Meet Crush: Why an Orangutan Guards Your Sugar Goals

Every evening, an orangutan asks you a question: too many treats today?

People sometimes assume Crush is just a cute face I picked from a lineup of mascot candidates. He isn’t. The orangutan was the starting point, and the reasons run deeper than charm.

The palm oil connection

Look at the ingredient list of the treats we’re all trying to eat less of — cookies, chocolate spreads, ice cream, packaged pastries, instant snacks. Palm oil appears again and again. It’s cheap, versatile, and in roughly half the packaged products on a supermarket shelf.

Growing that palm oil has a cost. Plantations have replaced large stretches of rainforest in Borneo and Sumatra — the only places on Earth where orangutans live in the wild. Deforestation for palm oil production is one of the pressures pushing these apes toward extinction.

I’m not claiming your cookie habit single-handedly decides the fate of a species. That would be dishonest, and this app is built on honesty. But the connection is real: less demand for heavily processed treats means, at the margin, less demand for the cheap oil they’re made with. When you skip the packaged snack, the beneficiary isn’t only you.

So every clean day in No Treat Today earns you an ape. Your collection grows as your treat count shrinks. The metaphor isn’t decoration — it’s the actual causal chain, drawn in cartoon form.

The monkey mind

There’s a second reason, older than any supply chain.

Meditation traditions talk about the “monkey mind” — attention that swings from branch to branch, grabbing whatever glitters. Cravings are the monkey mind at its loudest: the sudden, urgent, now voice at 9pm that has you standing in the kitchen before you’ve decided anything.

The way through isn’t to fight the monkey. It’s to notice it. That’s the entire design of the app: one calm question each evening, answered honestly. Not a food diary, not a calorie ledger — a moment of noticing. Crush is the monkey mind, tamed and friendly, asking you to check in instead of act out.

Why the apes stay

One more thing about Crush’s character: he doesn’t punish. Have a bad day and no ape is confiscated, no counter resets to zero. Your collected apes stay with you, and the next one is always just a few clean days away — clean days that don’t even have to be consecutive.

That’s deliberate. Real orangutans are patient animals, and habit change needs patience more than punishment. I’ve written more about that choice in why No Treat Today never resets your streak.

There are five kinds of apes to collect as your progress grows, plus special ones that appear on holidays and during in-app events. Each one is a small record of a day that went the way you wanted — and a small nod to the animals who’d rather we all bought fewer of those shiny packaged things anyway.

Crush is waiting to meet you. Download No Treat Today and start your collection.