We all want to eat well and stay fit. However, only a few achieve that goal, and often with great sacrifices. A busy lifestyle often limits our choices to faster, but unhealthy alternatives. But it does not need to be like that! Tracking our daily routines and eating preferences explores our habits, and allows us to make healthier choices with minimal impact on our busy lives.
Carb and Move Wellness is an iPhone and iPod application designed for users of all age groups, aiming to promote a healthy lifestyle through precise monitoring of key elements of wellness such daily food intake and exercise.
Using intuitive graphs relating consumed nutrients and endured exercises; this app offers a simple, real-time way to monitor user’s wellness goals. By tightly merging the properties of consumed foods such as carbs, glycemic indexes and loads with exercises, this app gives a new level of freedom in selecting appropriate meals and timing the post meal exercises.
Carb and Move Wellness app tracks the energy balance in daily exercises and meals helping users achieving: weight loss, staying physically active and maintaining carb/calories discipline. Towards that, the app accounts for the post-meal blood glucose level impact of: carbs (due to the glycemic indices and glycemic loads of the meals) and exercise (due to the intensity and post-meal timing). The app registers continuously user’s activities through the day. The exercise tracking includes a precise recognition of the type of motion and detailed matching of speeds of walking and running for users ranging from young children to seniors.
Users are given flexibility in defining exercise and energy balance goals that are either recurring daily or relate to specific one-time events. The exercise goals can be expressed in terms of: step count, calories expenditure or duration of exercises. A finely grained distinction between ten different speeds of walking and running allows users to monitor activity progress, and, in general, provide close tracking of the type and intensity of exercise. Due to busy schedule, it is not always possible to reserve time for the exercises. Precise, continuous motion monitoring recognizes an exercise component in typical daily activities and adds it to the overall daily exercise goal. In this way, users can be active, and reach the exercise goal with the minimized impact on the daily schedule.
Staying active is only one part of the daily wellness routine. The other one is eating well. This app tracks user’s calories and carbs goals for all the meals of the day. To eliminate the feeling of restriction often associated with imposing exercise and meal goals, this app offers a flexible goal tracking method, where the next meal goal can be dynamically adjusted depending on the history of meals consumption in the day, as well as the intensity of current exercise routine. Therefore, a little indulgence in the previous meal can be easily compensated in the meal to come. Similarly, the app will calculate how much the user can reward him/herself in the next meal for an above the goal exercise effort.
Carbs counting in meals is a crucial feature for weight loss and (pre-) diabetes control. Depending on the diet plan or a need for blood glucose control, carbs counting provided by this app can either include or exclude dietary fiber. Planning daily meal menus and keeping track of consumed calories, carbs, fats, proteins, as well as glycemic indexes and loads of the food is now much simpler due to the in-built Food Library of over 5000 common food items. For each product in the Food Library the user is provided with detailed nutritional information including glycemic index and load. Glycemic indexes and loads are factors indicating the speed of the digestion of consumed carbs, and are helpful measures for users touched by diabetes.
To reinforce calorically fit food choices the app offers energy-equivalent exercise samples to offset the calories content of the food. Further, the app can help to reduce undesired post-meal blood sugar peaks by suggesting the post-meal timing and type of exercises targeting only a portion of consumed calories. The app uses the amount of consumes carbs as well as the glycemic index and glycemic load to propose the exercise routine for lowering the post-meal blood glucose peak caused by a particular meal taken. To reinforce the relation between the food, exercise routine and daily energy balance, a detailed graph pictures the food intake and exercise data at different levels of granularity (hourly, daily, weekly, etc.). The visualization of the relation between the food and exercise throughout the program can help to make food choices more appropriate for the daily activities level. In particular, a detailed analysis of food nutrients and characteristics such as glycemic index and load can be helpful in associating types of food with the post meal physical activities.
For all the users concerned with their weight, the app offers an easy way for establishing and maintaining a weight-loss plan. The user is given weekly calories deficit (modified each week) helpful to reinforce the achievement of the desired weight. The daily calories deficit can be incorporated into either daily meal or exercise goals. For the daily weight-loss calories deficit the app offers the sample exercises, which burn the equivalent amount of calories. Close exercise and meal tracking provided by the app improves the execution of the weight-loss plan. Detailed graphical analysis of nutrients consumed and exercise endured in the previous week (including the complete meal plan of from each day) offers further help in making the weight-loss process less depriving and more effective.
The app provides maximum autonomy and privacy for the users, as no data of any kind is kept online or anywhere outside their phones. No signup to any online server is needed. The database consisting initially of 5000+ common meal items is accessible always, does not depend on network connections and can be easily augmented with users’ preferred food items. The app runs uninterruptedly in the background and works for iPhones or iPods that don’t posses a motion coprocessor. Finally, the app is advertisement-free.
Warning
Before starting any diet or exercise program users should consult with the doctor. Due to variations in personal metabolism, the results of the diet can vary.
Post-meal exercises proposed to minimize the impact of the consumed food on the blood glucose are only a suggestion, and should be discussed with the doctor. Exercises and diet should never be used as a replacement of the medications.
Carb and Move Wellness takes no responsibility for any injuries resulting from exercise and diet routines.
