I have been hearing more and more people talk about living the vegan lifestyle. As someone who closely follows the sport of Mixed Martial Arts, I was surprised how many fighters choose to live vegan. At first, I was unsure about what made the vegan lifestyle different from a vegetarian, but I looked into it, and it is quite a difference.

I have come to realize that being a true vegan consists of not using any animal products, and it is much more than not eating certain things. I can tell you right now that I am not a vegan, but I am always fascinated with learning more about other lifestyles and what they consist of.

If you are interested in finding out more about the vegan way of life, and are perhaps interested in adopting it yourself, than I have some iPhone apps that will help you out a great deal. These apps offer everything from basic information on what it is like to be a vegan, recipes and ways to get more active in the vegan community and make a difference.

Be Vegan

This application is a good starting point for someone looking to get into the vegan lifestyle. It offers some basic recipes, though not as many as some of the other apps we will talk about later. Where this app shines is in their news and stories about things that are happening in the vegan world. They cover all the latest news and dig into the science behind being a vegan.

VegScan

This app allows users to scan barcodes for items while shopping and find out if the item is vegan and vegetarian. It is a user maintained app, so some items will not be there. You can add them if you know whether the item is or is not vegan. You earn points for adding items, so it makes it something of a game. The scanning worked well when I tested it, and even if the item wasn’t listed, it always detected the bar code.

Whole Foods Recipes

This is an application from the Whole Foods Stores. This application is not dedicated to Vegans, but it does have a tremendous database of Vegan recipes. By simply clicking on “Special Diets”, you can show only vegan recipes. They also have special picks for all kinds of other lifestyles if vegan is not your thing. If you shop at Whole Foods this is a must have app because you can quickly add all the items in a recipe to your shopping list, and have it readily available the next time you go to the store.

VeganYumYum Mobile

YumYum is one of the more popular online recipe boards, so it only makes sense that they would have a vegan version. This app is simple and straightforward. It is a list of all the vegan recipes on their website. There are well over 50 recipes on there. Each recipe has pictures, a list of ingredients and systematic instructions for preparation. They also have the ability to add a recipe to your favorites, so if you find something you love and want to make again, it will be just a couple of taps away.

PETA

The official PETA app has everything you need to know about helping animals. If choosing not to eat any animal products is not enough, and you want to take it to the next level than the PETA app has just what you need. It offers all the latest issues that need to be addressed. You can take action on any of the alerts and earn points and rankings. If you are looking to step up your involvement, check out this application. Even if you are not a vegan and you just want to help animals this is a great app to help you get involved.

Conclusion

With these applications, you will be ready to make the lifestyle change, if you should choose to do so. Obviously, being a vegan is not for everyone, including myself. If you think it might be for you, check out these applications and see if they help move you in the right direction.

What do you think of these free iPhone apps and if you tried them, did they help you. Let us know in the comments!

Image Credit: ShutterStock

The Internet is good at helping us to save money.  We used to have to buy books (and other information sources) in order to learn about dieting and cooking healthy food. Now we can now hit up the ol’ Internet and find stuff for free!  We can also find free online diets and diet tips to keep our costs low.

You will find four different categories of links in this article that should get you well on your way to dieting on a budget: nutritional guides, recipe sites, counters and calculators, and journaling.

Nutritional Guides

In order to begin eating healthy, you’ll need to figure out what foods are good and what foods are bad.  Some of these guides will help you see what is in some restaurant foods while others will offer some overall good nutritional information on many different foods.

• Fatburgr (MakeUseOf Directory mention) – find out what is in that fast food restaurant food with this site.
• FitBuff.com’s Fast Food Calorie Counter: Nutrition Facts and Statistics – This is another fast food nutrition guide and calorie counter.
• DietFacts.com – This site offers nutrition facts about many different restaurant establishments.

Recipe Sites

Cooking at home can be a great way to control your diet.  This way you don’t have all of that junk that restaurants put into their food.  True, you could hit up one of those bookstores and find some good healthy recipe books but isn’t it easier to find recipes for free online?  There are sites that will help you avoid eating out, sites that will help you cook on a budget, and sites containing healthy recipes.  Any of these sites will help you eat healthier and keep your costs low.

• notakeout.com (MakeUseOf Directory mention) – By offering simple recipes and simple instructions, this site will help you avoid eating out so much.
• Budget Bytes (MakeUseOf Directory mention) – This is a cool site containing low cost recipes and includes the cost per recipe and serving.
• Healthy Eating via the Food Network – This site contains some top notch healthy recipes from the Food Network website.

