Resolutions of a healthier lifestyle are common at the beginning of the New Year. People want to exchange their bad habits for better ones and overall try to be in good health. It’s definitely not easy to keep on track, but there is help. Here are three apps that can help you achieve your goals this year.
Available for free on iPhone, Android and Windows Phone
My Fitness Pal is a great app to help you log your calories and exercise throughout your day. After logging in, you start with a “diary” that will keep track of the food you eat and the exercise that you do. It will then calculate the difference between your calorie intake and the calories you burn during exercise and give you a running total of the calories you have left for the day.
Apart from easy calorie counting, this app will also break down your nutrition by showing you a graph, keeping track of your daily progress and will also let you connect to other electronic health devices such as the Fitbit or iHealth products. You can even connect with friends and send motivating messages to each other.
Available for free on iPhone and Android
Have you ever wondered if the food you are eating is actually good for you or how it compares to other brands? Fooducate is an app that will help you know more about the food that you buy. With a scan of the barcode, this app will give you better insight about a food item’s nutrition facts. Fooducate’s rating of the item provides you with better and healthier alternatives when purchasing at the store.
If an item isn’t in Fooducate’s database, just snap a picture of the nutrition facts and the item itself, and the app will send a message to the Fooducate team to analyze the food item. In a short amount of time, you will get an e-mail back saying the item is now in the system ready to browse. This app also includes its own health tracker as well as the ability to make a shopping list.
Available for $0.99 on iPhone
Sleep is just as essential to health as eating correctly. Sleep cycle is more than just another alarm clock app. This app helps keep track of your sleep cycles and lets you see the quality of your sleep. You’ll be able to see how your sleep compares throughout the week.
Just make sure your phone is plugged in, open the app and set it on the corner of your bed. As you sleep the app will detect your movements on the bed and determine your sleep quality. One of the best features is the alarm. Regular alarms can wake you up when you are in deep sleep and make you feel groggy in the morning. This app will detect when you are at your lightest phase of sleep and within a 30 minute window of your alarm time, it will try to wake you up slowly.
