There’s an app for everything!

     These days it seems like everybody has a smartphone. Advertisements are everywhere talking about the great games, movies, music, and web access that smartphones offer. But how can we use this new technology to improve our health and fitness?


     This is the question that I asked myself as I began to explore the many different fitness and health apps on the market. Here are a few of the apps that I found most useful. The best part? All of these apps are completely free!

Fooducate:

Fooducate will give your food a
grade and offers suggestions for
 more healthy choices.  

Before we can start shaving the pounds off through exercise, it is first important to take control of what we eat. That is exactly what Fooducate promises to do. With this app you can use the camera on your phone to easily scan the barcode of that box of sugary cereal you were just about to buy. Fooducate will look up the cereal in its database and give it a grade (in this case a C) based on its nutritional value. It will also provide you with other types of cereal, with better grades, that you could buy instead.

Lose It!

LoseIt! allows you to input
your food and exercise and
keep track of your calorie budget.  

Lose it! offers an easy way to track your progress towards that ideal beach body. This app lets you set up your own personalized program by inputting your starting weight, goal weight, gender, age, and height. From there the app will ask you how much weight you are looking to lose each week. Using this information, the app will give you a daily calorie budget. Each day you can then add the food you eat and any exercise you do. Whenever you add new food or exercise the app will let you know how many more calories you can eat and offers a handy little meter that shows how close you are getting to your calorie budget.

iMapMyFitness

iMapMyFitness uses
your GPS to keep
 track of your favorite
 exercise routes. 

It’s almost spring and that means we can start taking advantage of the best gym equipment we have: nature! iMapMyFitness allows you to log your walk, bike ride, run, or hike using the GPS in your phone. You can save your favorite routes in the app and share them with your friends. The app will also tell you how far along you are on your route or how much longer you have until you need to be back at the office for those of you who like to get a little exercise in during lunch.

     These are just a few of the many apps that can help you get in shape. There are many more apps available – from apps that create a workout program based on the type of equipment you have, to apps that will adjust the tempo of your music to match the intensity level of your workout. I encourage you to pull up your smartphone’s appstore and take a look for yourself in the fitness or health categories.

By Shawn McNally