Counters & Calculators

While on your journey to dieting, you’ll want to make use of some tools that will help you “see the numbers.”  Use some of these tools in order to find your target weight, count calories, and even map an exercise route.

• CaloriesPerHour – calculate your calorie intake goal (how many calories should you be taking in)
• Halls.md Ideal Body Weight Calculator (MakeUseOf Directory mention) – This site will help you find what your healthy weight goal should be.
• Gmaps Pedometer (MakeUseOf article – great how-to guide) – Map a route and find out the distance and the probable amount of calories that will be burned with this Google Maps tool.

Journaling

What better way to keep an eye on how you’re doing and to get back on track than to keep a journal?  This list of links will give you instructions on how to keep a journal and one even has a free online journaling tool for you to make use of.

• How to Maintain a Diet Journal for Life – This is a great how-to article about how to keep a diet journal. (via wikiHow)
• Keeping a Diet Journal – This is an article outlining 2 types of diet journals and why they are used. (via 7habitsofweightloss)
• FitDay (MakeUseOf Directory mention) – This is a free online diet and weight loss journaling tool.

Sure, you can go out and buy books, pay money for those diet tips and plans, and even spend money on tools to help you diet.  The purpose of this list of resources is to help you get it done on a budget.  The tools here are free and many of the recipes are inexpensive to make (avoiding restaurants alone will help your diet and your pocketbook).

What tools and sites can you suggest to help someone dieting on a budget?

Working as a code churner by day and a writer by night hardly leaves me with any time to exercise those (lazy) muscles, so the only other thing that I can do is limit the number of calories I take in.

That, as you all know, is easier said than done. For example, how are you going to stop yourself from eating that Big Mac (with extra cheese!) for lunch or the Chicken Tikka Masala with Cheese Naan for dinner unless you know how many calories it has before ordering it. Nothing better to lose your appetite than a guilt trip!

That is exactly what Lose It! will help you with.

Lose It! is an iPhone calorie intake calculator that acts as your personal guilt trip service by telling you exactly how many calories each of your meals has and how much you need to exercise to reach your weight loss goals.

When you run Lose It! for the first time the application asks you a couple of questions like your current weight, your goal weight, your height, and how much do want to lose per week. Lose It! will then set a daily calorie budget for you.

Now, as you go through the day, you need to either Add Food or Add Exercise to Lose It!. The goal is to remain below the daily calories budget that you’ve been assigned. Easy enough for you ?

Lose It! has a pretty large database of the common types of food that we eat and the calories that they add. For example, I ate a Big Mac for lunch today. Let’s add that bit of info to the Lose It! calorie intake calculator.

Tap on Add Food and select Lunch. Since McDonalds is a pretty famous name, we’ll just search for it under Brand Name Foods -> Restaurant Foods. Type in McDonalds.

Select what you ate from the list and Lose It! will show you the number of calories that your meal contained, and ask you to enter the quantity that you ate.

As you can see, I’m not doing too well with my diet plans. The Big Mac for lunch and the Burger King Whopper for dinner really doesn’t help me with my goal of losing 1lb a week.

So, let’s exercise a bit and add my workout to Lose It!. I love playing squash and since I have a squash court close to where I live, that’s what I’ll play. Of course, with my current fitness levels, an hour of squash is all that I can last for!

Click on the ‘+’ sign and select Exercise. Browse for the extensive list of sports available, select Squash and move the counter to 1 hour.

Ha! I’m still under 1685 calories for the day! I guess I can reward myself with that dessert!

So, you see, Lose It! is not only a very good application to help you track what you’ve eaten, it’ll also tell you just how much you can afford to splurge on yourself and still be on track to losing those extra pounds.

How do you guys plan your diet? Do you like to keep track of the calories you’re consuming?

Image credit: bensonkua

One of the first steps in being healthy is changing how you spend your time, which will include getting rid of some bad habits. For many, this will mean no more snacking on potato chips, popcorn or soda. For others, it means quitting smoking or consuming alcohol; and still others will have to do all three. Either way, Ryan recently found a website called Joes Goals and this is a good place to start if you’re trying to break a bad habit. He also wrote about the best workout websites that combine technology and fitness. Both these articles are great and I hope they will come in handy.

However, there’s another website dedicated to helping their community to lose weight and feel great – SparkPeople.

