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2018’s Best Health Apps to Keep Your New Year’s Resolutions
March 16, 2018
New Year’s is officially done and with it, so are many people’s resolutions to get in shape, eat better or spend more time connecting with yourself. Even with the best of intentions, it’s easy to get caught up in day-to-day life and let those goals go to the wayside.
But there are a ton of useful smartphone apps that can help you not only stick to your resolutions, but even go above and beyond. While I’m all in favor of unplugging and escaping nomophobia, I also love using tech that’ll actually help me feel and perform at my best.
I’ve rounded up some of my own favorite apps. This is by no means a comprehensive list, but I hope you’re inspired to try some of these or find what fits into your lifestyle, so you can be the best version of yourself.
The Best Health Apps in 2018
Running
Strava: Strava’s taking an often-solitary sport and making it way more social. Sure, it tracks your runs (and bike rides). But your Strava feed also allows you to share workouts and cheer on friends for their own efforts. You can add photos to favorite routes, discover a new-to-you path or take on a segment, stretches of road that are popular with Strava athletes, to “compete” with others.
Price: Free for basic; Premium is $7.99/month
Nike Run Club: While sometimes glitchy, this impressive app is awesome when training for a specific event. Enter the distance and date of event, and the Run Club will spit out a training plan for you. Each run has a purpose — building endurance, for example, or increasing speed — and your training plan is laid out in a week by week format that makes it easy to follow.
Peppered throughout are rest days, suggestions for Nike Training Club cross-training workouts and benchmark runs, where the app takes stock of where you’re at and adjusts upcoming workouts accordingly. Best of all, it’s totally free.
Price: Free
Atlas Run: Already logging miles? Use them to do good. Atlas allows you to sign up for a challenge and raise funds for a non-profit partner of your choosing. Each time you lace up your shoes and hit the road, you’ll be unlocking funds. Raise even more money by sharing your progress on social media. While the organizations involved are still limited, it’s a great way to motivate yourself to hit the road.
Price: Free for basic; Premium is $9.99/month or $49.99/year
Food Tracking
My Fitness Pal: The granddaddy of food-tracking apps, My Fitness Pal is one of the most comprehensive. It allows you to easily find the nutrition facts for common foods, track your macros at a glance and save favorite foods for easy access. It can take some time to get used to, particularly if you don’t eat much processed foods; adding in all my morning smoothie ingredients, for example, was time consuming, but once your go-to foods are in there, it’s a lot quicker. This one’s particularly good for those tracking calories or wanting a clearer picture of what food groups they’re consuming.
YouAte: If you’re less focused on calories and want to get a better handle of your eating habits, this iOS-only app is terrific. It’s a visual food diary: take a quick snap of each meal to see patterns in what you’re eating and when. It will greatly assist with mindful eating. You can add notes to your meals to track how you’re feeling when it’s time to eat and share your diary with your nutritionist or diet coach. Quick and painless.
See How You Eat: Admittedly not as clean as the YouAte app, SHYE also allows you to take photos of what you’re eating and assign them to meals. It’s adamantly opposed to calorie counting. If you generally eat around the same times each day, you can have the app remind you to snap a photo or show you an inspiring quote. It’s also available for Android users, something YouAte lacks.
Price: Free for basic; Premium is $3.99/month, $9.99/quarter, or $29.99/year
Daily Dozen: One of the easiest ways to see if you’re eating enough fruits and veggies. The app is super simple: just check off how many servings of foods like cruciferous vegetables, leafy greens, berries and beans you’ve eaten that day. You’ll see at a glance how you’re tracking in hitting the mark on your daily dozen and what foods you’re missing out on most frequently.
Price: Free
Meditation and Sleep
Calm: Having trouble easing anxiety or unwinding at night? Calm can help. It’s packed with multi-day series to help manage stress, reduce anxiety or feel, well, more calm. The meditation categories include things like “personal growth,” “resilience” and “relationships,” which is a broader range than some others. While there are free meditations, the Premium version offers a new, daily meditation each day and access to features like bedtime stories for adults.
Price: Free for basic; $12.99/month or $4.99/month when billed yearly
Buddhify: If you’re keen to start getting your zen on throughout the day, give Buddhify a whirl. The app has different meditations for whatever you’re doing, including ones to do with a friend, while commuting or when you want to be a “mindful ninja” for stealthy meditations. There’s even a range for kids, so little ones can get in on the mindfulness habit, too.
Price: One-time lifetime fee of $2.99
Stop, Breathe, Think: What sets this app apart is that, upon opening it, you’ll go through a check-in, a series of questions to assess how you’re feeling, like if you can’t sleep. The app will then suggest a meditation (including guided meditations) that suits your mood or concerns. You can easily see your top emotions for the week, month or all-time, track favorite meditations and more. It doesn’t have a ton of bells and whistles, but Stop, Breathe, Think is pretty solid.
Price: Free with in-app purchases
Simple Habit: Known as “a daily vacation for your mind,” Simple Habit has a ton of different meditations to choose from. You can choose standards like sleep or anxiety, but also find specific ones based on what situation you’re in, like tough day, big event or taking a break. Different teachers voice the meditations, so if there’s a voice you find particularly soothing, you can hear more from them.
Price: Free for basic, $11.99/month
Sleep Cycle: Does the sound of your alarm in the morning fill you with dread? Try hitting the hay with Sleep Cycle instead. While you rest, the app will track your different sleep patterns and wake you up (near when you need to get up) during the lightest point of sleep (within a user-specified window) so that getting out of bed doesn’t feel as painful. The sleep graphs produced are super interesting as well; you’ll see at a glance periods of irregular and disturbed sleep.
Price: Free with in-app purchases
Yoga
Daily Yoga: Don’t let lack of a studio keep you from developing a practice. Daily yoga offers different programs and yoga series, whether you’re a beginner or advanced yogi. You can choose different styles of yoga based on goals like getting toned or quick yoga fix, and new classes are added regularly.
Price: Free with in-app purchases
Yoga With Adriene: The popular YouTube yoga instructor now has her own app, allowing you to take your practice to the next level. Access members-only videos and all her YouTube videos, along with yoga classes and challenges. You can save your favorite videos for offline viewing when you don’t have a connection and move from your phone app to Roku and your TV.
Price: $9.99/month
Down Dog: Can’t get past sun salutations without an instructor? Down Dog will be your new go-to app. The app will design a sequence for you each time you’re ready to practice, based on the amount of time you have and what sort of style you’re going for. It’s probably not best suited for total newbies, though, as you won’t get actual videos of the poses, just the cues and images.
Price: Free with in-app purchases
Read Next: The Best Fitness Trackers
