Groucho Marx had the right idea when he said that he wanted to live forever or die trying. There are plenty of things we should be doing to not only extend our lifespans but also how long we remain healthy.
The good news is that help is available. I’m using a selection of iPhone apps to try and live forever by moving more, making exercise a core part of my routine, eating better, and taking care of my mental health. Here are my favorites.
Wakeout
A sedentary lifestyle is linked with a significant number of health risks. There is evidence that links being sedentary to an increased risk of obesity, heart disease, diabetes, depression and anxiety, and even some forms of cancer. What’s worse is that even if you are physically active outside your sedentary hours, long periods of sitting can still negatively impact your health.
I spend the vast majority of my day sitting at a desk, and it’s all too easy to sit there for hours at a time without moving, which has a significant chance of reducing my lifespan. That’s why I use the Wakeout app.
Wakeout is packed with short groups of exercises that you can do at your desk, around your home or office, or even sitting in your chair. It tracks your exercises and gives you an indication of how sedentary you’ve been. You can set your own difficulty to match your fitness level, and even set a target amount of activity per hour to ensure that you don’t just do it all in one big burst.
I use it in combination with a Pomodoro timer. I do 25 minutes of focused work, and then a 3-minute set of exercises. It’s then easy to do 30 minutes or more of exercise throughout the day without really noticing it.
Apple Workout
Reducing how much you are sedentary is a good way to help extend your lifespan, but it’s not enough on its own. The World Health Organization recommends that we all do at least 150 minutes of moderate-intensity exercise each week, which can offer significant health benefits. Knowing what counts as moderate intensity isn’t always easy, however.
That’s why I use the Workout app on my Apple Watch to help. Although not strictly an iPhone app, it syncs with the Health app on my iPhone so I can track my exercise. The reason that the Apple Watch is so beneficial is that it tracks your heart rate, meaning that you can tell how hard you’re working.
Moderate intensity is considered to be between 50% and 70% of your maximum heart rate. You can calculate your maximum heart rate by subtracting your age from 220. Half of this value is the minimum heart rate you need to have when exercising for it to be of moderate intensity. You don’t need an Apple Watch to track this; any fitness tracker that can measure heart rate will do.
Fitbod
Bodyweight training is a simple way to exercise without the need for any additional equipment. It’s easy to do squats or push-ups at any time in your own home. However, as we age, our muscular strength and bone density decline. This poses serious risks, as it means we’re much more liable to fall and break bones, and breaking a hip can increase the risk of death in the following year by up to 20% in older women and as much as 33% in older men.
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Bodyweight exercise alone isn’t enough to counteract this decline in muscle mass and bone density, however. Resistance training, using resistance bands or ideally weights, is needed to strengthen the muscles and reduce the risk of falls and fractures.
To that end, I use an app called Fitbod which generates workout sessions based on the home exercise equipment you have available. Using just some dumbbells, resistance bands, and a pull-up bar, Fitbod gives me a full-body workout throughout the week that helps to increase strength and endurance.
The app will adapt to your strength and fitness levels so that the workouts are never too hard or too easy, and you can choose when you work out and for how long. Once you’re into a routine, you can soon start to see results.
Bevel
Bevel is an app with an explicit purpose to try to extend your “healthspan.” This term is slightly different to lifespan, because you could live for a long time in poor health with very little quality of life. Increasing your healthspan means increasing the length of time that you remain fit and healthy.
The app offers several useful features. It can track your sleep, since good quality sleep is crucial for longevity and overall health. You can use it to track your food to ensure that you’re getting the right balance and not overeating.
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The app can also track your stress, your recovery, and your heart rate and give you useful feedback on your scores and what you need to improve. There are a lot of apps that can do some of these things, but Bevel combines them into a single app, making it easier to track a wide range of health metrics.
Yuka
Ultra-processed foods have been getting a lot of press in recent years, due to the significant risks that they pose to our health. It’s frightening to discover that foods that we would consider healthy, such as bread purchased from a grocery store, can contain preservatives and other additives that are potentially harmful to health. The challenge is knowing which foods are ultra-processed and which are free from harmful additives.