SparkPeople’s motto is “Lose Weight. Get Fit. Look and Feel Great!” and they have really done a fantastic job at developing a site that has multiple tools and features to help you achieve your weight loss goal! It has everything from:

• expert advice
• blogs
• weight calculators
• fitness videos
• meal planning
• custom workouts based on your goals

SparkPeople is a HUGE website so I suggest checking out the Getting Started Guide to learn how to use the site.

After you sign up, you will see the main area with three primary tools:

• Nutrition Tracker – create a menu and shopping list based on your goals.
• Fitness Tracker – create a workout based on your goals.
• Weigh-In – calculate your calorie and nutrient needs based on your weight loss.

Each of these tools is a link to various options and features. For example, when you click on the Fitness Tracker, you can view an auto-generated workout based on your goals. One of the nice features with SparkPeople is you can also watch a demo on how to do each exercise.

There is also a section where you can modify an auto-generated workout or create one from scratch.

Notice the screen shot above is just showing the exercise options based on “crunches”.  There is a plethora of exercise options based on selections, such as: upper body, lower body and core. Furthermore, each of those areas have beginner and advanced sections.

For those who are looking for expert tips and video workouts for the home or gym, SparkPeople has a free video section as well.

I have only skimmed the surface of what the SparkPeople website has to offer you on losing weight and feeling great. I have not yet started to get into the: blog, message board, receipes, teams and other SparkPeople tools; you can even create your own Sparks web page.

If you use SparkPeople and have a favorite section that I did not mention, please let us know. Also, if you use a different site to help you lose weight, share with us in the comments.

Image credit: N!el from Flickr

But why do something so mundane when we’ve got all this great technology! A very straightforward yet robust tool I’ve found is Gmaps Pedometer. It’s an interface to Gmaps that allows you to plan walking routes in pretty much any town in the world! You can create your own walking routes, have them autmatically done, count calories, or throw in mile markers for interval training. By the way, interval training is sometimes known as Fartlek training. I just love saying that. “Hey honey, whaddya got your shoes on for?” “I’m doing some Fartlekking.” Tee hee, I’m so juvenile.

Anyway, here’s how to set a route with Gmaps Pedometer.

Step 1 – Go to the Site

Gmaps Pedometer

Seriously, I’ve known people that would miss that step.

Step 2 -Start Planning the Walking Route

At the top of the screen, enter the town of place that you will be walking. Great idea for travelers – plan your walk before you go. I’m going to use Stanley Park in Vancouver, B.C. Canada You should go. There’s a world class aquarium, beautiful botanical garden, right on the ocean. Very nice!

Using the slider on the left of the map, or the drop down box next to the Go button, zoom down a level that focuses just on the area you want to walk.

Step 3 – Create the Walking Route

Click the Start Recording Button to, well, start recording. Now double click on the map the place you wish to start. Look down the road and double click a little further.

Aha! Now you see the red line and you know what the program is doing. It’s creating your route and measuring it at the same time.

Step 4 – Check the Effect

I’ve mapped out a route that is about 2.2 Km. Just fine for my bumpy buttocks. But what sort of damage will that do? To find out, I’ve entered my weight in the Weight field and it automagically approximates how many calories I’ll burn. The calculation isn’t terribly accurate, but it certainly gives you a good idea.

Step 5 – Save the Route

If you are subject to a poor short term memory like I am, you can print the map, save it and put in on your GPS or simple bookmark it by clicking on the Save Route link, or any combination of the three. Then, If you are subject to a poor short term memory…I typed that already didn’t I? Well, now you’ve got your marching orders and there’s only one more step to go.

Step 6 – Get to Stepping

Map in hand, repaced tunes on the iPod, get out that front door and take care of business. And when your fitness level is up and the route is too easy, come on back to Gmaps Pedometer and make a new route, or several. The problem for a lot of people is that exercise becomes boring and routine. Change it up!

If you want to connect with other walkers, check out Walker Tracker. It’s a fun community of like-minded walkers to encourage each other and track progress.

How do you plan your walking routes? Know of any good ways to add routes to your GPS? Got a success story to share? I need all the motivation I can get. This is a lot of inertia to overcome. Let me know in the comments.

The best way to lose abdominal weight, or even just to control your weight overall when you can’t seem to get much exercise, is through controlling your diet. However, keeping track of what you eat and the calories you consume can feel both overwhelming and annoying. Who wants to waste time jotting down the calories of every little snack or drink?

