Helpful APPS

 

A friend of mine that’s a trainer told me about an app for your phone awhile back called My Fitness Pal.  I tried it out for a few months and it’s very helpful in terms of keeping track of your daily caloric intake and logging your exercise routine.  It takes into account calories burned from exercise and adds them to your daily intake which is an extra incentive to exercise if you want to indulge in a piece or two of chocolate.   To help get you started you can view this tutorial on you tube.  Also at the bottom of your phone it will list different options: home, my diary, progress, friends and a more button.  If you click on more it will give you several other options and one of them is tutorial videos.  I found My Fitness Pal has a good inventory of foods.  For example a smoothie from my gym Lifetime Fitness is listed and Spin pizza which is my favorite pizza place.   You can also scan items with a bar code.  This one is new to me and I just discovered it while writing this post.  You can also follow friends who are using My Fitness Pal.  It tracks your progress and tells you how many calories to eat each day to achieve a certain weight goal and if you follow that plan how many weeks it will take.  I haven’t used it for quite some time, but I have a feeling I’ll be reacquainting myself with My Fitness Pal very soon.

 

Another APP a good friend told me about is All Recipes Dinner Spinner.  You select an ingredient, a dish type and a cooking time then hit view matches and it gives you a selection of recipes to choose from.   Once you select a recipe it gives you all of the details along with nutritional information and reviews.   You can store your recipes under favorites and also add them to a shopping list.  It’s a great way to plan meals on the go.  I haven’t had time to play around with it much, but there are other functions that are possible like scanning products.   Click here for more information.  The all recipes website is one I use often when I’m searching for a recipe.  I find it faster than searching through all of my cookbooks.