The Rise dietitian coaching app now integrates with your Fitbit

The Rise app tries to help you fix your diet and control your weight by pairing you with a licensed dietitian who becomes, in a sense, your virtual pen pal — and now Fitbit integration means that pen pal knows even more about you.

You report all your meals in the app (mostly by taking pictures of them), and the dietitian provides counseling and offers advice for improvement. You end up feeling accountable to another person for making lasting change, which studies have shown works.

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(My dietitian’s name is Margaret, and I like her very much. I’ll have a full review of the Rise service a little later on.)

But the dietitian wants to know more about you than just your eating habits. Your exercise and sleep habits also have a huge influence on your ability to manage your weight.

That’s why the good people at Rise have made their app work with Fitbit’s app and line of wearables.

The Fitbit connection enables your dietitian to see your steps and sleep hours on the same dashboard as your food information. “The more complete the picture that we can provide [to the dietitian], the easier the experience is going to be,” Rise CEO Suneel Gupta told VentureBeat.

And this opens up whole new areas of coaching.

For example, let’s say you wake up at 6 a.m., take a brisk walk at 11 a.m., and then eat a large meal at 2 p.m. Your dietitian would be able to see all this, and might advise you to eat something small for breakfast before your walk, then eat lunch sooner to avoid overeating later.

“Having a sense of how your activity level ebbs and flows during the day can help you understand how you should be eating throughout the day,” Gupta says.

The Rise app also integrates with Apple’s HealthKit platform, so users can combine their food information with data collected by other health apps and devices they use.

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The Rise app is free, and the service costs $48 per month or $120 for three months.