Being a geek who’s always interested in Internet resources that will do all of my work for me, naturally I decided to turn to the Internet for my weight loss needs. MakeUseOf has touched on weight loss solutions in the past, such as Tina’s article listing 6 cool sites to help you keep New Year’s resolutions in 2009 as well as a number of calorie and weight loss calculators.

Lose Weight for Free With the Daily Plate

If you perform a Google search for “how to lose weight,” you’ll get back an entire truckload of weight loss scams that will leave you as fat as ever. Why don’t diets work? Because, as any professional dietician will tell you, there’s no magic formula that’s going to make you magically lose weight. Physics still comes into play. As a biological creature, if you take in more energy (calories) than you expend, you’re gonna plump up like the Goodyear Blimp.

So what’s a body to do? It’s simple. The best way to lose abdominal weight is to find an easy way to keep track of the food you eat and the energy it holds. By doing so, you can control the way you eat in order to get to your ideal body weight. I’ve found that there are foods that can help me lose weight by suppressing appetite, but ultimately you need a tool that will help you lose weight for free by tracking and calculating the total calories in the food you eat. The DailyPlate does just that.

Keeping Track of Calories and Nutrition

Once you get through the one-page registration, you can immediately get started tracking your food intake, looking up nutritional information, taking part in the DailyPlate forum community, or, heaven forbid, calculate the calories you’ve burned by working out (in an alternate universe).

The food diary is fast and easy, and by using it you never have to count a single calorie again. After each meal, you simply click on “My Plate,” search for the food you’ve eaten and add it to your diary.

One of the things that surprised me was the accuracy and size of the DailyPlate food database. For example, when I searched for “multigrain bagel,” I not only found thousands of results, but I found the exact bagel from Dunkin Donuts that I’d purchased that morning. To my dismay, it turned out that a Dunkin Donuts multigrain bagel is one of the most calorie saturated bagels in existence.  Luckily, the website application also offers suggestions for foods that can help me lose weight.  I can use all of the advice I can get.

Once you click on the item you ate, all of the data gets loaded into your “daily plate,” including calories, fat, carbs and all other nutritional content. The website automatically tracks all of the nutrition that you eat during the day.  As you add the food, the items show up on your My Plate page.

Cool Features For Lazy People

You probably got to this point because you’re too lazy to get on a treadmill, let alone constantly keep a log of the food you eat. That’s why The DailyPlate is perfect. To make the process even easier, the folks at The DailyPlate created a few extra, cool features to the site. The first of these is a “meal” system, where you can pre-load specific meals that you eat often.

Now, when you click on your “Standard Work Lunch,” it automatically loads the ham and cheese sandwich, pickle, and chips that you eat almost every day.  Underneath this widget in the right menu, you’ll also find the “What I Eat Often” box, where the foods you recently entered are listed.

After a while, you’ll find you can simply log into the system, click on the foods you eat often, and then log out – in a matter of seconds.  There are a few calorie management systems out there that are as easy as this. The right menu bar also saves the exercise and activities that you add to your daily calorie log, also for easy point and click use.

As you add items to your log of food and activities, the system gets easier and easier to use, because all of those items get loaded into these right menu widgets.  As you add the food you eat, and the exercises that you’ve done (if any), the page lists your calorie and nutritional totals at the bottom.

As the day goes on, each time you log in you can see how much of your daily calories and nutrition that you’ve already consumed. As you can see above – I love salt.

Monitor Your Progress With Graphs & Charts

Everyone loves a good chart, especially when you’re not the one who has to put it together. The cool thing about the DailyPlate is that as you’re entering your food consumption and activity details, the website constantly keeps track of your progress. Just check out the charts, calorie goals or weight goals at the top of your My Plate page.  As an example, I’ve clicked on my weight history for a graph of my weight from the beginning of 2008 into 2009.

Okay, it’s obvious I’ve been on the wrong track.  But a guy has to start somewhere right?  The system also tracks the calories you’ve consumed versus your calorie goal (based on your weight and activity level).  This progress is displayed on a dot chart.

Best of all, from the main page, you can monitor a pie chart that instantly updates as you add the food you’ve consumed. Just above that, you can even monitor how much water you’ve had throughout the day, to make sure that you hit the daily recommended limit (about 1.9 liters a day).

All of the information on your My Plate page, and the charts and data in the background, are constantly updated and tracked as you quickly click on the foods you eat throughout the day.  Counting calories has never been this easy.

Do you have a favorite website or application that you use to keep track of your health and fitness goals? Share your insight in the comments section below.

