Apps to help you get healthy...

It's been two weeks since the beginning of the new year.. Have you started to work on making small changes to meet your new year's resolution? or have you already lost steam and forgot about your resolutions?
My resolutions this year is centered on getting healthy with making small changes in my lifestyle.
To make my resolutions into reality, I've enlisted a few iPhone apps to help me get there.

With so many apps out there, which one to choose??? So my search began with trying to find apps to help me track or keep a log of my exercise or the food I ate.

MyFitnessPal

MyFitnessPal has a calorie counter, a barcode scanner to scan your foods, exercise tracker, track progress on your goal and social network to track and motivate each other. Your account can be accessed from your smartphone or from the we at myfitnesspal.com. The information syncs nicely between the two and the app is available free for Apple, Android, Blackberry and Windows phones.

So each day you can search their food database for meals or for certain products you are eating. It will count the calories and see how you're doing towards your goal over time. It's amazing to see that one Double Chocolate Chip Frappuccino from Starbucks makes up all my calories for the day.. INSANE right?? There goes my Starbucks sweet fix..

Then I add in exercise routine for the day and it helps you track how many calories you burned and subtracts from your calorie intake. The trick is to not eat more just because you just burned a few calories from exercise. :-)
Connect with your friends and see how they are doing or help to motivate each other. It's always better to have a exercise buddy to help you through those lazy times.

30/30

30/30 is a great app to help you manage your time. It's a to-do list and timer blended into one app. You setup a list of tasks and a length of time for each of them. When you start the timer, it will tell how much time you have left and when to move on to the next task. I was trying this out to help me take a break from my desk so I put in two tasks to start with. Task 1- Work, 50 mins. Task 2- Break, 10 mins.

So these two tasks repeat all day long to remind me to take a 10 min break from looking at my computer screen through the day. The timer counts down Task 1 and gives an alert as it moves on to Task 2. You can set the tasks to auto repeat or not. So I started to use this also to schedule my exercise to make sure I can get at least 30 mins of exercise twice a week as part of my resolution goals.

Office Fit

This is a great little app that shows you how to do some exercises to help relieve work related pain and stress all in the comfort of your office or cube.
This great for anyone who spends a lot of time on the computer. When you sit all day, your body, brain and eyes can become fatigue. This app can setup reminders for you to stop for a quick exercise break and shows you with pictures how to do the exercises to help you distress and rejuvenate for the rest of the day. So take a mini break from your day and to some stretches to rest your eyes and mind.






Hopefully these apps can be of use to help you get healthier this year.. If you have a favorite app to get you closer to your fitness goal, please share.

~~Words of Encouragement~~
We can rejoice, too, when we run into problems and trials, for we know that they help us develop endurance. And endurance develops strength of character, and character strengthens our confident hope of salvation. And this hope will not lead to disappointment.
Romans 5:4-5 (NLT)