Fitness Favorites

I love love love fitness apps, and I have...ahem...quite a few of them. Of course there is a lot of overlap with the various calorie-counter, exercise loggers, and distance determiners, but I find a use for all of them. In conclusion, here is list of my favorite health/fitness apps! And they're all free!

(I have an iPhone, but I'm pretty sure you can get these on anything?)

Weight and Calorie counters:

1. Lose It*
This is my daily go-to app. It's extremely simple: plug in your information, log your exercises, and    type in your daily meals for the day. It tells you roughly how many calories you need to eat daily to lose X lbs in X weeks. Cons: not a wide variety of food selection and limited exercise data. You can enter and create your own, but I'm lazy.

2. Fooducate
This is a really cute and thoroughly informative app that lets you browse from a zillion food products and even lets you scan the nutrition labels from your food! You pick a selected item from any of the categories and Fooducate gives them a "grade" based on nutrition; it gets really excited and !!!! when there's something really nutrient rich in it. It even tells you when there is tricky packaging afoot that leads to overeating. How great is that?
I absolutely absolutely absolutely love this app. It's soooo thorough in its explanations about fiber, vitamins, calcium, etc. Seriously, if you want to really keep track of what you're consuming I definitely recommend this. Cons: Not really any...

Running trackers:

3. FootPath
This is really just a simple GPS that tracks your time and distance of a run. I like it because of its simplicity, but there are better apps for running out there. Such as...

4. Runtastic
This is such a good app! There are so many amazing features to log your  runs throughout the world. (There are some extra features that cost, such as taking pictures during your run and geotagging them online). You can choose different cardio workouts and then track your time, distance, calories, elevation, etc. There's even a compass, a map, and a speed graph. You basically just tap through the first screen to change the view from mph to calories. (It took me longer than I'm willing to admit figuring that out). This one's great if you're serious about logging your miles and seeing progression. I really like it. Cons: difficult to use, it took me a few minutes to figure out all the gizmos and gadgets. So...that may take up some time from your workout.

Miscellaneous

5. Stress Check

This is really cool for those crazies like me out there--and I'm slightly obsessed with it. By placing your finger on the camera lens for a couple of minutes this app measures your current stress levels. The science: "analysis of the HRV requires heart pulse data to be measured continuously for a certain period of time. The more you use Stress Check, the better the app gets to know you and your heart". Anyway, it tracks your stress levels over a minute or two on a graph and lets you save it; you can then compare the graphs over a period of time and look for patterns of when you have the most highs and lows.  I constantly feel somewhat stressed out, so it's nice to see it physically on a screen--I think it helps me realize when I need to sit back and take some long, deep breaths. In conclusion, this app is really neat and addictive for the stressers in the world. I recommend doing it 2-3 times a day at a consistent time. Cons: Well, who knows how accurate it actually is. I like to believe it's fairly accurate.

    *Why aren't some of the more popular health apps on my list? Well, I've looked into a lot of them and I've come to realize I really don't like how they handle calorie counting. I'm actually pretty skeptical of all calorie counting apps. Why? Because they NEVER EVER take into consideration free foods. This is why I don't use MyFitnessPal. I used it for a while, but eventually got fed up with it. Oh, so you're on an allotted 1600 RDA? Too bad, because all of those fruits and vegetables you ate are going to count against you. Uhm....that's not how that works. You should eat basically half of your weight in vegetables every day (though fruit does contain a lot of natural sugar, so those should not be consumed as much). I plugged in a spinach and pure fruit smoothie and it's like "OH man you just ate 300 calories, you can't eat any more for breakfast."

   This is why even Weight Watchers is a better alternative--it tells you to eat as many fruits and vegetables as you want, and they don't count against you.

Also: If you want best results for your calorie-counting activities, I strongly recommend putting in your meals before you eat them. For example, early this morning I added "apple sauce, one egg, yogurt" even before I ate it. That way I felt I was accountable for sticking to it--it's much easier to stick to an already set plan than feel regret for something you ate after you plug it in.