20. Keeping Fit and Healthy
In this chapter, you discover a variety of health and fitness apps for your iPad.
Exploring Health and Fitness Apps
Many people use their tablets to help them manage their daily health and fitness needs. You can find workout and yoga apps, food and nutrition apps, even apps to help you find important medical information. These apps add more value to your iPad and can help you keep healthier!
And if you want to learn more about health options available on your iPad and elsewhere online, check out Que’s companion book, My Health Technology for Seniors, available wherever books are sold. There’s a lot of good health-related information available online, if you know where to find it!
Exploring Health and Fitness Apps
When it comes to staying fit, nothing beats the combination of a healthy diet and a regular exercise routine. We’ll cover diet-related apps in the next section, but for now let’s focus on the fitness end of things.
Discover Exercise and Yoga Apps
It’s important to make sure you get enough exercise each day. You can use the following apps to track your daily exercise—and guide your workouts.
Streaks Workout ($2.99) offers personalized exercise routines you can use at home or at the gym. It offers a variety of workouts of different lengths and levels.
Sworkit (free) offers a variety of personalized video workouts, from 5 to 60 minutes long.
Daily Yoga (free with in-app purchases) gets you started with a variety of entry-level exercises.
Finding Health and Fitness Apps
You can find all the health and fitness apps discussed in this chapter—and more!—in Apple’s App Store. Just launch the App Store app and search for a particular app by name or type.
It’s Not All Good: In-App Purchases
Many purportedly “free” apps offer in-app purchases for additional features or content. Just because you get an app for free doesn’t mean it won’t always cost you nothing!
Exploring Food and Nutrition Apps
When it comes to staying healthy, exercise is just part of the equation. You also need to watch what you eat—which you can do with these dieting and food apps.
My Diet Coach (free) helps you set diet goals, tracks your calorie intake, and motivates you with tips and photos.
MyFitnessPal’s Calorie Counter & Diet Tracker (free) is an easy-to-use calorie counter with a huge database of more than 5 million different foods.
When you want to eat healthy, MyPlate Calorie Tracker (free) tracks everything you eat with a database of more than 2 million food items.
Discover Cooking and Recipe Apps
Whether you’re trying to eat healthy or just want to spice up your dinner routine, check out these cooking and recipe apps, for all types of cuisine.
Use the Allrecipes Dinner Spinner (free) to access popular recipes from the 30 million members of the Allrecipes community—and watch more than 1,000 step-by-step cooking videos, too!
The Betty Crocker Cookbook app (free) offers more than 15,000 recipes inspired by the best-selling Betty Crocker cookbooks.
Yummly Recipes and Shopping List (free) offers more than 1 million unique recipes and lets you create your own menu plans and shopping lists.
Exploring Medical Apps
There’s a ton of medical services and information available on the Internet. The following apps let you access that information—and better track your own medical needs.
Discover Medical-Related Apps
The following apps let you access large online databases about medical conditions, symptoms, and medications. (You still should contact your own personal physician if you think there’s something wrong, of course!)
The Drugs.com Medication Guide app (free) lets you look up prescription drug information, identify any random pills you might have lying around the house, check drug interactions, and manage your own personal prescription records. Also popular: Formulary Search (free) and PocketPharmacist (free).
Medical Dictionary (free) is a medical dictionary app with more than 180,000 medical terms, 50,000 audio pronunciations, and 12,000 images.
The WebMD app (free) is a one-stop shop for everything medical, including a huge database of medical conditions, a symptom checker, medication reminders, drug information, first-aid essentials, and local health provider listings.
It’s Not All Good: Don’t Self-Diagnose
As tempting as it is to plug your symptoms into one of these medical-related apps and see what pops out, these apps should never replace the experience, knowledge, and advice you get from your own personal physician. Although these apps can be informative, they’re not always accurate or complete. It’s always best to consult with your own doctors—and use these apps to supplement, not replace, that information.