into it
The patient sorts, not you. The chart is read-only on your dashboard. This follows the rule the rest of ARFID mode already runs on: the patient picks their own target foods, never you. A clinician-assigned red list is a homework assignment with a colour on it.
Nothing is celebrated. Moving a food to green produces no message, no coin, no badge. If a promotion were celebrated, moving a food back would become a failure — and moving backwards is normal, expected, and clinically uninteresting.
There is no score. No percentage, no green-to-total ratio, no "variety index". A ratio like that is a diet score wearing a different hat, and it would make a patient with many safe foods look like they were failing.
What you see
Inside the New foods card on the patient's overview: the three zones, what is in each, and how many foods are still unsorted.
A short green column is not a finding to act on, and a food moving back to "not yet" is not a relapse. The clinical guidance is explicit in the other direction: never reduce safe foods to make room for new ones. Green is the base that keeps them nourished while anything else is optional.
Turning it on
Nothing to turn on. The chart appears for any patient in ARFID mode, alongside the food ledger it sorts. It is not shown in any other care approach — sorting foods into colours is the cognitive move anorexia and bulimia treatment works to undo, so the chart exists only where it is therapeutic.
Prompting a patient toward a yellow food is a separate, off-by-default setting (exposure prompts), because fear-of-choking and underweight presentations need supervised exposure rather than an app nudge. The chart on its own never nudges.
Related
- ARFID mode — the mode this lives in, and the try counter it sorts.
- Care approach — where ARFID mode is switched on.