Apps to help resolutions Friday, 03 February 2012 03:32

January is almost over – which means you’ve probably abandoned your new year’s resolutions already. Get back on track with these great applications for your phone.

Resolution: get more sleep

App: Sleep Cycle

Available: iPhone

Willpower substitute: 10/10

Sleep Cycle will not help you go to bed earlier or sleep longer - but it will make you feel like you have. It’s an alarm clock, without the alarming part. Using the accelerometer in your iPhone, the app monitors your movement and determines which phase of sleep you’re in. It then wakes you when you’re in light sleep, so you wake feeling well-rested and relaxed. The result is so gentle and lovely it feels like being woken up by a mermaid stoking your hair or a unicorn nuzzling your toes.

Resolution: get more exercise

App: GymPact

Available: iPhone

Willpower substitute: 2/10 (but         could improve once the bugs are         fixed)

This app takes as its starting point the (possibly true) idea that exercise is not fun, that you hate it and so must be bribed into doing it or punished for not. You hand over your credit card details and pledge to exercise a given number of times a week. You then use your phone to check in to every gym session. Every missed session incurs a fine. Some of the money raised is then divvied up among those who did make it to the gym, as if they weren’t smug enough already. You can alter your pact at the beginning of the week, but once the week starts, that’s it. Exercise or be damned.

The problem with exercise is the whole short-term loss v long-term gain issue. GymPact does a good job of getting around that by introducing a short-term gain (cash!) to tide you over till the long-term gain (buns o’ steel) kicks in. GymPact is new and there are some teething problems. You can’t do long runs and I had some trouble checking in. But it got me exercising. Once the teething problems are fixed, this app is well worth a try.

Resolution: lose weight

App: My Plate

Available: Online, iPhone and         Android

Willpower substitute: 7/10

If losing weight is your goal then a healthy diet combined with exer… blah blah blah. If only those words could fill me up the way a burrito does. I tried two apps to aid healthy eating. The first, recommended by a friend who has used it with great success, is Live Strong’s My Plate app. You enter your stats and target weight loss and it gives you a daily calorific goal. Every day you input exercise done and food eaten (or food that you are willing to admit to eating; I just never could find the button for Toblerone. Maybe I’m spelling it wrong?). The app tots up how you’ve done. My Plate is non-judgmental in that it will allow you to input some really quite unrealistic goals, resulting in a puny allowance of just 1,200 calories a day. Surely not even enough for a small child?

Personally I found the calorie counter a little bit, well, eating disordery. It’s one thing to check the back of a frozen pizza and think, “Hang on, 2,000 calories? That’s probably a bit much. Maybe I’ll just have half.” It’s another to religiously record and add up the calorific content of every morsel that passes your lips. Pawing at my phone after every meal felt like slipping into a warm bath of obsession. My Plate works, but in the end I gave it up. It was making my head go weird.

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