Great (and Free) Health Apps

New Year’s is a great time to make a new start and many of us (myself included) have resolved to get healthy in 2014. Here are a few great (and free!) apps to help us out.

SleepBot

First and foremost, a good night’s sleep is crucial for weight loss, so why not have an app to help track your sleep? SleepBot tracks your length of sleep, quality of sleep, and they can alert you to snoring, sleep apnea, and if you have trouble sleeping, it gives tips and recommendations for getting to sleep and staying asleep.

Epicurious

Epicurious is a great recipe site, and now their app is up and running and it’s just as great. If you are poking around in the fridge or pantry and are out of ideas for what to make, open the app, enter in your ingredients, what meal you want to make (breakfast, brunch, lunch, dinner, appetizer, etc.) and up comes recipes. You can sort by meal, ease of cooking, newest recipe, favorite recipes and more.

RunKeeper

When I was training for 5Ks and running every day, I used RunKeeper exclusively to track my progress. It kept track of your distance, pace, heart rate, calories burned and it allowed me to run other apps like text messaging and my music. It would email me regular updates and it can link to social media so you can share your progress with others. MapMyRun also gets an honorable mention here. I just liked RunKeeper a little better.

Lose It

I downloaded the Lose It App and I haven’t regretted it for a second. I’ve had other weight loss apps that I’ve downloaded and deleted after a couple of days because they didn’t live up to the hype; including one very well known national program. I had it on my phone for about five minutes and I had one pop up ad and three requests to upgrade for $3.99. Delete. Then I found Lose It and I love it. Enter your age, current weight and goal weight and it does the work for you. It asks the length of time you have to lose the weight and then sets your calorie count per day to lose that amount of weight by your goal date. I scan the food, or do the exercise (and yes, sex does count!) and it does the work (including the math) for me. I’ve already lost 3 pounds this week and it’s Thursday.

Hot5

Don’t have time for a full workout, but you still feel like you should do something? Hot5 gives you options for workouts. From beginner to elite athlete, it has a range of options from a quick 4 minute high impact circuit (it’s SO tough, but it works!!) to a full on yoga session. The good news is that it works and it’s free. The bad news is that it’s only available for iPhone, so Android users, Windows Phone users and Kindle users will have to wait.

Evernote Food

Evernote Food is a free app that lets you remember the food you eat, healthy recipes you saw and groceries to buy to make the recipes. It also finds restaurants for you that serve healthier meals. Just watch: