Wouldn’t it be nice to have your own fitness trainer, dietician, or health coach who could steer you in the right direction for better health and wellness? The good news for 2013 is these wellness services are easily accessible to more and more of us via mobile devices. With the surge in smartphone and tablet use, a burgeoning market of inexpensive mobile applications has emerged, including a growing number that fall within the health and wellness category. They aim to empower users to change their behaviors and to help them manage their own health conditions.
Even the Surgeon General’s office sees the promise that technology brings to improving our personal health and wellbeing. Last year the office jumped into the game with the surgeon general’s Healthy App Challenge, which garnered over 80 apps in three categories. More important, the competition highlighted the ability for innovative new technologies to provide health information tailored to the needs of users and to empower the public to regularly engage in and enjoy health-promoting behaviors.
With these new tools, healthy living is at your fingertips 24/7. While new and improved apps are introduced daily, here are a few, some award-winning that may just transform your life. All of the suggestions are free and available on Android and iOS. Take any one of them for a test drive and then see which ones become your favorites in 2013.
Physical Fitness and Activity
Lose It!, the first-place winner in the physical fitness category of the Surgeon General’s app challenge, combines a medically sound approach to weight loss, mobile technology, social networking, and game dynamics to create an engaging way for people to become healthier. Lose It! helps users make healthy choices by setting a calorie budget, by permitting users to track their fitness and activity level, and by providing them information about their nutrition. You can have reports emailed daily or weekly, share your progress on Facebook or Twitter, or download your data for saving.
The MapMyFitness app also incorporates fitness and nutrition education. It lets you use the built-in GPS of your smartphone to track your fitness activities. You can establish a training log, record your activity, keep track of calories consumed, and share your information with friends. The “Nutrition Center” contains tools to track your caloric and nutritional intake. The popular Endomondo app runs similarly but without nutrition information.
Fitness Buddy is a comprehensive fitness app that allows you to track your progress over time using its collection of more than 1700 exercises. The app is organized into several categories – by muscle, general body area, or equipment. It also offers videos and customizable workouts that you may tailor to your specific fitness goals.
If you’re just starting a fitness routine, try the Pedometer FREE app. Since most of us carry our smartphones with us at all times, why not add a belt clip and use the built-in GPS to transform your mobile phone into a pedometer? You can compare yourself with the goal to walk 10,000 steps each day.
Healthy Eating and Nutrition
Making healthy food choices that are tied to your specific needs is easier when you use one of the many apps on the market. Tied first-place winners in the surgeon general’s challenge healthy eating/nutrition category were GoodGuide and Fooducate. The GoodGuide app makes it easy to get the information you need about food, personal care, and household products to help you make healthy (and green) choices. You can use the bar code scanner to get this information while you shop and select products based on your preferences. Fooducate is also designed for use when shopping. You can scan the product bar code for a quick read on a food’s health value, represented by a letter grade from A to D, plus additional information such as nutrients and additives. The app handily suggests healthier alternatives and it can compare two products side-by-side.
Eating well is meaningless if food is not properly handled or cooked for safe eating. All your food safety questions are answered using the Ask Karen app from the USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service. With this handy app you can get answers to your food safety questions while at the grocery store, farmers’ market, in your kitchen, or on a picnic. Additional features allow you to chat live with a food safety expert through your device on weekdays or speak to someone directly through the USDA Meat and Poultry Hotline number.
General Health and Wellbeing
Good health is not just about healthy eating and being active. The Healthy Habits app empowers users to make behavior changes. This health and happiness app won first place in the integrated health category of the Surgeon General’s challenge. It allows you to select from a list of pre-loaded healthy habits or gives you the ability to create your own unique healthy habit to incorporate into your daily routine. With a calendar to track your progress and an option to receive daily encouragements, Healthy Habits makes it easier than ever to add a healthy habit to your life. You can also share your habit-forming progress with friends via a Facebook or Twitter post.
Marilyn Sullivan is a community educator and consultant with experience teaching health and wellness topics in workplaces and community settings. She is passionate about helping people achieve their potential through health and wellbeing opportunities. She can be reached through her company LivingSmart Today at 867-8194.
