Wellness in the world of apps!
While there are many great healthy apps to download, here is a highlighted list of wellness apps that could help 2013 be your best year ever!
Contents:
- Fitness and exercise
- Nutrition and weight loss
- Relaxation, meditation and sleep
- Medical
- Quit smoking
- Teasing your brain
- Other
Fitness and exercise
Endomondo– FREEapp for iPhone Android
Are you into running, cycling, walking, skiing, kayaking, roller skating - or other sports involving movement across a distance? Endomondo makes your experience even more exciting! Endomondo is an app where you automatically track all your sports data and monitor your performance over time. You can meet like-minded friends, get inspired by them, challenge them and follow their activities live! So whether you are into just following your personal achievements or whether you wish to place yourself in a larger network of sports partners that challenge and support each other's efforts, Endomondo is your app!
You will get the most out of Endomondo.com with a GPS mobile phone or a Garmin GPS watch. Free of charge, you can download the software to most common GPS phones directly from the website. On our Download page, you can see a list of the phones we support. New ones are added all the time.
Sign up on Endomondo’s website to start tracking today!
RunKeeper – FREE app for iPhone and Android
The RunKeeper mobile running app also lets you track your workout performance over time, while connecting with your friends to make your workouts social. Join the more than 12 million people who are using RunKeeper to turn their phone into a personal trainer in their pocket. Track your running, walking, cycling, hiking, and biking.Itsfeatures include GPS activity tracking, manual activity tracking, audio interval cues, huge social community, data syncs with RunKeeper.com and iPod integration.
iFitness- $1.99 iPhone & Android
According to iFitness: “Fitness is more fun with friends!”
At its simplest, the iFitness app is a database of more than 300 exercises. The exercises are listed in alphabetical order, organized by the part of the body they target - abs, arms, backs, chest, etc. Each exercise includes multi-step pictures, and the more complicated moves (about 120 in all) include a video demonstrating the steps.
The appincludes a fitness log so you can record your exercises, repetitions and weights used.
iFitnessalso includes common cardio exercises you can add to your log. Once you’ve logged enough workouts, you can view all the data on a graph or export it via email.
Fitness Buddy – $.99 iPhone & Android
Containing more than 1,700 exercises, this app is organized into several categories: muscle group, general body area and equipment. Fitness Buddy offers approximately 1,000 videos and 75 customizable workouts that you can tailor to help meet your specific fitness goals. It even allows you to track your progress over time so you can see just how much closer you are to reaching your reaching your goals!
Nutrition and weight loss
Fooducate–FREE app for iPhone & Android
Diet without a diet: Scan a product’s barcode and see what's inside.
Fooducate automatically grades foods and beverages on a scale from A to D. There are 10 distinct grades: A, B+, B, B-, C+, C, C-, D+, and D. This app explains what’s really in a product and offers alternatives with better grades. A recent scanning of popular diet soda, for example, yielded warnings about the artificial sweeteners and industrial caramel coloring. Fooducate challenges you to select grocery items with a B+ or better grade.
This app won thebest of the iPhone Health & Fitness category in the Apple App Store, and 1st prize in the US Surgeon General Healthy App Challenge.
This app’s algorithm is based on information that is publicly on a product’s package: the nutrition facts panel and the ingredient list. The algorithm rewards minimally processed, nutrient dense foods with the highest grades. This means that real foods, with essential nutrients will score better than processed foods that are poor in nutrients and use fortification to appear healthy.
Lose It! –FREE app for iPhone and Android
Counting calories can be an effective way to shed pounds, but keeping track of every last bite is a chore. The Lose It! app is a helpful tool you can use to record your food intake and exercise.
When youcreate an account, you’ll be asked to enter your personal details, including: start weight, goal weight, gender and height. You can also specify how much weight you’d like to lose each week, which will affect your calorie totals. The setup process takes a few seconds, and then the Lose It! app will display your daily calorie budget.
The app is intuitive, and the daily calorie budget helps you quickly make decisions on the food you eat. If weight loss is your New Year’s resolution, the Lose It! app should be one of your first downloads in 2013.
The Allrecipes.com DinnerSpinner – FREE app for iPhone & Android
The DinnerSpinner app is a fun way to discover new recipe ideas. Simply choose a course and main ingredient, shake your iPhone, and the app will display recipes that meet your criteria. With thousands of user-submitted recipes to choose from, you're bound to find something new.
Allrecipes.com is one of the best apps for low-carb dieters, since it has a filter to identify recipes that meet low-carbohydrate standards. The app includes nutritional information for all recipes, including total carbs and dietary fiber so you can calculate your net carb intake. Allrecipes.com also has filters for high-fiber, low-fat, gluten-free and low-sodium diets.
