CONTEST: Nutrition MY Way!

Rene Ritchie

Old Man Ritchie
Jan 12, 2007
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February is fitness month at Mobile Nations, and you know what that means? we all get together to get in shape, share tips and tricks and recipes for success, review amazing apps and accessories, give away great prizes, and have a ton of fun!

This here is our Nutrition MY Way contest. Simply tell us how you use your iPhone or iPad, to eat better and stay healthier. What are your favorite apps? What are your go to accessories for diet and calorie counting, recipes and meal planning, weight tracking and nutritional balance? How does your device fit your active lifestyle? We want to know!

Write them out like a blog post. Yup, use paragraphs, list apps, list accessories, make it really helpful for anyone else interested in using their tech for exercise!

We'll post the best entries on Friday, so get them in ASAP! Need more incentive? We'll pick one winner a week and send them a $100 gift certificate!

What are you waiting for, start posting NOW!
 

Fausty82

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Jun 23, 2010
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I use several apps on several different devices.

To track my food intake and log exercise, I use MyFitnessPal. I love this app, for many reasons, but primarily because it?s so easy to use. I use it on both my iPhone and my MacBook Pro. The iPhone version has a barcode scanner for entering packaged food items. But whether you use the scanner or not. MyFitnessPal has a very extensive database of foods with their nutritional values. The database also contains a good assortment of menu items from popular restaurants, which allows me to choose healthy (ier?) meals when my wife wants to go out for a meal.

Another great feature of MyFitnessPal is the ability to add meals and recipes. This, in turn makes logging your food intake even easier. Simple pick a recipe or meal and voila! it?s logged for a particular meal. It also allows you to copy meals to/from previous days. In my case, I eat virtually the same breakfast every day. Simple select the option to copy breakfast from "yesterday" and it?s done.

It allows you to set you body weight and height, set goals for yourself (like losing x pounds per week) and then helps you manage yourself towards those goals. It also allows you to enter exercise sessions (both cardio and strength training), and adds additional food calories to your daily allotment to offset the exercised. It also allows you to tweak your daily intake percentages between carbohydrates, proteins and fats, and it also tracks other items like sugar and sodium. The iPhone/iPad version also allows you to view your daily and weekly percentages fo carbs, protein and fats as a pie chart and compares it to your goals. (Wish this was available on the website version).

I?ve been using this app for the past 4 weeks now and it has helped me lose 12.5 pounds so far - approaching 20% of my goal.

I also use the Nike+ app on my iPod nano to track my workouts. I am walking an average of about 3 miles, six days a week. Currently I?m logging about 45-50 minutes per day, but as I get stronger, I expect the mileage to go up in the same time frame. I love the app on the iPod nano because it allows me to set my workouts by target time, distance, and calorie burn. I also love it on the Nano because of the built in FM radio. The Nike+ app allows you to use your own music (synced with the iPod) or the FM radio as background music while you workout, and it gives periodic progress points throughout your workout in terms of time, distance, pace and "to go" information, as well. When you complete your workout, you see a screen that gives you details about your workout - time, distance, pace, calories burned. It?s a simple task to move those values (I use time and calories burned) to MyFitnessPal.

Additionally, I am using several cooking apps to research healthy foods, recipes and menus to keep my eating on track. My favorites are All Recipes and How to Cook Everything... but I am always looking for new sources for great, healthy foods.

Having these apps and devices has certainly made my change of lifestyle easier to manage, and I would strongly recommend that anyone looking to make their changes easier and more manageable look into them.
 

iDonev

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Jan 11, 2011
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Eating healthy foods is perhaps the most important aspect of maintaining your weight. Exercise can certainly help as well. Unfortunately many people who train also adopt a "I'll burn it off later" mentality thus negating much of the positive effects that physical activities have on our weight and general health.

I have three tentpole principles to which I adhere:

1. Being a vegetarian. No surprise there - vegetarians and vegans enjoy a much healthier lifestyle than the average person. Plus it's harder to gain weight by eating only fruits and veggies.

