strength clare: 20 Life-Changing Health and Fitness Apps

Posted 04/05/2013 at 4:51pm | by Susie Ochs, Andrew Hayward, and Christopher Phin

Your iPhone can?t make you exercise more or change your diet. But it can help you make your life more social, more creative, and way more fun. With so many apps aimed at helping you take care of yourself, your Mac and iOS device can be sources of support and inspiration ? and all the nerdy statistics you?d ever want. No matter what your initial fitness level or your own goals (maybe you just want to sleep better, feel less stressed, or find a new trail to walk your dog), we hope something here speaks to you.

20 Life-Changing Health and Fitness Apps

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When it comes to losing weight, what you put into your body is just as important as what you burn from it. Lose It! (free, iPhone) makes calorie-counting easy, thanks to a huge database of common foods and activities. You can quickly record your meals and snacks throughout the day, and add fitness activities that give you a bit more calorie room to work with. Steady (and honest) use can really help your eating habits improve.
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Meal Snap ? Calorie Counting Magic ($2.99, iPhone) makes daily food-tracking as easy as possible. Simply snap a photo of your meal, send it to the app?s servers, and within moments you?ll have an estimate of the calorie count. Granted, while it does a good job of identifying the food in your photo, the resulting caloric range can be quite wide?like 100-plus between the high and low estimates.
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Getting in shape is serious business, but treating it like a game can help keep you motivated. SlimKicker Calorie Counter (Free, iPhone) lets you track what you eat, and awards you points for healthier choices and logging your exercise. You can link up with friends for friendly competition, or to take on missions like ?No Snacks After Dinner? or the ?Replace Soda Challenge.?
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No recipes here, but if you have your own beloved recipes with less-than-healthy ingredients, Substitutions ($0.99, iPad) offers a straightforward list of substitutions for 400-plus ingredients that can help you tweak them to remove some of the fat, sodium, gluten, or anything else you?d like to avoid.
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You don?t have to go vegetarian or vegan full-time to get the benefits ? even skipping meat for a few meals a week can affect your calorie intake and save you money, too. The App Store is crammed with options, but we like the simple design, mouth-watering photography, built-in timer, and 63 easy-to-follow recipes in Filibaba Meals ? Simple Vegetarian & Vegan Recipes ($3.99, iOS).
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Depriving yourself of anything sweet might not be the best way to change your sweet tooth. Instead, Healthy Desserts ? by Green Kitchen ($2.99, iOS) helps teach you to reimagine desserts you love with less sugar, butter, and flour. Some of the ingredients here are on the exotic side, but the gorgeous pictures and step-by-step instructions make these 48 recipes too tempting to pass up.
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Sleep Cycle Alarm Clock ($0.99, iPhone) uses your phone?s accelerometer to track how often you move during the night, which tells it what sleep stage you?re in. Set an alarm range, and when it senses you entering a lighter sleep stage during that window, it wakes you up with gradually increasing sound. Sleep graphs show you when you get the best sleep, and how long you spend in bed.
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Need a power nap? Pzizz Energizer Lite ($1.99, iPhone) guides you through 20 minutes of soothing sounds and spoken relaxation coaching, and you don?t even need to fall asleep all the way to benefit?just zone out until the end of the routine and you?ll feel refreshed. The full $5.99 version lets you tweak the music and voice volumes separately, or even mute the voice all together.
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Think of Magic Mind ($4.99, Mac) as Pzizz for your Mac. Its 40 built-in sessions combine ambient music, nature sounds, and isochronic tone frequencies designed to help you relax, sleep, meditate, sooth stress and anxiety, and train your mind. If you have trouble quieting your mind before bed, this app is worth a try.
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Our favorite running app, RunKeeper (Free, iOS/web) lets you set goals, track your runs, and challenge yourself or friends. All your data is uploaded to RunKeeper.com, which can also pull in data from a heart monitor strap, FitBit or Zeo tracker, Withings scale, Garmin fitness watch, and tons of other apps and services.
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Running a 5K (about 3.1 miles) is a great milestone for new or casual runners, and the Couch-to-5K program can transform a nonrunner into a 5K-dominating machine in just nine weeks. C25K?5K Trainer FREE (iPhone) lets you ease into running gradually, with voice instruction that tells you when to jog and when to walk, ramping up the difficulty over three 30-minute sessions per week.
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Recognizing the power of playful competition, community-centric Fitocracy (free, iOS/web) challenges users to keep up with workouts, complete fitness quests, and level up alongside online friends. The free iPhone app contains hundreds of workouts and makes it easy to track your activity, awarding you points for your efforts. Fitocracy gets results by tapping into our competitive, completionist urges.
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Running is boring, you say? Not if zombies are chasing you! Zombies, Run! ($3.99, iPhone) serves up rich audio drama with interactive elements. By running, you take on a starring role?Runner 5, a messenger for the fledgling Abel Township?and the story unfolds over more than 45 total runs, giving you fun and spooky motivation to keep heading out again and again.
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Music is a great energizer, and when a hot song matches your running pace, you get an extra spring in your step. PaceDJ ($2.99, iOS) lets you set a target pace and then rolls out song after song from your iTunes library to match your tempo. It can even change the speed of your music to exactly match your pace without affecting song pitch. All you have to do is keep your feet moving.
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GymPact (Free, iPhone) lets you set a goal of how many workouts you want to do this week, and commit to pay a penalty for each missed workout. Then check in at the gym, or log a biking or running workout with RunKeeper. (Or use GymPact Anywhere to log a workout...well, anywhere.) Penalties paid by people who shirked their commitment are redistributed to people who actually worked out, so you could even make a few bucks.
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Bring the gym with you anywhere: DailyBurn ? Video Workouts (Free, iOS) will play on your Mac, iPad, iPhone, Apple TV, Roku, and other devices. The subscription-based program starts with 30 days free, then goes to $9.99 per month or $69.99 per year. Videos are organized by workout type?dance, yoga, cardio, all the way up to the intense Inferno program?or you can narrow down the choices based on how much time you have to get sweaty.
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Whether you?re looking for a grueling uphill running loop or a new forest trail for long hikes, WalkJogRun Running Routes ($2.99, iOS) has a massive database of 1.5 million shared routes ? we found more than 6,000 near us, from sub-mile sprints to 45-mile endurance runs. The GPS tracker offers nine map types, including versions of Apple and Google Maps, plus you can save and share new routes and try the built-in training programs.
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For advanced cyclists, or those wishing to vault themselves there, Cyclemeter GPS Cycling and Running ($4.99, iOS) offers a remarkable array of options for breaking down a ride, with a slick tracker screen that shows essential mid-ride details like time, distance, and speed ? current, average, and fastest speed, in fact. The detailed graphs plot your progress, and you can take on a training program or set up your own interval workouts.
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Strava Cycling (Free, iPhone) has all the same advanced features as Cyclemeter (both apps can even work with separate sensors for things like bike cadence and heart rate), but we love how the Strava Premium features ($59/year) show you how each of your rides stack up with everyone else who logged rides on that route, optionally filtered by your age group, gender, and weight.
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Keeping recipes handy is one way to ensure you?ll cook them more. Paprika ($19.99, Mac) lets you browse recipe sites and save recipes to your library with one click. Then, it?s easy to create shopping lists, scale ingredients to larger or smaller yields, and keep everything synced to the iPad and iPhone apps ($4.99 each).