MyFitnessPal–FREE app for iPhone and Android
This four star-rated food and diet app uses your daily calorie goal to help you set up healthy meal plans. You can keep track of what you eat and your exercise routines. Plus, it allows you encourage your friends who also use the app.
MyPlate by LIVESTRONG.COM– $2.99 on iPhone & Android
The MyPlate calorie tracker can help you reach your diet, weight loss and fitness goals by tracking your daily calories and exercise. This app tracks your daily caloric, fat, carbohydrate and protein intake with the click of a button. You will have access to MyPlate at LIVESTRONG.COM, which offers a comprehensive nutrition database of more than 1.3 million food and restaurant items.
You can also find and track the amount of calories you can burn in its database of exercises and activities. Caloric burn is calculated based personally on your measurements. The MyPlate app is like having a diet coach, nutritionist, calorie counter and food planner at your fingertips.
Relaxation, meditation and sleep
Sleep Cycle– $.99 on iPhone
Sleep Cycle works by tracking your movements during the night in order to perfectly time your morning awakening. Sleep cycle is a software app that uses movement during sleep to time your iPhone alarm. It is designed to reduce the likelihood that your alarm will go off during a period of deep sleep or REM sleep. If you have some movement around the time your alarm is set to go off, the alarm will be set off.
Say you want to wake up no later than 7 a.m. Beginning at 6:30 a.m., Sleep Cycle will monitor physical movement. If you begin to move during that 30 minute window, the alarm will sound. The app easy to use and the primary goal works well. Each time your alarmgoes off it is easy to hear and because you are not in a deep sleep, you wake more alert.
Even more fascinating than the alarm function with this app is the plot function that allows you to look at the entire night pattern of physical motion plotted to estimated sleep stage status. This app may be worth trying to avoid waking groggy, which will happen if youhave been awakened from a deep sleep.
Relax with Andrew Johnson– FREE app for iPhone and Android
The pace of life and change can be overwhelming. We all need to slow down sometimes, to relax, to unwind. Yet after a hectic day at work, a terrible commute, or a nightmare shopping trip this may seem impossible. To de-stress and fully relax is vital for your health and well-being. Your stress can affect not only you but also everyone around you.
This app is a guided meditation and hypnosis audio program intended to help you unwind. It teaches relaxation techniques, which have helped with pain control, insomnia, post traumatic stress disorder and many other stress symptoms.Put your headphones on and drift into deep relaxation..
Meditationby Red Hammer Software – $.99 on iPhone & Android
The term "meditation" is a result of differing sets of practices that are found across many cultures and traditions, different but all striving to achieve the same goal of inner peace or escape.If you think meditation should be a part of your life or are planning to enter the world of meditation, then this meditation application is for you.
To assist with your meditation goal, the app has a soundboard with 80 sounds for you to use. All sounds are divided into six categories for easy navigation and all selected sounds from the soundboard can be saved and replayed again for your next meditation session.
By using this app you can relax, meditate, sleep and feel better, reduce anxiety, increase peace of mind and happiness, and help yourself in post operative healing.
Breathe2Relax – FREE on iPhone & Android
Breathe2Relax provides detailed information on the effects of stress on the body and instructions and practice exercises to help users learn the stress management skill called diaphragmatic breathing. These types of breathing exercises have been documented to decrease the body’s ‘fight-or-flight’ response, and help with mood stabilization, anger control and anxiety management. Breathe2Relax can be used as a stand-alone stress reduction tool, or it can be used in along with clinical care directed by a healthcare professional.
iStress– $.99 on iPhone
Are you stressed? This app was developed by professionals who work with individuals who lead stressful lives.
Chronic stress is related to illness, depression, anxiety and unhappiness. Many apps will provide one aspect of stress management, but iStress is designed to help you reduce stress reduction through relaxation, positive thinking and humor.
The app includes a compendium of motivational sayings and affirmations to help you reduce your stress levels when you feel overwhelmed. It also allows you to keep a journal of positive or negative thoughts and emotions so that you can identify stress triggers and avoid them in the future.
Medical
S.O.S.– FREE on iPhone & Android
This is an app developed by Dr. Mehmet Oz with the American Red Cross and Sharecare. It gives you step-by-step instructions for dealing with a variety of emergencies, including choking, broken bones, strokes and allergic reactions.
