App-Propriate for a Healthy Lifestyle?

Can Smartphone Apps Really Make Healthy Lifestyle Goals Easier to Attain?

Leading a healthy lifestyle can be a big challenge in today’s modern world. So, can smartphone apps really make healthy lifestyle goals easier to attain? For this article we’ll focus on those that help track nutrition and fitness.

The common thread between the 4 free smartphone apps reviewed is that each has the user complete profile information. Included in your profile will be sex, height, weight, and activity level. This information enables their fitness calculators to establish a baseline of health and to track progress toward meeting goals.

The App’s Name: Health and Nutrition Guide & Fitness Calculators

Upon opening the app it’s visually pleasing and there are 9 categories to choose from:

Vegetarian, Non Vegetarian, Immunity Boosting Foods, World Best Foods, Foods Heal Your Body, Rainbow, Fitness and Health Calculators, Blog, and Tips for Healthy Life.

I started my experiment with the last meal I’d eaten: pasta with shrimp. I tapped the Non Vegetarian category. Up popped a pleasing menu with photos of various animals; I tapped Prawns. A nutrient factoid page separated by bullet points about the Pros of eating prawns emerged. As I scrolled down the Cons appeared (not many for prawns). After more scrolling, 3 tables displayed Nutrients, Vitamins, and Minerals.

Returning to the main menu, I noted there were a few different types of Fitness and Health Calculators: BMI (body mass index), BMR (basil metabolic rate- total number of calories to eat per day), Calorie Calculator, Ideal Weight Calculator, Protein Calculator, and Body Fat Calculator.

The app is easy to navigate. The nutrition information is moderately interesting. If somebody is just starting to explore fitness and nutrition these tools may be novel enough to spark more interest in one’s health.

First, regarding the basic function of the app: there were some inconsistencies with how it worked, there were quite a few grammatical errors, and there were loads of intrusive ads for in-app purchases.

I also found a popular nutrition myth such as all cholesterol is bad. The app also treats all cheeses as though they have the same nutritional value. There’s a lot of repetitive information throughout the different categories and a limited amount of foods represented. For example, I couldn’t find pasta and the only grains were wild rice and quinoa.

In this app there’s no real context or help regarding how to apply the information presented. Lastly, 4 of the 6 calculators looked identical, yet yielded different results about healthy weight and ideal calorie intake without explanation. I found this to be confusing and unhelpful.

Summary: Probably don’t bother downloading this app.

The App’s Name: Health & Fitness Tracker with Calorie Counter

After completing my profile, I was automatically directed to the home page. From there I could tap on icons for a scale, water, food, flame (calories), stopwatch, or map. The menu lists Overview, Goals, Weight, Diary, Sleep Tracker, Heartrate, Route Tracker, and a Medication Reminder.

Some of the more unique features included:

1. A place to upload before-and-after photos

2. Notifications to drink water with a goal of drinking 67.5oz per day

3. Sleep Tracker

4. Medication Reminder (you could use this function to remind you to take your supplements too)

5. Heart Rate Monitor

In addition to the above features, I was able to record my activities either while performing them or at a later time.

Manually entering foods (rather than choosing foods from a list) makes this app more useful for tracking what you eat. There was good general advice about how many macronutrients to take in per day. The graphics made it easy to see at a glance how much fat, carbohydrate, and protein was eaten in relation to total daily calories. This could help with making positive changes in diet even if one eats pretty well already.

The reminders to drink more water and to take medications (or supplements) could be helpful. Tracking activities in real time and using the heart rate monitor could be beneficial to gathering more accurate data about true activity levels and possibly motivate me to do more.

Keeping a meal diary is already a tedious task, but it becomes even more tedious in this app because an ad pops up with each new item entry and some of the ads don’t allow you to dismiss them until they’re finished playing.

The sleep function is ridiculous. The instructions state to keep your phone by your bed (already not recommended for good health) and then the instructions further explain “Do not worry, Sleep Tracker is intelligent enough to differentiate whether you are awake or just glancing at your notifications.”

Summary: Overall, I found the ads too distracting which overshadowed any usefulness of the app. A good idea spoiled by far too many intrusive ads.

The App’s Name: Healthy Diet

This app makes it really easy to get started. Just like the other apps, I created a profile (height, weight, sex, activity level). But unlike the other apps that had me figuring out my height in cm and my weight in kg (Americans use feet, inches, and pounds) or had me scrolling for days through calendar menus that always started at least 20 years after I was born (the assumption being that you can’t possibly be older than 30 if you’ve downloaded an app), I chose which measuring system to use and manually filled in height and weight in the proper fields. These subtle differences added up to a more streamlined experience.

After creating my profile, the app recommended a daily calorie goal. It started off with a Balanced Diet screen which was 20% protein, 50% carbohydrates, and 30% fat. I tapped the edit button and other diet options appeared:

High Protein Diet       45% protein (152g), 25% carbohydrates (84g), 30% fat (50g)

Keto Easy                    25% protein (84g), 30% carbohydrates (101g), 45% fat (76g)

Keto Medium              30% protein (101g), 15% carbohydrates (50g), 55% fat (93g)

Create Custom Macros (you input the % of protein, carbohydrates, and fats you want the app to calculate)

Each diet option comes with an explanation of benefits and a related goal with simple tips for achieving it. Each diet option also includes a feature that searches recipes that match the corresponding nutrition goals.

