healthy living
Latest
Set healthy goals with iHydrate
Despite the numerous studies about how drinking more water keeps us focused and energized and does things like help us fight off colds and stave off migraines, most of us fail at drinking the recommended eight glasses of water a day. iHydrate, US$1.99 in the App Store, helps you to get your daily 64 ounces through reminders and goal setting techniques. Before you start tracking your beverage intake, iHydrate asks you simple questions about your sex, age and weight so that it can set your water intake for each day. The app set my daily intake to 80 ounces of water. This seemed a bit ambitious to me, so, with the custom setting option, I reset it to 64 ounces. While iHydrate's goal is for you to drink more water, you can enter in any type of beverage. There are options for water, milk, soda, coffee, tea, juice, plus energy and sports drinks. Each of these is associated with a color so that you can track how much of each beverage you drink. Simply click on your drink of choice and enter in the amount of ounces to add it to your daily tally. Ounces are the default measurement, but you can change this to milliliters in the settings. Once you've added the drink, it shows up in the pie chart and iHydrate tells you how many ounces you have left for the day. The only flaw in this app is that it does not account for the variations in hydration levels of beverage types. When you drink a cup of coffee, the app counts that toward your daily 64 ounces of water. If the app's goal is hydration, then a diuretic like coffee shouldn't count the same as water. The more coffee you drink, the more water you need to consume to offset coffee's negative effects. The app should increase your recommended daily water intake based on how much coffee, tea or soda you drink. Maybe that will end up in a future update. Still, the pie chart clues you in to how much of your fluid intake is actually good for you. That's important for those of us who don't realize how much we subsist on coffee and soda. There is a reminder feature, which I never used because the idea of the app itself was motivation enough. You can set as many reminders as you need and make them recurring to help you build healthy habits. Other than the one flaw mentioned above, iHydrate is a great app that I plan to keep using. It's perfect for anyone who wants to make a small change that will have a big impact on their overall health.
IBM wins diet monitoring and reward patent, celebrates with sip of Spirulina
Does your employer offer a "wellness rebate program?" No? Then you can't be working for IBM, which has been bribing its staff to eat healthier since 2004. It's a Watson-worthy idea, because what the company pays out in incentives it recoups in lower healthcare costs. Now, after a decade of toing and froing with the USPTO, IBM has finally patented a web-based system that makes the whole process automatic. For it to work, a person must use a micro-payment network to buy food, which allows their purchases to be monitored and compared against their health records. If they've made the right choices, the system then communicates with their employer's payroll server to issue a reward. Completing the Orwellian circle, the proposed system also interacts with servers in the FDA and health insurance companies to gain information about specific food products or policy changes. You can duck the radar, of course, and buy a Double Whopper with cash, but it'll bring you no reward except swollen ankles. This is IBM we're talking about; they've thought of everything. [Photo via Shutterstock]
Buffing for BlizzCon: No pigging out at the Great Feast
Buff(ing) for BlizzCon is a bi-weekly fitness series written by ShrinkGeek authors Rafe Brox and Michael McGreevy. Join the WoW.com team in getting in shape for the ultimate WoW geek event: BlizzCon 2010. There are two words that can seriously take the shine off of anyone's efforts to lead a healthy lifestyle: "I can't." The minute you start saying that, you start stacking up the frustration debuff, which almost invariably leads to some kind of indulgent meltdown that can cause a huge setback or completely derail all the good work you've done. We want to feel good about the choices we are making, and most people don't feel good when they say the words, "I can't." ... Unless, you know, they are responding to a question like, "Can you stick this razor-sharp sword into your eye?" That question, fortunately, doesn't come up much in polite conversation. One that does, however: "Would you like to go out to eat?" Ah, yes. Our old nemesis, the restaurant. I've written in the past about how it's easier to eat at a restaurant after some advance research to find the good choices on the menu -- but what if it's a spontaneous outing or the restaurant doesn't have any obviously good choices? What if you don't know where you're going before you get there, or the restaurant doesn't have its menu available online? There are a lot of factors that can make dining out a challenge when you're trying to watch your caloric intake, but that doesn't mean you have to avoid those situations altogether. There are several tricks you can stash up your sleeve to keep the "I can't" debuff at bay and enjoy your meal without taking too much damage in the process.