2. Caloric restriction. Even though recent studies show restricted caloric intake doesn't affect longevity, I restrict mine as a part of a two-year plan to bring down my weight. Here I'm heavily invested in Calorie Counter by Viaden. Their iPhone and iPad app is quite pleasant to work with and is bursting with options. In the app I have set up a personal plan by inputting my biometrics and setting a goal for the summer of 2014. The app calculated my needed caloric intake based on my lifestyle (mostly seated and actively training).

3. Staggering my meals. In an attempt to accelerate my metabolic rate I strive to eat as many times a day as possible. As you might imangine to compensate for the frequency, all of those meals are closer to snacks and even that is an overstatement! Currently I try to eat every hour from waking up until about six in the evening. Here my iPhone proves incredibly handy. Since I work from home the phone is always docked with AppCubby's Timer running in the foreground. I have a dedicated timer for meals set to one hour with no alarm. That way I don't get distracted if I'm working and need a few more minutes. As you might expect I start the timer after every meal.

Perhaps the tentpole principle number zero would be persistance. Even though Mobile Nations' initiative lasts a month, try your best to live in a perpetual Fitness Month. Your body will thank you for it.
 

Alli

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Apr 28, 2009
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Still using my Fitbit to monitor calories when possible. It's perfect for every aspect of fitness. Looking forward to the new one in the spring that syncs directly to the iPhone!
 

heberman

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Jan 15, 2011
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To help me with my fitness goals, I use three apps on my iPhone and iPad Mini to track progress and keep me motivated and am ready to try a fourth app. Here's what I use:

MyFitnessPal

This is a free app for my iPhone and iPad Mini which tracks everything I eat, everyday. I input my goal weight, personal info, and activity level into the app and am given a calorie allowance for each day. The "home page" in the app gives me a summary of the calories remaining for that day and shows calories consumed minus calories earned through exercise. The best part of this app is the huge food database. It makes locating foods quick and easy to add to my food diary for that day. The iPad interface is even better than the iPhone and desktop version, showing additional information, graphs, and achievements.

RunKeeper

Although MyFitnessPal tracks exercise, I use RunKeeper for tracking of my running, walking, and weight lifting. As soon as it gets warm enough outside, I plan to use RunKeeper's GPS functionality to track my runs and walks through the nearby mountains and fields. I take the "calories burned" calculations in RunKeeper and input them in MyFitnessPal to see how many calories I have earned that day so I can eat more if I am hungry that day.

Monitor Your Weight

I started using this app last week following a good iMore review. I input my current weight, goal weight, and target date to complete my goal. It's a simple app that tracks my weight each day and then shows my weight loss/gain with great graphing and history options. It's one more way to keep me motivated to reach my goal.

Finally, I just bought the Zombies,Run! app - it looks like it will be a lot of fun. It's an interactive audio story that tells me when to run fast (to avoid the zombies!) and has goals and missions to achieve along the way. My hope is that this app will keep me interested in progressing in my ability to run longer and longer distances. It looks like a fun distraction to use during a boring run on the treadmill.

I expect these few apps will help me track calories consumed/ burned through exercise and keep me motivated and informed along my journey to a better me!
 

mjcostajr

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Feb 13, 2010
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Keep track of your nutrition can be cumbersome and disconnected, but there are definitely some great apps/devices which can make it quite simple.

1) Evernote Food: Not just a great app for keeping track of what you've eaten at a restaurant. It's great to remind yourself of what ingredients you used, how you cooked the meal and when you ate during the day. Of course since it syncs with Evernote, it's a great food journal that's accessible everywhere. Also, if you're busy and unsure of calories, serving sizes, etc, you can always use this to snap a picture of the meal quickly and enter the details into other apps (MyFitnessPal, Lose It) later in the day when you are winding down.

