Anokhi Fashion Lifestyle Entertaiment

Let’s face it: the world is FAT. Everyone is Falsely Advised Today. You can’t just “drink milk and love life” anymore. These days, you need more than a glass of milk to spread some good healthy cheer. You need a nutritionist, a doctor, a personal trainer… simply too many things to keep track of! And the truth is, thinking about trying to manage a healthy lifestyle could, in retrospect, turn out to be detrimental to one’s health.

But not to fear! Before you find yourself drowning in sweat from your latest workout, you may want to familiarize yourself with the latest in what today’s competitive health market has to offer: handheld cures in the form of health-related smartphone applications.

If you Google “health phone applications,” you will get more than 28 million hits on the Internet informing you of how the health-conscious and techsavvy are working together to alter the conventional ways of monitoring our personal wellness. Now, the secret to good health and well-being is readily accessible within the palm of your own hands— literally, thanks to your mobile phone!

Pioneering new, easy-touse smartphone software applications like Calorie Check, Food IQ and iPoints Calculator on the iPhone are allowing users to follow a strict diet while on-the-go, providing access to a wealth of nutritional information and tools to keep you from tipping off the commitment scale.

Calorie Check costs only 99 cents and provides detailed nutritional information on over 7,500 foods. Food IQ lets you do that and more, giving you quick reads on fast food meals and grocery store goods. And if you’re someone who counts your calories, fat and fiber the Weight Watchers way, then having the iPoint Calculator application on hand will keep you counting your way to a successful weight loss!

RIM, the brains behind BlackBerry, also announced a collaboration with seven-time Tour de France champion, Lance Armstrong’s Foundation in April of this year, launching together the LiveStrong Calorie Tracker for the BlackBerry. With a comprehensive database of over 525,000 food items and 2,000 fitness activities, this calorie counter helps you track your calories and the number of pounds you’re losing, getting you on your way to livestrong.

Of course, watching your diet is only one aspect of healthy living. As America’s reigning king of exercise, Jack LaLanne will tell you, “Exercise is the catalyst.” So, you’ve got to get up and get moving to really get healthy. To aid you in your fitness pursuit, applications like Distance Meter Pro on the iPhone and Walk Me and Tripometer on the BlackBerry have integrated built-in GPStechnology to help you take your first step in the right direction. Acting as a pedometer and stopwatch but costing only a fraction of the price, these technological tools automatically monitor your distance traveled, current pace, speed and much more, motivating everyone to find pleasure in even the simplest forms of exercise.

Not only has the reinvention of the traditional mobile phone put competition chasing the future, it has also helped revolutionize healthcare. Pharmaceutical phone applications like Epocrates Rx for the iPhone is providing up-to-date information on pharmaceutical drugs available in today’s market. Specifically developed by clinicians for clinicians with special features like Pill ID, it enables users to identify a pill based on its physical characteristics. Through safe drug analyses, the application has been shown to help improve patient care, as well as reduce administrative burden, save time, and enable confident clinical decisions.

That’s not all. A significant part of healthcare has always been allocated towards maternal care. With multiple newborns being welcomed into the world every day, you can bet smartphone companies are taking advantage of their most promising marketing audience—mothers.

Expecting mothers can use the award-winning MIM iPhone application to see MRI scans of their baby’s development. With all communications being transmitted over a secure password and temper-protected connection, patients can view medical images remotely and in privacy.

Once the baby’s born, mothers can record its growth using the BlackBerry’s Baby FollowUp application. From birth to vaccine and food details, everything can be recorded and kept on hand. The newly designed user-interface is created with you and your baby in mind and can be customized to your liking. And if you’re having trouble putting the baby—and yourself to sleep, there are, of course, applications for that too. The most popular being Sleep Relaxation, aSleep and White Noise for the iPhone, which all provide soothing sounds to put you and your baby in a dreamlike ambiance.

But, whether you’re pregnant or not, we women like to monitor our menstrual cycles and our fertility periods. The EZ Lady Calendar for the BlackBerry and the Free Menstrual Calendar for the iPhone are just a few of the current popular downloads allowing you to log your menstruation, fertility, and ovulation periods in one convenient place. So the next time, instead of trying to remember when you should be expecting what, you’ll be given a reminder instead.

Simply put, technology has been a frontrunner in complimenting a strong diet and exercise ritual for decades. As consumers continue to monitor their health while maintaining dynamic lifestyles, companies are keeping up by creating innovative technologies. That’s why health phone applications are all the rage right now as people stay attached to their phones over their gym memberships. Providing fingertouch convenience and control, it’s clear these applications are creating a niche in today’s competitive health market.

So maybe it’s time to pick up your smartphone and make that conscious decision to download a few health phone applications and in turn, upgrade your health. We hear that’s just what the doctor ordered.

BY: RANGA THANGARAJAH / PUBLISHED FALL 2009 ISSUE