10 iPhone, Android Apps To Keep You Healthy
Wellness is about more than eating salad and hitting the gym once a month. These 10 iPhone and Android apps will keep your health on track.
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Remember that time you made a New Year's resolution to be healthier in 2015?
Maybe you don't. Maybe you didn't make a resolution at all (guilty). Or maybe you started this year with a week of kale salad and spinach smoothies before abandoning your regime after a stroll past your local pizza place.
Living a healthy life isn't always easy. So many of our jobs require full days of sitting. Hectic schedules don't leave much time to prepare nutritious meals. As a workforce, we're stressed. We don't sleep well. We spend too much time on our smartphones.
[Smartphone apps you can really talk to.]
Mobile devices may be known to worsen eyesight and cause stress to the neck and back, but they might also hold the keys to a healthier future. You just need to stop texting, log out of Facebook, and make your way to the app store.
There are countless smartphone apps on the market that target every facet of a healthy lifestyle. If you can't find the motivation to hit the gym, there's an app that will charge you per workout skipped. If you can't decide which brand of cereal is healthiest, there's an app that will narrow down your choices.
Of course, wellness goes beyond physical exercise and wise food choices. Mental health is just as important, and there are mobile apps that can connect you to a therapist or help you calm down at the end of a long day.
Can you live a healthy life without the help of mobile apps? Sure. But why not leverage tools that are so readily available and often free of charge? We dug through a bunch of health and wellness apps for iPhone and Android users and picked the ones we think mostly likely to influence a healthier lifestyle. If we missed any good ones, feel free to share them.
If you skip a workout, you're going to pay -- in more ways than one. Pact, formerly known as GymPact, lets you earn money by staying active at the expense of those who don't. Each week, the app lets you pledge a certain amount of money towards a health goal related to exercise or healthy eating. It records and verifies your workouts via gym check-ins, GPS, an accelerometer, and a step tracker. Nutrition goals (e.g. seven servings of veggies per day) are verified when you submit a photo to the app. If you miss your goal, you lose your money. It's an ideal system for people motivated by monetary incentives.
So how does the app help you earn cash? According to its Web site, rewards are based on the number of days you commit to, and complete, a Pact. If you meet your goals, you earn a reward. Generally, rewards can amount to $.30 to $5 per week -- not bad for a free app.
People who don't run generally hate running. This app was created to help them hate it less. Couch to 5K provides new runners with an nine-week training plan designed to prepare them for a 5K (3.1-mile) race. The plan is flexible, letting you alternate between walking and running before building up to more intense workouts. Training doesn't take much time and allows for rest days between workouts. Sessions last about 20-30 minutes and only need to be completed three times per week.
To help with motivation, you can pick a virtual coach, log and share your workouts, track progress, and use the in-app music player.
Five minutes of exercise is better than no exercise at all. That's the premise behind Sworkit, which has a video library of 160 exercises demonstrated by personal trainers. You can build your own workouts based on the body part(s) you want to exercise, and select a length of time that works best for your schedule. Now there's no excuse to skip a workout because of time constraints related to work, travel, or childcare.
There is a free lite version. The $3.99 Pro version provides access to more workouts, lets you build and save custom workouts, adjust interval lengths, and save and view your workout history.
We all know that exercise is better with music. Spring synchronizes your movement to a specific beat, a trick that has been proven to boost athletic performance. Each playlist contains a collection of songs that all have a similar number of beats per minute (BPM). You can also use the app to design your own interval programs with corresponding songs, track and save your runs, and see how far you've gone.
If you're meticulous about tracking health and fitness data, Argus is the app for you. It's an all-in-one platform that records steps taken, calories consumed, GPS maps of miles run/cycled/driven, water/coffee/tea intake, and your sleep cycle. You can use it to set daily goals for any of these metrics and see health trends over time in colored charts created using the data stored in Argus. The app also gives you the option to create a food diary of your meals. If that sounds like an overwhelming amount of data, no worries. Argus also helps you make sense of all that information so you know where your health habits stand.
Nobody ever goes on WebMD and logs off feeling better about their symptoms. iTriage, which was built by two ER physicians, aims to better inform at-home diagnoses without requiring a trip to the doctor. If you're hurt or feeling under the weather, iTriage will ask a series of questions to try and determine what, exactly, is wrong and how you should address it. If necessary, the app also provides information on medications, diseases, and locations that provide medical care.
Health-conscious food shopping sounds easy -- until you're in the supermarket and completely overwhelmed with options. Does this have too much sugar? How low is low cholesterol? ShopWell analyzes nutrition labels according to your dietary needs and preferences. After downloading the app, you create a personal profile with your age, gender, health goals, dietary staples, and foods you want to avoid. When you're at the store, you'll be able to scan bar codes and learn the "score" of each item. The closer a score is to 100, the more likely you should toss the item in your cart.
Most restaurant meals are nutritional bombs. Occasionally this doesn't matter, but oftentimes it's better to be aware of healthier meals on the menu. (I maintain that calories aren't real on birthdays.) HealthyOut helps you select better options and suggests good-for-you modifications. You can use the app to browse local restaurants and see which have meals that adhere to dietary restrictions or have a specific range of calories. If you're sick of traditional healthy fare, you may opt for the app's most popular filter: "Not a salad."
Mental exercise is just as important as physical workouts. Lumosity is a collection of fun games inspired by commonplace activities normally used among neuroscience researchers. The games are intended to boost mental skills like attention, memory, and problem-solving. Just three 15-minute sessions per week can keep your brain sharp.
Anxiety is a common condition that can wreak havoc on an otherwise healthy lifestyle. MindShift is designed to help people struggling with anxiety to change the way they view their condition. It can be used by adults and teens to relax and to pinpoint the right steps to take in order deal with everyday anxiety. The tools within the app can help alleviate stress related to social anxiety, performance anxiety, worry, panic, or conflict.
Anxiety is a common condition that can wreak havoc on an otherwise healthy lifestyle. MindShift is designed to help people struggling with anxiety to change the way they view their condition. It can be used by adults and teens to relax and to pinpoint the right steps to take in order deal with everyday anxiety. The tools within the app can help alleviate stress related to social anxiety, performance anxiety, worry, panic, or conflict.
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