Interested in healthy living? There are hundreds of apps out there that can help you track your heart rate or sleep cycle, shop for groceries or perform thousands of different workouts. But what about the smokers, the nail-biters and the avoid-the-doctors in the world? Don’t fret: there’s an app for you.
While 88 percent of Americans have a cell phone, only 10 percent have downloaded health-related mobile apps. Don’t think that health apps are only for those that are already living a doctor-approved lifestyle. With the dominance of smartphones, support to break a bad habit is literally at your fingertips. Here is a list of some of the most common bad habits that are affecting your health, and apps you can download to help kick them.
Bad Habit: Smoking
App: iQuit - Free
Bearing a very Apple-appropriate name, iQuit helps smokers break the habit with a scheduled reduction method. After gathering some data about your smoking habits, the app will prompt you when to smoke, gradually increasing the interval between cigarettes to reduce the number of cigarettes you are smoking each day. Whenever the app is opened, users are greeted with one of two icons: a red “no smoking” icon or a green “smoking” icon. It also connects to Facebook to let friends lend their support. Just like breaking any bad habit, to fully kick the habit you’ll have to work with the program.
There are a ton of apps out there to help you stop smoking, including Coach Quit, NoSmoking Life, Since iQuit -- which keeps a running log of how many cigarettes you’ve consumed since you decided to quit and how much money you’ve saved over that time period -- and some hypnosis apps such as Quit Smoking Now with Max Kirsten or Andrew Johnson. One you may or may not have heard of is Electric Smoke ($1.99). With the help of sonic transmission technology, electric smokers can light up their DIGITAL CIGARETTES on their iPhone screens and mildly simulate what it actually feels like to smoke. Now you really don’t have an excuse to not quit because your smartphone can actually do everything.
Bad Habit: Biting Your Nails
App: StopBite - $0.99
StopBite is a motivation program supporting nail biters to stop nail biting. It keeps track of the nail length since you stopped the habit and logs how long you have been “bite-free.”
App: Stop Nail Biting - $4.99
If just keeping track of how long it’s been since you kicked the habit doesn’t motivate you to stop, there’s also the direction of hypnosis. Stop Nail Biting features hypnotherapy recordings that help re-program your unconscious mind and help you deal with stress and anxiety to break the habit of nail biting. It contains hypnosis audio in a choice of male or female voice, a photo diary to record your progress and success and top tips to help combat the nail biting habit.
Bad Habit: Skipping meals
App: Shroomies Nutrition Menu - $0.99
Dubbed “The mother of all iPhone calorie counters” by Fitness Magaizne, this app takes the guesswork out of choosing healthy meals and includes a calculator to compute your Food Score. This app is for you if you like to follow the basic Weight Watchers plan but don’t want to pay the price for the whole package. It is also completely compatible with Weight Watchers’ PointsPlus values. No Internet connection is required for this app and its database includes 93,000 food items – both restaurant dishes and common foods like apples, meat and frozen meals. Since a healthy diet doesn’t just involve healthy eating, the Nutrition Menu app also lets you choose from 149 built-in exercises and shows you how many calories you burned based on your weight. At the end of the day, you can view your daily summary with pie charts indicating your calories consumed and burned, as well as a list of food and exercises from throughout the day. You can jot down daily notes, track your weight with a graph, and even email the journal to yourself and import it into a printable spreadsheet
App: The Eatery - Free
This is a food journal app that doesn’t require you to scroll through a ton of lists to find the food. All you do is snap a photo of your meal or snack, then rate it anywhere between fit and fat. The app logs all of your meals and generates reports for you, like which food was the best you ate all week, which was your worst, what time of day you tend to eat more and at what restaurant you make the healthiest choices. It provides a big-picture breakdown of your habits, including your strengths, weaknesses and the best places to start making a change.
Bad Habit: Putting off Doctor Visits
App: ZocDoc - Free
If you are one of the guilty ones that would rather WebMD your symptoms than see a doctor, this app is for you. The ZocDoc app helps you find qualified doctors in your area that meets all of your specifications, such as zip code, insurance and available times. Additional features include viewing doctor locations on a map, reading patient reviews of doctors before choosing the right one and checking your upcoming appointments or look at your past appointments booked through the ZocDoc app. Types of doctors range from dentist, primary care, dermatologist, eye-specialist, ENT, orthopedist, OB/GYN, allergist, podiatrist, cardiologist, pediatrician, radiologist, and psychiatrist appointments.
Bad Habit: General Bad Habits
App: Fail Log – Free
As an iPhone loyalist, I tend to lean more toward apps featured in the App Store, but this is for the Android users out there. Fail Log is a habit tracker that allows you to quickly and easily make a record of when you give in to a negative habit. This associates a negative feedback with it, which will help you avoid doing it in the future. You can use the app later to analyze when you are most likely to fail.
App: Habit Maker Habit Breaker - Free
For those trying to live a generally healthier life, this app helps you make good habits and break bad ones. Data shows that the longer you consciously work on making or breaking a habit, the higher the chance of reaching and maintaining your goals. App features include habits, tracking up to three (more if you upgrade), set goals, motivation messages, rewards, charts, Facebook sharing, reminders, stats, notes and customization.
Smartphones help make our everyday lives easier in many ways, including kicking our bad habits. If there’s a habit you know you need to remove from your life and never look back on, download these apps to help you get there. Good luck
Edited by
Rich Steeves
