Digital Applications that Help with a Healthy Lifestyle
College is a time of stress, possible weight gain, and figuring out what routine works best for you. With the pressure to already be able to maintain a good balance between these three overwhelming life assets, social media can be negative contributor. Scrolling through Instagram and Twitter and viewing all of the lavish lifestyles that you are trying to work towards or fantasizing about can be an added discourager. BUT, let’s say that social media does not have to be a negative contributor to the added stress and possible weight gain that may come with college. There are many ways that social applications can help you stay in a routine of health and give you healthy ways to deal with stress. There are multiple apps that allow you to be able to track your calorie intake, tell you how many calories are in each food you have eaten that day, and overall help you maintain better eating habits. These applications are not there for you to belittle yourself for eating too much, they are available for you to be able to help you get out of a routine that might cause you to eat too much due to stress.
On top of stress eating, stress in general can be hard to manage especially with not only the pressure from school but from parents, social life, your job, taking care of pets, etc. There are multiple applications that you can literally have in your back pocket that provide you with just a quick 5 to 10 minute relief from reality. Some of them provide short meditations that help free your mind and calm your inner self without having to get up from your work station. A lot have helped with disorders that might be induced by stress such as panic disorders or anxiety disorders.
Headspace is an application that requires only a few minutes of your day to set your mind free. It can be at a certain scheduled time or whenever you are feelings stressed you can go into the app and pick how long you want to relieve some stress. The voice that talks to you throughout your meditation is very calming and he provides simple directions on how to clear your thoughts. It is definitely a favorite!
One application that is very useful for calorie counting is the MyPlate application. It provides daily nutrition charts, daily snapshots of protein, carbs and fat intake, and net calories by the day or the week. It also provides its users with meal plans that they can follow if they don’t know what foods to start changing in their life in order to become a healthier person.
Another application that is used for reducing anxiety is an app called Calm. This app is different from Headspace because it gives you calming pictures to look at while you take that time out of your day to meditate the stress away. It provides relaxing music, videos on how to do gentle body stretches, and enables you to have a better time sleeping (which is ALWAYS something that can induce stress).
A really good application that is more focused on creating healthy eating habits instead of dieting is called Foodstand. It aims to helps its users find food thats are healthier to replace rather than cutting off all enjoyable food in order to lose weight. It allows for users to track their progress on how they are either cutting out some foods one step at a time or adding new, nutritional foods to their daily routine.
Hopefully by exploring more, you will see that maintaining mental and physical health is important. Life can get ahead of us sometimes but with a little help from the digital world and its creations it is worth taking the extra step to take those 5 minutes out of your day to calm your mind or replace that cookie with some fresh strawberries. The digital world works in our favors more than not!