More than a Coder - Henry Yu

In today’s world, there are many different mental illnesses. Did you know that eating disorders are commonly associated with other mental illnesses such as anxiety, depression, borderline personality disorder, and more? It is not uncommon for someone to experience an eating disorder on top of another mental illness, making recovery even harder. It is said that eating disorders are the most lethal of mental illnesses. Statistics show that every 62 minutes, at least one person dies as a direct result of an eating disorder. To help people recover from this mental illness, our very own Henry Yu and his girlfriend, Joey Liang, created an application called Brighter Bite.

Henry Yu graduated from Duke University in December 2019 and began his Consulting career with Macedon shortly after in March 2020. For the last six months, Henry and Joey, a software engineer, spent time creating their app, Brighter Bite. They officially launched on June 6th, 2020. The story behind this app comes from Joey’s personal experience with overcoming an eating disorder. She faced many pain points throughout her recovery process, such as unrealistic methods for tracking her food and insufficient access to resource materials when needed. This app has become her way of helping others navigate through the recovery process and stick with it.

The application is free to download on any smartphone and has a variety of tools to help users. When you open the app, it prompts you to select your goals from a preexisting list: understand it, learn if I have one, recover from one, or improve well-being. After selecting your goals, it prompts you to set a daily reminder time for check-ins. Then you can sign up with your email! Once you are in the application, you have a few different feature options. You can create a food diary that links to your mood diary, which is a standard tool used to overcome an eating disorder. With these diaries, you can download the logs into PDFs so you can analyze them for patterns or triggers in your diet or share them with your treatment team. In addition to the diaries, there is a resource tab that gets you connected with a tremendous amount of information that can be saved directly to your profile.

Brighter Bite also provides you with bite-sized therapy that is available to you 24/7. It allows you to utilize some therapy techniques such as Acceptable and Commitment Therapy (ACT), Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). The application also gives you positive daily quotes to assist in your process. With this app, you can get rid of outdated and inconvenient coping methods such as numerous paper worksheets and handwritten diaries. With this app, you have all your tools at your fingertips any time you may need them!

To-date the application has over 1,000 users, which is increasing daily. If you have any questions about this application, please reach out to Henry Yu via email at henry.yu@macedontechnologies.com. If you are experiencing mental illness and require immediate assistance, please call 911 or contact the SAMHSA Treatment Referral Helpline at 1-877-SAMHSA7 (1-877-726-4727).