This is where the Yuka app comes in. You can use the app to scan the barcode of any food product using your smartphone camera. As long as the food has been added to the database, you’ll see a list of the positive and negative ingredients and an overall score out of 100 indicating whether the food is considered healthy or not.
If any dangerous additives are included, you can tap on that ingredient to see information on what the additive is, what it does, and what impact the additive has been shown to have on your health. Using the app can be quite frightening at first, as you realize that foods you had assumed were healthy are actually full of dangerous ingredients.
The good news is that there are plenty of foods available that don’t include these additives, and the app will offer alternative options for any foods that you scan so that you can make healthier choices. You can also use the app to scan cosmetics and toiletries, too, many of which include harmful ingredients.
Headspace
It’s all too easy to focus on physical health and forget about your mental health. However, issues such as stress and anxiety can have a significant impact not only on our quality of life but also on how long we live. Stress, for example, is a significant factor in the aging process.
Mindfulness isn’t a cure for mental health issues, and it won’t stop you from ever suffering from stress, but it may at least help. Not only has mindfulness been shown to help to reduce stress, but some studies have even found a link between mindfulness and cellular longevity.
There are plenty of mindfulness apps available, and while you don’t need an app to practice mindfulness, they can definitely help. I use the Headspace app, which offers general guided mindfulness meditations as well as focused sessions on specific topics such as sleep or calming anxiety.
Waterminder
Our bodies are mostly water, with adult women being around 50% water and adult men around 60%. The amount of water in our bodies reduces as we age, with babies averaging around 75% water but dropping below 50% for older adults. That’s why, the older we get, the more water we need to drink to stay hydrated.
Keeping track of how much water you’ve drunk throughout the day isn’t easy as it’s something you do so often that it can be easy to forget whether you’ve had a drink or not. Thankfully, there are plenty of apps that can track how much water you’ve drunk.
I can track my water intake in the Bevel app, but sometimes you just need an app that does one thing simply and effectively. Waterminder is the best option that I’ve found, thanks mostly to its simple widget. The iPhone widget displays a human body, and the body fills up with water as I log my intake during the day. With just a glance, I can see how much of my target intake I’ve reached, and whether I need to start drinking more to catch up.
The app can sync with the Apple Health app, which will then share the information with any other apps that you allow access. It means that if I log my water intake in Waterminder, that information is automatically added to the Bevel app so I can see my hydration alongside my other stats.
Streaks
It’s all very good to have well-meaning plans about how you’re going to take action to improve your health. The trouble is, sticking to those plans is easier said than done. You can start off with the best of intentions, but soon things start to slip, and before you know it, you’re back to your old ways.
I needed a way to motivate myself to keep doing all the things that could help me to live longer. Once again, there are plenty of apps that can help. I’ve tried various habit-tracking apps, including Habitica, which gamifies tasks and rewards you for completing them.
In the end, however, I moved to something simpler. Streaks is an app that is solely intended to help to track streaks of things that you want to achieve on a regular basis. If you want to try to do Duolingo every day, or get 30 minutes exercise each day, or read a book every day, you can use the app to log these activities.
The clever part is that the app can monitor many of these things for you. For example, if you want to ensure that you close your Apple Watch rings every day, you can link the app to Apple Health, and the task will automatically be marked as completed once you’ve closed all three rings.
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The general idea is that once you’ve built up a streak, you feel much more motivated to keep it going, knowing that if you miss a day, your streak ends, and you have to start all over again. It works well for me, and I build in even more motivation by promising myself a reward if I keep a streak for an entire month. For example, if there’s a tech gadget I want to buy, I’ll promise myself I can buy it as long as I’ve kept my streaks to the end of the month.
It’s a system entirely built on trust, as you can manually tick off a task even if you haven’t completed it, but as long as you’re honest with yourself, it can be a useful motivational tool.
None of us are going to live forever, but I’d like to live as long as I can in the best possible health that I can. There are plenty of ways that I can improve my chances of that happening, from watching what I eat to ensuring that I get enough exercise. While technology can have a significant negative impact on how sedentary we are or our mental health, it can also help if used in the right way.
Unfortunately, it’s not possible to guarantee that using apps like these will help you to live forever, but they can help to increase the chances of a longer and healthier life. The key is to find what works for you and stick to it.
