Apps to help you drink less 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.
If you worry about your drinking (indeed, if you ever prefix 'drinking' with 'my'), chances are you know you drink more the recommended guidelines. You may not realise just how far over the guidelines you are. The premise of My.Drinkaware is that if you measure your drinking, you'll naturally start to cut down. You log your drinks every day and it calculates the financial and calorific cost and tells you if you're low, increasing or higher risk.
I'm no more of a booze hound than the next girl (I realise saying that makes me sound like a borderline alcoholic), so I was shocked to discover that at particularly drinksy event like, say, a wedding, I can easily drink 2.5 times the weekly guidelines in a day WITHOUT EVEN TRYING. Whether or not this app helps you cut down, it will certainly show you how much you actually drink, which is probably half the bottle, oops, I mean battle. Be warned, though, use of this app can seriously impede your desire to "get your party on" in the future. You may have to find another way to have fun.
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.
App: Intelli-Diet
Available: iPhone
Willpower substitute: 4/10
Intelli-Diet (the logo's an apple with glasses, see what they did there?) eschews calorie counting and instead takes your weight, height, goals, food likes and dislikes etc, and churns out a daily personalised diet plan. A bit like a nutritionist would do. A nutritionist like celebrities have! This sounded fancy - until I saw the plans. They are healthy. They are generous. And over two weeks I did shrink by 4lbs. But the plans include no sauce. Just a protein, a carb and some veggies. For example, one dinner comprised beans, brown rice, brussels sprouts and an avocado. That's a massive helping of not-yum.
On balance, if I must chose between a life without losing those final few pounds and a life with sauce, I choose sauce. A life without sauce is a life unlived. It is also unworkable if you live with a man. Men just won't submit to this sort of low-level self-harm. It is possible to eat the foods featured in this app in non-disgusting combinations. Intelli-Diet just needs to go back to cookery school to figure them out.
Resolution: do more
App: Todo
Available: iPhone
Willpower substitute: 7/10
Oh, I love lists. I could write you a list about how much I love them ... but that's not really what we're here for. There are a lot of list apps out there, all of which claim to be able to help you get organised and do more. Of all the getting-stuff-done apps I tried, Todo is the leader by far. You can add three types of task: Normal, Checklist and, my personal fave, Project, an uber-task made up of little tasks. Tasks can be ordered by day, given deadlines and reminders, and vital data such as urls and phone numbers can be added. Once completed, tasks move into a done list that grows satisfyingly over time and is cheering to look at if you ever accidentally get a bit of low self-esteem.
Todo is a worthy successor to the humble scrap of paper by the kettle and genuinely helped me get stuff done. It rescued me from forgetting several important things this month. But perhaps the best things about Todo is that if you ever lose your phone, no one can reasonably expect you to do anything at all.
Resolution: stop smoking
App: Cold Turkey & NHS Quitsmoking
Available: iPhone
Willpower substitute: 2/10 (Cold turkey), 7/10 (NHS)
Last year researchers at George Washington University put 47 quit smoking apps to the test. They tested how well the apps adhered to US Public Health Service's 20 key guidelines for treating tobacco dependence, with three points for each guideline. Cold Turkey came top with 30 points out of a possible 60. This tells us that most quit smoking apps are a bit rubbish.
Cold Turkey tallies how much money you've saved since you quit and how many days you've added to your life. There's a timeline to show how quitting will improve your health over time and a 'Help I Feel Like Smoking' section with motivational statements for when a craving hits. Unfortunately, most of these involve a picture of some cigarettes for you to gaze longingly at. A game to play or something to do with my hands till the craving passed would have been more useful.
The NHS Quitsmoking app is better. It links through to the NHS advice service, features tips and facts, and keeps track of fags not smoked, money saved and days, hours, minutes and seconds since you smoked. The latter gave me the motivation I needed to stay smoke-free.