I'm not addicted to apps...

My friend Dave's comment a few weeks back inspired me to look at apps I might use to help me with my weight loss. Here's my thoughts on the one he recommended and a few others I've been using along the way. I'd love to hear what apps you like too!

My Fitness Pal

This free app is really comprehensive. It has a huge food database, with Australian brands, and tracks how many calories you eat each day, adjusting your allowance based on your personal information and the amount of exercise you do. It shows a graph of your weight loss, and allows you to connect with friends using the app to share your progress. What I don't like is that even when you select cm/kgs for your units, it still sets your weight goal in pounds, measures your food in calories, and measures speed of exercises in miles per hour. On the up-side, there is a barcode scanner to simplify entering foods and entering your meals is much quicker on this app than on others I've tried.

Calorie King
This was the next app I downloaded. I use the online database all the time. I have a lot of meal plans from previous lives, and have been working out the kilojoules of my favourite meals for a while. This is an easy to use app with a HUGE database and lots of information about each food item.


iMapMyRIDE
My bike computer came to a tragic end a while ago, so this seemed a good app to try. I love it. You can delay the start by seconds or minutes, to allow time for you to put your phone away and put your helmet on etc before you start riding. It shows your exact route on a Google map, and measures the time of the ride. You've just got to remember to be quick to stop it at the end of your ride. Because it records all your rides, I've been able to see my improvements. It also has a great graph showing the change in elevation over your ride. It does have features for tracking your nutrition and weight but the database is really slow and seems limited - I haven't been inspired to use it. I didn't get the app for nutrition though - perhaps they should stop trying to do everything and do what they do well. You can share your routes with friends, and don't forget to try the sister apps such as MapMyDOGWALK and MapMyRUN. There's others too but you get the idea...

Daily Water
My doctor told me to drink more water. I drink a bit of tea, and an occasional coffee, but I'm the first to admit I forget to drink water. This app is pretty straightforward and tracks how much you've drunk towards a goal number of drinks. What I like is that (after paying a princely sum of $0.99) you can set reminders to drink, choosing times that suit you. I had a look at some others but they were a bit clunky or once again tried to do too much.


ShapeUp
This is a food and exercise tracker that I like much better than My Fitness Pal, simply because it works in metric measurements. It allows you to track the food you eat, and the free version also shows protein, carbs and fat goals for the day. A few of the features are only available if you join the ShapeUp online club, but I've found the free version adequate for what I need. It doesn't have a good range of exercises, but there's enough, and you can always enter a custom exercise. It doesn't have a food scanner.

My Shopping Lists
This app has revolutionised my shopping experience. I tried the ShopShop app, but that was too simple! What I like about My Lists is that you can have a range of lists that are registered under different shops. This means that I can have a list of things I might buy from Aldi, and another group of lists for Woolworths or Coles. It has a good database backing it up, and I also like that it puts your foods into categories according to how they are grouped in the supermarket, so you're not constantly scanning up and down the list. It's easy to mark things off and you can close categories once they're complete. There's lots of different measurements to enter, and you can also add prices. I enter in my weeks meal plan requirements, and then I've got it saved for when I use that week plan again.

Period Tracker
I don't really need to use this app to track my period, but it's got some added features that are really useful. Each day it allows you to enter in what symptoms you're experiencing, such as bloating, cravings, aches, nausea etc, and then your mood. This allows you to see whether patterns develop according to what part of your cycle you're in. There's room to add notes as well. If I know that I always crave sweet things at a regular time in my cycle, I know to be really well prepared food-wise. It might also let me tip-off my boyfriend that it might be an idea to avoid me at certain times :) No downsides to this app, and I'm only using the free one.

Sleep Talk
As I've said before, sleep is an important part of losing weight. I don't sleep that well, and I've been told for a long time that I talk in my sleep, which was my first inspiration for getting this app. Love it, love it! You start it when you're falling asleep, and it starts recording as a noise-activated recorder half an hour later. So far no talking, and only two cases of snoring for five minutes each, but I'm amazed at how often I'm disturbed while I sleep. One night it made 105 recordings, mostly of me turning over. A more standard night is about 40-50 recordings. You just sit it on the pillow or table next to you and it picks up sounds really well. This app allows you to see how the time you go to bed affects your sleep. I only wish it had a notes function, because then you could start to note factors influencing sleep each night, like what time you ate the last food before sleeping, stress levels etc. and start to compare your notes to how many times you were disturbed during the night. Ah, if only I were able to develop my own apps...