I chose the Balanced Diet option and started filling in the food diary with what I’d eaten for breakfast, lunch, snack, and dinner. Half of the screen filled with a circle that progressively became colored in providing a visual representation of how many calories I had left to consume throughout the rest of the day. As I scrolled down, I could see at a glance how many calories I’d consumed from each meal in comparison to what the app recommended. Also, at a glance was how many of each macronutrient I ingested from each meal.

Further scrolling revealed the activities I took part in and how many calories were burned. Tapping the add activity button displayed a detailed list of activities to choose from. Next to each activity was how many calories burned if performed for 30 minutes.

At the bottom of the app was an option to record how many glasses of water I drank throughout the day. An ever-present menu lines the bottom of the screen with icons for Home, Recipes, (diet) Plans, Progress, and Settings, making navigation easy.

This app is very intuitive. Keeping a meal log is easy: just enter the food, name brand, weight or number of servings and it’ll calculate the nutrients. If a whole food needs to be logged that doesn’t have a table of contents (like fruits, vegetables, herbs, etc.), the app seamlessly fetches the nutrition information from Google.

Another great feature is the ability to meal plan. Flanking the circle of calories left to consume on the app’s home screen are arrows. Tapping the arrow to the right jumps the screen to the next calendar day. This allows for pre-planning meals to align macronutrients and calories. Tapping the arrow to your left allows for spotting and tracking areas of strengths and weaknesses in both fitness and diet.

The fitness tracker is pretty helpful too. When choosing an activity, I only had to enter the duration of time performed and it did the breakdown of calories burned. The same type of circle as on the home screen appeared, only it displayed how many more calories left to burn to obtain my goal.

Summary: Overall, it’s a well thought out app with no distracting ads. When I tapped an option called Pro, a page with subscription options appeared. For a small fee the option to add more features for a more personalized healthy lifestyle program became quite tempting.

The App’s Name: Nutracheck

This app is pretty UK centric. The first sign that it was designed by Brits came when I created my profile: it offered a choice to record my weight in stones!

At the top of the home screen is a search bar for food, exercise, icons for a chart (at-a-glance macronutrients), and a menu (Reports, Add To Diary, Sharing, and Settings). The middle of the home screen scrolled and there was a food diary for the day (breakfast, lunch, snack, dinner). The meals were organized separately with total calories and fat. The bottom of the screen is fixed with the total calories and fat of all the meals combined plus the navigation menu bar.

The recorded totals of fat and calories were calculated by using the following formula: Goal (calories determined by your profile) – Food (logged) + Exercise (calories burned) = Left (calories still to be eaten). The menu bar includes: Diary (default home screen), My Meals (individually preprogrammed), Progress (where I entered my weight), Forums (to connect with others using the app), and More (profile, measurements, options to upgrade with a commitment to a subscription, reminders, and miscellaneous options). Graphically, all this information appeared as a grid on the home screen.

The search bar is an efficient way to log food diary entries. All I had to do was type in the store name and food item, then choose the correct item, and input the portion amount I ate. For example, type in Waitrose (name of the grocery store) lettuce and all the lettuces Waitrose sells appear. Choose the lettuce and its nutrition information appears. When I typed in 50g (that was how much I ate) it made the nutrient calculation for me.

After clicking on the chart button, an at a glance in-depth record of that day’s consumed macronutrients appeared. Another great feature was that it allowed me to choose sex as a fitness activity and gave it a moderate intensity level! Finally, I really liked that this app has no ads because it uses a subscription model.

The grid design felt cluttered and was bland in its appearance. There were too many menus and sub menus to look through to get to the functions needed. While the app is usable after you learn where everything is located, it’s not the most intuitive. If I needed to use the manual entry for the food diary, it quickly becomes tedious.

Summary: I felt this app offered the most free useful functions of all the apps. I don’t know if the food diary will work as well in the US, but for those in the UK, it’s definitely worth trying.

My Conclusion for All the Apps and Their Usefulness

for Attaining Nutrition and Fitness Goals

All the apps I found use a general BMI metric to establish a daily calorie intake. Some of the apps try to measure how many calories are burned by certain activities and/or through self-reported activity level. These things have many variables that apps can’t accurately measure. Everybody is different.

Also, the food diary functions have their limitations. For example: if you make homemade lasagna for dinner, you’ll have to input each ingredient and its nutrient contents, then break those down to serving size calculations. But this is a problem for all food diaries whether digital or analog. That being said…

Overall, I was pleasantly surprised.  I found that apps can make healthy lifestyle goals more fun and easier to attain. Especially if the apps are used to enter foods that have content labels and/or if the meal entered is not too complex. The same is true while tracking fitness activities.

In general, these apps did help me to find my strengths and weaknesses. The at-a-glance graphics and easier tracking made me more motivated to make improvements in my personal fitness and nutrition goals. I definitely recommend giving them a try. Whether you’re just starting to discover nutrition and fitness, or already a health nut, the right app can help make health and fitness goals easier to attain.

© Cherie Fournier 2021