Lately I’ve become a bit obsessed with the idea of life hacking. Life hacking are the little cheats and shortcuts you can take to make your life easier. Life hacking has also made me love my phone just a little bit more. I’ve been using apps that help me ‘life hack’ for a while now and these are my favourites:
1. My Fitness Pal/WW Diary
I’m perpetually trying to lose weight and one of the things that’s worked best for me is keeping a food diary. The two apps above are the best ones I’ve found for keeping track of what I’m eating.
My Fitness Pal is great if you’re calorie counting. You can input what you eat and the library of foods is really extensive. It also links to www.myfitnesspal.com so you check your progress there and input foods there. On the website you can create recipes whereby you input all the ingredients and it calculates how many calories, carbs, protein, etc., in one portion.
WW Diary is good if you’re doing Weightwatchers and it is updated very regularly too so if you have an issue with it, chances are it will be rectified pretty quickly. I use it in conjunction with WWCalcUK as I don’t trust the calculator in WW Diary.
2. The Fuel App
This is basically just an app for the Pumps.ie site. Using GPS or your network signal it finds the petrol stations closest to you and let’s know the cost of petrol/diesel there and when that price was updated. It’s saving me quite a bit of money of petrol lately.
Runkeeper just tracks any exercise or activity you do. It uses GPS to track where you go and how fast you’re moving. There’s loads of different activities you input too so the information will be accurate.
You can also see your information on runkeeper.com
If you’re not a runner C25K is also a good app. It follows the Couch 2 5K plan to get you running 5K in 8 weeks.
4. Easy Money
I’m terrible with money. I won’t deny it. I’ve tried to budget but I never end up sticking to it.
Easy Money allows me to keep track of all my bills and create a budget for the month. It also lets me know how my spending is going and view charts of what I’m spending money on most. You can also keep track of multiple accounts so I know how much money I have in my bank account, in cash, on my Visa and on my work swipe card.
This is probably going to be the first app that I’ll actually buy!
5. Best Before
In addition to being bad with money I’m also terrible with food. I waste so much money by throwing food out because it’s gone off. I just buy it and forget about it!
Best Before allows me to keep a list of what food I have in the fridge/cupboard and set when they will go off. It’s really handy. Earlier it told me that I had eggs that were about to go off. Instead of letting them go off and then throwing them out I made some lovely chocolate brownies.
Actually, it’s not an app but Allrecipes.com is a great site. Look for the Ingredient Search button which lets you input the ingredients you have and the ingredients you don’t have and it will give you a recipe! Really useful for using up the last of some things.
Happy life hacking!
Thanks for mentioning my app! Please let me know if the point calculator is inaccurate for you. Start a thread on the forum and I’ll get to the bottom of it.