You can also apply these methods to Outlook, Thunderbird, or any other mail client with some similar features. Let’s jump right in!

Writing a diary

Gmail is almost built for this function in a sense. It is private, it can store as many entries as you want, you can categorize using labels, everything is there to make this a great diary application.

Each day, start a new email draft in the morning and either write everything that happened to you that day when you get home in the evening, or add to it as the day goes by. When you’ve written all there is to say, you can save the email, or better yet, send it to yourself.

The great thing about this method is that it allows you to amend any comments, or your friends to comment on an entry too. Just reply to an entry and send it to yourself again to add some additional thoughts, or send the whole message to a friend to get his/her comments. This way all the comments will stay in one thread, so you will have a very organized diary indeed.

Plus, you get all the categorization and search features Google offers you. You can use labels to add your emotional state (happy, sad, etc.) or you can categorize as usual, highlighting the main events of the day.

Keeping your diet

You can also use the power of Gmail to manage your diet and take a look at how many calories you consume daily. This is helpful because you can dedicate a whole inbox to this subject and you can keep track of your progress on a daily (or even more frequent) basis.

I recommend either adding a new message for each meal you ate, or adding one each day. I would write what I ate, ingredients, how it made me feel, was it necessary, and all the additional info you need in the message body, and write the calorie count in the subject. This would give me at a glance info about my consumption if I take a look at the inbox.

You can use labels to flag all the days where your consumption was good, and to highlight the ones where it was not so great. You can also create labels for the amount you consume. Create one for 500-700, 700-1000, 1000-1400, 1400-2000, etc. You can then easily switch to view all the days where you were in these specific regions.

Book & Movie Organizer

Gmail can also help you organize your Books and Movies, or indeed any other items you have a collection of. If we take Books as an example, you can create a new email for each book you have. Type the book title, author and ISBN in the subject, this will help you sort and search very easily later on.

You can write a short synopsis of the book, along with any other info, like publisher and so on in the body, plus you can include an image from Amazon to accompany it. Just we did with the diary you can write down your opinion, your review and so on as replies to that email. You can also send the email off to your friends to get their opinion on the book.

You can create emails for books you would like to read, which will come in handy when you’re shopping (you already have a list of titles with ISBNs you would like), and when you want to decide which one to get (you can send them off to friends who have read them to get their take on the book).

Labels can be used well to mark the genre of each book, but you can also use them to indicate whether you liked a book or not. If you also enter books you would like to read later on, you should also assign a label to separate them from books you have already read.

Google’s search will give you a great way to sort through your collection, all you need to do is enter the title or the ISBN and you have it already. I for one read good books multiple times and I have approximately 30 Terry Pratchett books. Selecting which one to read (again) is no easy task, and this system helps me, and could help you too.

Note Taker & Task Manager

Nowadays when we have Google Notebook, Remember The Milk, Todoist, Zoho Writer or Adobe Buzzword we have quite a few note taking and management goodness apps at our fingertips, but I like to keep things simple and integrated, so I came up with a system to use Gmail for taking notes and managing tasks.

Basically there are two types of emails, a note or a task. Notes are assigned the label “note”, tasks are left without a label. I keep adding notes and I use other labels to categorize them (personal, work, website design, etc), the main thing is to separate needed and not needed notes. If a note becomes unimportant I just delete it, or archive it, depending on the contents. Make sure the subject is to the point and short, so you can sort through your notes in a jiffy.

Tasks are mainly managed using the Gmail Superstars system, which can be enabled in the settings under Google Labs. It replaces the usual Gmail stars with an assortment of different icons like a green tick, or a red exclamation mark. I use the normal star, the blue star, the exclamation mark and the tick to indicate the status of a task.

If I enter a task and it needs my further attention until I can start work I slap the yellow star onto it. If I am waiting for someone else’s input to get it going I apply the blue star. The exclamation mark is used when I need to work on a task and the tick is used to mark finished tasks.

This method enables me to have an inbox where I just keep notes and tasks. All the methods we talked about above like sending a task to someone to get their opinion and so on still apply, you can add more using threads, and of course you have the all powerful search available.

Conclusion

While Gmail is not a management system or a CMS, it can do a pretty good job of organizing anything really. It won’t beat some top notch systems, and is NOT a better note taker than Google Notebook, or other services, but if you just need simplicity and ease of access, these uses may be for you. let us know if you use your Gmail inbox for some weird stuff!