6 Helpful Health and Fitness Apps for your Smartphone

Staying in shape is no small task. It requires constant dedication and daily attention in order to keep your body looking and feeling how you want it to. However, it can be difficult to keep up with your health and fitness goals when distractions and temptations abound. We’ve taken the liberty of rounding up several useful health apps for your smartphone, iphone or android. These apps provide fitness shortcuts that make staying on track easy. Read on for tools that will put managing your health and fitness at your fingertips!

SparkRecipes

SparkRecipes is an offshoot of Sparkpeople.com, an online community of people looking to live healthy. The database contains over 500,000 user-submitted recipes that can be sorted in a number of different ways. Whether you have a hankering for Indian food, or are looking for something under a certain number of calories, there are recipes to fit any craving and dietary limitation.

My Fitness Pal

This free weight loss app is a combination of a food journal, calorie counter, and exercise log. Plug in your body’s proportions, and in a snap you’re ready to go. If you’re eating brand name foods, you can search for them in the app’s database and plug them into your food log to track exact nutrition info. In the exercise log, it even tells you how many calories you’ve burned based on the amount of time you report exercising for. You can also connect with other friends using the same app and cheer each other on. If you only get one app to aid you in your journey, My Fitness Pal should be it.

Healthy Out

While healthy, home-cooked meals are the best option when it comes to managing your diet, eating out is sometimes unavoidable. It doesn’t have to crash your diet if you use Healthy Out, a free app that finds healthy restaurants near you that match your dietary preferences. If you’ve already got a restaurant narrowed down, Healthy Out can help you pick the healthiest option on the menu. This one is definitely a diet life-saver.

Vida

For some people, simply tracking their diet and exercise information isn’t enough to keep them on track with their health goals. Vida offers a solution with weekly one on one video conferences with a personal health coach. Vida users also get personalized nutrition and fitness plans. The app can connect with other fitness devices you have to store your fitness information. The $49 monthly fee makes this app the most expensive on the list, if you need more specialized help with your goals, it is definitely worth it.

Spotify Premium

Nothing gets you up and moving like a playlist of your favorite jams. Spotify premium allows you to search from thousands of songs to craft a playlist that is uniquely you, or stream their expertly curated playlists for any mood. The premium membership also allows you use their running feature. This functionality detects the speed that you’re running at and automatically plays songs with BPM’s that match your pace. For just $9.99 a month you can stream virtually any song and sync them to your phone for all your fitness pick me up needs.

Daily Yoga

For some, the typical gym or running trail won’t do it for their fitness goals. Yoga is a great option to improve flexibility and core strength, and the Daily Yoga app makes it accessible to anybody. No matter what your skill level, Daily Yoga offers helpful videos with routines, in addition to a library of 500 yoga poses. Each video is HD with a live voice guide and soothing yoga music. If you’re looking for a more peaceful way to improve your fitness and flexibility, check out Daily Yoga.