Category: Health & Fitness

One of the great features of the Apple Watch is the Activity app.  It is an app that keeps track of your movement calories, your exercise and the standing you do each hour in one easy-to-use app.  It is the measurement of these activities that allow you to complete the now well known rings each day.

When it comes to calorie targets, it is the one metric that users can adjust.  The standing once per hour and 30 minutes of exercise, at least for now, are fixed and can’t be adjusted.  The calorie one however is probably the more important one anyway.  Depending on your lifestyle and even your profession, you may want to set your calorie burn goal higher than the minimum 300 calories target.  You’ll know this is the case if you are consistently going over your current target by two or three times in a day.  One day is a one-off but consistently blowing through that target means it needs to be adjusted up.

In this How To I’ll show you a quick way that you can adjust your calorie target in the middle of a day or week.  Once you adjust it, it will be your goal going forward until you adjust it again and it will be reflected in your target measurements for the week you are in.

There was an exciting new announcement today from Google Cloud Platform and Fitbit.  The fitness wearable company is not only moving to GCP as their preferred cloud platform provider, but they will also be taking advantage of the Google Cloud Healthcare API.

The Cloud Healthcare API… “provide an interoperability solution that enables their users to collaborate on care with their own healthcare providers.”  This could be a big deal as there have been some 76 million Fitbit devices sold and some 25 million active users.

As we roll the calendar forward to 2018, many of us will be looking to the new year as a chance to start living a healthier lifestyle.  In fact, “weight loss” and “exercise” are among the most common new year resolutions that people set for themselves.  It is said that it takes 3 weeks of doing something before it becomes a habit which makes the month of January critical for the success of your goals or resolutions.

For me, living a healthier lifestyle started in June 2009.  At the time was weighed in at 285 lbs (129 kilos) and was making every poor food and exercise decision you could make.  Fast forward to December 2009 and I was 210 lbs.  As of January 1, 2018, I tipped the scales at 199 lbs.  That’s nearly 10 lbs over my ideal weight of 190 lbs but now you know one of my goals for the new year.

Fortunately we live in the future.  There are dozens of apps out there to help you achieve these healthy goals both for Android and for iPhone but like so many things, it is a question of which one to use.  That’s where this article tries to help.  I’ve compiled a list of apps that I use to help me maintain my diet and overall health.  This is by no means an exhaustive list nor am I suggesting that these are the best of the best.  These are the apps that work for me and they have worked a long time in some cases.  Hopefully they will do the same for you.

The sleep tracking app Sleep as Android has a major update rolling out today that brings a number of new features along with several improvements and fixes.  The new build is version 20171223 and should come to all users of the app over the course of the next few days.

This update brings support for a new time-based theme to the app which will be the traditional dark theme until sunrise where it turns to a light theme automatically.  You’ll also see that the sleep charts have been improved for easier reading and clarity of information.  In fact most of the app has had some type of face lift in this update.

For those that aren’t familiar with Sleep as Android, it is an app that allows you to track your overall sleep and the quality of that sleep using your Android phone or Android Wear device.  It is an app that I use daily and highly recommend for those who want to keep tabs on their sleeping patterns in this hectic world of ours.  You can read my review of it here in case you missed it.

The Microsoft Band app, the Android app which supports the company’s now defunct fitness tracker, has received a surprise update today that owners of the Band 2 will certainly appreciate.

Sync problems have plagued the Band 2 for a couple of months now and while Microsoft did say they found the source of the issue early on, it has taken them a long time to address it both in the Android app and in their Windows 10 app.  The new update for Android is build 2.3.31002.0 for those keeping score at home and it is rolling out to the Play Store now.

A new update to the diet and wellness tracking app, MyFitnessPal, is rolling out in the Play Store.  The update, version 6.24-10373 for those keeping score at home, brings a lot of general fixes and improvements to the app as well as bottom tab navigation.

The new navigation in the app falls in line with what Google expects from apps today and provides three options to users.  The Home tab is your news and information feed with posts from MyFitnessPal themselves as well as achievements that friends who use the app have completed.  The Diary tab is where you log your food and exercise for the day while the Me tab gives you an overview of your profile, see your friends profiles, and your achievements.