Provided you are with the age of the smartphone, that little device you may be willing to turnaround and go home to get if you forgot it is a great source to help optimize a healthy lifestyle.
When I speak of a healthy lifestyle I am referring to working out on a consistent basis, eating nutrient rich foods a lot more often than processed foods, and focusing on your mental health.
The focus of this post is on how your phone can be used to optimize that healthy lifestyle.
Here, the main focus is on how your phone can help you in terms of what you put in your body and the activities you do in order to get your body moving.
Phone Applications to Aid Your Healthy Lifestyle
There are far too many phone applications to cover them all. Therefore, the approach I am taking is to tell about the ones I use on a regular basis.
More importantly, these applications help me to make informed decisions and to track my progress.
Fooducate. Use this app to be an informed consumer of food. Scan the barcode, or type it in, and Fooducate will return a letter grade for the product. A summary is provided for each product. What shows for the summary varies by product. The key is to pay attention to processing, sugar, fat, and sodium levels. Use the alternatives feature to find options with better grades, if necessary. To learn more about foods, pay close attention to the newsletters. They are quite informative. Lastly, if necessary, add the product to the database if it is not available.
MyFitnessPal. MyFitnessPal and Fooducate have similar features. I used MyFitnessPal as a calorie tracker. Another great way to use MyFitnessPal is to sync it with an activity tracker (I cover what tracker I use in the next section). Enter your goal weight. When you eat something or are planning a meal, enter each item in the app. Nutritional information is returned for those items. By doing that, you can easily track your calories and amount of carbohydrates, fat, sugar, and sodium you are eating. You can also track the calories going out by syncing to a device much like those in the following section.
Digifit. Sync your Digifit to MyFitnessPal, tracking devices such as Fitbit or Misfit, and a Withings scale. The sync updates the calories burned in MyFitnessPal. After weighing myself on the scale, the information is updated in the Digifit and MyFitnessPal. Therefore, there is no need to add all of that information separately. Bonus!
Find the Phone Application that Works Best for You
As stated earlier – and I am sure you know this already – there is a great deal available to you in terms of tracking devices and calorie trackers.
Do searches for phone applications for your needs. Read the reviews. Watch videos. Try an application. If you do not like it, ditch it.
What is of the greatest importance is that you find what works best for you and that you allow it to optimize your healthy lifestyle.
Start the Discussion: What phone applications do you use to optimize your healthy lifestyle? Share in the post comments, Facebook, or Twitter.