2) RunKeeper: Manual data entry is a must! It's crazy that Nike+ still doesn't natively offer this option. Also, RunKeeper lets you distinguish between different activities: running, elliptical, rowing, etc! Of course, when the weather is beautiful and you are ready to hit the pavement, the GPS records all your running stats quite nicely!

3) Withings WS-30: Keep track of your weight without writing anything down! Just simply step onto the scale and let it record your weight and BMI. Doesn't get much easier than this!

Definitely looking forward as Health/Fitness apps/gear continues to integrate and make staying healthy easier!
 

decarlo4

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Aug 9, 2010
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Keeping track of my fitness and nutrition used to feel like I had a second job. Counting calories and trying to measure food out to make sure I'm not eating more than the recommended serving. But as of late I've found some great apps to help keep me on track with my training and nutrition.

1) P90X- I just started this training plan. The great thing about this program for me is the structured workout routines and the nutritional outline that comes with the program. I was able to download the app that helps me keep track of my daily workouts and nutrition. It tracks my progress and shows me a graph of my actual stats and my goals. I really love how the app breaks down my nutrition plan for me. It shows me how many servings of protein, vegetables, fruit, carbs, fat, etc I'm allowed/should have to achieve my goals. And for those people who have a hard time counting calories or tracking what you eat the app has an option for planned meals ( which includes recipes) or quick options which includes the correct serving for each with the calorie amount. The app gives you the option of alerts to help keep you on a schedule. Lastly the app automatically syncs with your online profile to keep all your information up-to-date. I absolutely love the ease and simplicity of the app. It offers 2things I need in one place. Highly recommend if you're doing the P90X training program.

2) Polar Beat is another great app. It syncs up with my Polar Ft60 Heart Rate Monitor Watch. It offers training programs and allows you to use the app for you own training program. It keeps track of your distance, calories, pace and heart rate. It gives you weekly summaries and stores your history in your profile. There are audio prompts for those who like audio prompts. It lets you utilize your own music for training. It automatically syncs up with my heart rte monitor and watch so that I'm able to keep track of my progress. It gives me prompts when I leave my target heart rate zone. It's a great app if you're looking to record your training while using your Polar Heart Rate Watch. I would recommend.

3) MyFitnessPal is great for scanning your meals on the go and keeping track of your nutritional goals. It allows you to scan/manually input your data or look it up from similar info provided by other users. I really like the scanning feature because it saves you the hassle of manually inputting all the nutritional info. It lets you set up a profile that outlines your goals and keeps track of your progress it also gives you friendly reminders when you skip filling out your meals on any given day. A nice feature is after submitting your daily meal & activity info it'll let you know what your projected weight will be in a few weeks based on the info you provided that day. The app breaks down how many carbs, calories, fat, cholesterol, sodium, sugar, etc you can have per day. Highly recommended app.

4) C5K is great for people who are interested in training to run a 5K. It helps you build your endurance over a course of a few weeks. It starts you with alternating between running and walking. Over time the time spent running increases and the time spent walking decreases until you're able to achieve running a complete 5K. It's great for people who have never run before.

As of today the apps I use most is the P90X and Polar Beat since I'm doing the P90X program. These apps cover what I need to achieve my nutrition and fitness goals.

I hope this helpful. Good luck everyone on accomplishing your fitness goals.

Sent from my "new" iPad using Tapatalk HD
 

Premium1

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Aug 17, 2011
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I use my iPhone as my personal music player for when I am at the gym. I also use it to keep track on the days I run and how many miles/calories burned as long as using it as a timer on the nicer days when I can run outside. Overall my iPhone is the all in one device so I no longer need to carry multiple devices with me when I go to the gym/workout.
 

djayme7

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Feb 4, 2010
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Vegan express and the how to cook everything vegetarian apps help me eat right the low fat veggie way! The fitness buddy and full fitness apps help me keep my bod looking Aotay! I highly recommend all four of these apps and a vegetarian diet to look and feel the best you ever have for 2013!