MedHelper– FREE on iPhone & Android
MedHelper is your heathcare assistant. Its designed to help individuals and caregivers keep track of and schedule prescriptions, medications, refills, doctors, pharmacies along with relevant personal information such as allergies and blood types. Alarms can be set to notify you when medications need to be taken or when prescriptions are getting low and need to be refilled. Once added, refills can be automatically updated by a simple touch of a button.
Inventory tracking follows and logs the time and dose taken and presents it in an easy to read timeline. A “take as needed” feature let’s you manage and log off-schedule prescriptions such as pain management medications. Multiple profiles allow caregivers the ability to manage as many people as they need. Data can also be exported and shared by email in multiple formats.
QuantiaCare for Diabetes– FREE app for iPhone and Android
QuantiaCare helps track and analyze your blood glucose, exercise, insulin doses, weight loss and nutrition intake. The app is intended for those with diabetes (or have a high-risk of developing the disease) and patients with cardiovascular conditions or obesity issues.
Its features include activity coaching, a weight tracker, pharmacy and health professional locator, as well as the ability to send summary reports via fax or email to a physician. The app focuses on finding fun and engaging ways to increase activity levels, and its short, 1-3 minute segments, also teach you how to set goals, track their progress and reward yourself. Other segments focus on exercise safety and routines for various setting such as home and work.
Inspiring QuotesFREE on Android
From Aristotle to Robert Frost, this collection of 2,000 quotes will inspire you to move forward and motivate you toward greatness. This app features a new quote each time you launch it. You choose if the next quote will be random or sequential, and you can add your favorites. Post your favorite quotes to Facebook or share on Twitter.
MyThoughts+ by NTP$1.99 on iPhone
Getting work done while you’re down in the dumps is a hard task to accomplish. Many people swear by the power of positive thinking. MyThoughts+ displays positive affirmations on a customizable background, transitioning from one quote to the next while playing soothing music in the background. If you can’t afford a mountain retreat to the Himalayas, MyThoughts+ just might be the next best thing.
The app contains more than 1,000 affirmations, choice of category (relationship, success, wealthand wellness), enjoyably soothing audio music, and a special slide show mode to automatically transition between affirmations.
The Habit Factor– $6.99 on iPhone
There are a lot of apps in the App Store that simply track habits, but The Habit Factor bills itself as a new paradigm through which you assess all of your habits and intentionally craft new habits to enhance achievement and create your ideal future. The app promises to help you achieve more in less time, far easier than you ever imagined possible.
This app allows you to share your goals on social sites, add images to goals to help you visualize your success, and add comments to each day’s habit tracking to give you added details on each day’s success.
Quit smoking
Kwit– $1.31 Android
Kwit uses game design techniques, game thinking and game mechanics to encourage people to quit smoking. You reach higher and higher levels and rankings as you try to become the ultimate Kwitter.
You'll have access to useful statistics such as the time passed since you've stopped smoking, the money you've saved and the number of cigarettes you haven't smoked. You can monitor these statistics live.There are also 60 achievements for you to unlock. When you reach some of them you'll even get information about the benefits of stopping smoking for your body and your life.
Finally, you'll be able to share your progress with your friends on Facebook, Twitter and by email.
My Last Cigarette– $.99 iPhone
Since 2000 My Last Cigarette has successfully helped 1,000s of ex- smokers stay that way. If you quit smoking and are serious about staying a non-smoker, then this app could make all the difference!
Simply enter your smoking habit and personal details then watch as various indicators display your expected increase in lifespan, your circulatory and lung function improvements, your savings increase and much more. Over 10 different readouts keep you informed and motivated. My Last Cigarette for iOS is proven aid to help you resist restarting this fatal addiction. It is a serious tool that benefits from years of medical research into the harmful effects of smoking. By showing you the behind the scenes improvements in your health, your will power will be increased and your resolve strengthened from day one.
Find other quit smoking apps at
Teasing your brain
Lumina– $.99 iPhone
Lumina is an elegant game of memory in you watch a pattern of flashing colors, then repeat the pattern by pressing the glass buttons in the same order. As the pattern grows longer, the pace quickens and challenges you to keep up! Glistening artwork and melodic sound effects make Lumina a great way to keep your mind challenged and have fun on the go. And now with Multiplayer Battle Mode, Lumina can be played competitively with up to 5 people on one device!
More helpful apps
Grocery Pal – FREEon iPhone
This amazing app points you toward weekly sales at your local supermarkets and discount stores, and even matches your shopping list items against products online with lower prices, plus FREE shipping! When you download Grocery Pal you’ll find savings and products from stores such as SAFEWAY, CVS/pharmacy, Walmart, Amazon, RiteAid, Target, ALDI, Kmart, Dollar General, Family Dollarand many more!