Healthy Apps

I have two new favorite toys on my smart phone. They are fun and informative so I want to share.

1) My Fitness Pal

This app is a great tool to journal and track your diet and exercise. It can help you set your calorie goals and will take into account calories burned through the activities you enter. There are countless exercises and food pre-loaded into the app. You can also add your own or just enter a calorie amount. A great bonus is that it tracks several nutrients and will display daily and weekly summaries. It helped me to realize that my iron intake is about half of what it should be. I thought all of those green, leafy vegetables were enough, but now I know that I need to make more of an effort.

I am having the most fun with the bar code scanner that will automatically load all of the information of the foods you scan. You just adjust the number of servings and you are done! The only thing close to frustrating is that when I am making juice, it does not have the juice of a leaf, just the whole plant. There are specific juice recipes pre-loaded, so I did use one that seemed close to what I made for one meal’s “add”.

Keeping a journal can help you be more aware of what you are doing. this app makes it closer to fun to track exercise and diet.

2) Sleep Time by Azumio

This app did cost $0.99, but was interesting enough that I decided to purchase it. I have always wondered about my sleep patterns and if they were contributing to my general fatigue. The app is said to track your sleep cycles and graphs the cycles for you. It also has an alarm function that wakes you when you reach a lighter level of sleep – up to thirty minutes before your set time.

While I am sure it is not as accurate as the medically supervised sleep lab studies (it showed an area of deep sleep when I was awake), it is certainly interesting to check out how much movement it detects during the night. You do need to make sure your phone has a good charge before you go to bed. The app stays on all night as it rests, display down, on the bed next to you.

“Sleep Time by Azumio is an alarm clock that monitors and analyzes your sleep cycles to wake you up in the lightest sleep phase, allowing you to wake feeling rested and relaxed. Utilizing the iPhones accelerometer, Sleep Time by Azumio, senses your subtle movements throughout the night and graphs your sleep cycles.”