“I’m too busy taking care of others to take care of my Self.”
“I don’t have time to take care of my Self”
If you’ve said these to your Self at least once in the past year, join the club. As busy women, we often have so much going on with family and work that we feel like there’s not enough hours in the day to get it all done…so how could we possibly make time to take for ourselves?
Enter these time-saving Self-care apps.
If you thought you had to unplug everything in order to take better care of your Self – think again! While it is a good idea to take a break from your smartphones, tablets, and laptops, the truth is they can be very helpful in making Self-care part of your daily routine – and sticking with it!
Here are 5 of my favourite apps that I have on my smartphone, in order to help keep my own Self-care on track. I also recommend these to my patients, friends and family (women and men alike…well, except for the second one, and you’ll see why!):
This app helps keep me motivated to exercise by providing a variety of different exercise videos, many with famous athletes, and celebrities. What’s great about it is that you can choose different areas to focus on, say strength, cardio or flexibility. There’s a huge variety of workouts which allows you to find something you like – and that is the key to sticking with a fitness routine. There are workouts that you can certainly do in the gym, requiring various equipment, but there are a lot of workouts that don’t need any equipment at all, meaning you can do them in the comfort of your own home, removing the time and energy obstacle of “getting to the gym”. The app has a search function that allows you to find just what you’re looking for and if you’re up for it, it can help create a 4 week program from you ranging from beginner to advanced. Each workout comes with a video of an often well-known fitness celebrity doing the exercise which you can watch before doing it, and even pause the workout if you need to remind yourself how to do it. It provides a series of different exercises that counts you down from about 30 seconds to 1 minute of repetition and then continues from there, with little words of encouragement to keep you going. You can also add your own music to the workouts – which I find is crucial to staying motivated.
SAFETY NOTE: As always, if you have been inactive for a long time or have any health conditions, you should to check with your health care professional to ensure it is safe for you to begin this workout program.
This one is for the women. I believe every woman – from young to mature can benefit from becoming more aware of their cycles – and no, I’m not talking bicycles. Yup, you guessed it, I’m talking menstrual cycles, your menstruation, your menses, your period, your monthly visit from Aunt Flo. Whatever you call it, we need to be tracking this ladies! It’s not just for fertility tracking, it’s helpful for understanding your cycles and the different symptoms that may be linked to your cycle. Do you feel unusually weepy or exceptionally angry the week before your period? Do you feel abdominal cramps or headaches and want to know if they are related to hormonal changes around your cycle? This app can help track all of that for you, as well as help you know when to expect your period, how long your cycles are and more. And even if you’re not sure how to make sense of the info you’ve tracked, your naturopath can certainly help you make sense of it. I’ve looked at a few similar apps, and this is my favourite app to track periods, mainly because it’s just so easy to use.
And if it’s easy, you’re going to do it more often.
If you are trying to become pregnant and want to figure out when you are ovulating, this app can help you determine your most fertile times. It’s always best to go by your own body changes to help pinpoint ovulation, but having an idea using this app can help put your timing in the right ballpark. I always encourage women who are trying to conceive, or who have menstrual irregularities (like they don’t know when their periods are coming, or their periods are incredibly painful or heavy), or even starting into perimenopause to download this app.
But more and more, I am encouraging young women – we’re talking teens and early 20s to starting using it. I’ve seen so many women who have struggled with fertility that tell me their periods were always heavy, always accompanied by debilitating pain, or always irregular – and they were never investigated properly for a cause until they were at the fertility clinic. They often wish they got help earlier, but just always assumed their periods were normal.
This app helps you understand your periods from an early age. Just creating that Self-awareness will help you notice if there are any issues with your periods early on so that you can start the investigation process before you want to get pregnant, without the pressures that can come with trying to conceive. The more you use it, the more in tune with your body and mind you will become – all of which create the foundation for Self-care.
This is more than just a great site for when you’re feeling crafty. It’s one of the first places I go to when I search for healthy recipes, inspirational quotes, exercises and more. I love that you can organize all of the different things you collect onto different boards and search other people’s boards for ideas. It’s a great resource for sharing. While sometimes people have different definitions of what constitutes a “healthy” recipe, it’s a helpful way to search for specific recipe restrictions like vegetarian, vegan, egg-free, gluten-free, dairy-free, soy-free…that still often prove to be delicious. Again, everyone has their own taste, but people often write what they think about the recipe when they “pin” it to their board, which helps you to get a sense of whether or not the recipe is worth trying. If you’re looking for ideas on how to use Pinterest for your Self-care, feel free to check out my Pinterest board where I share various Self-care resources including healthy recipes and inspiration.
This is my favourite app for tracking food intake and recommending to patients who want a more high-tech way to track theirs. There’s nothing wrong with good old pen and paper diet journals, which I often ask for, but for the people who find it easier to track their food using their smartphones, this is the app for them. There is pretty much any food you can imagine on the list, allowing you to quickly input your breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks. The app then calculates the calories, and breaks down the amount of protein, carbohydrates, and fat in each food, meal and by day. This allows you to become more aware of their eating habits.
As a naturopathic doctor, I encourage patients using this app to email me a few days before we start a nutrition plan. It helps me see what their typical eating habits are, allowing me to create more individualized nutrition recommendations for them. Then about a month after they start the nutrition plan, I often ask them to send me a day of their eating so I can see how closely they have been following the plan. This helps us make sense of how successful they have been and allow me to adjust the treatment plan to help them continue their success.
The downside of this app is that it can depend on people inputting the nutrient content of food themselves, which may be inaccurate. To avoid this, there are often verified food choices listed, and I encourage you to use those whenever applicable. The app gives you starting suggestions for your weight loss or weight gain goals, but I always encourage getting a health professional to help you determine if this is accurate for your needs based on any existing health conditions.
This app was created to help manage medication better, but I find it very helpful for organizing and reminding you take your daily nutritional supplements . I know many patients who leave my office with a treatment plan in hand, planning to be 100% committed to the plan – but who just can’t seem to remember to take their supplements. I totally get it. It is a change of habit and it can be challenging to make a new habit into daily routine. This app helps remind you to take your supplements, which is useful when you are juggling so many things that even remembering to take a multivitamin every morning is easily forgotten.
You simply type all of your recommended supplements in, along with what time you want to take them, and this app will remind you to take it. It makes this really cute sound like someone’s shaking a bottle of pills (or multivitamins) when the set time comes. Then you can check off that you’ve taken your supplements or you can snooze it to remind you later on. The first time I heard the sound I was like “What is that?” Then I looked at my phone and realized what it was. It works great!
There you have it – 5 great Self-care apps ranging that can help get you get you back on track and make it easier to take care of your Self. There are actually, many, many more health apps out there. Do you have one you think should have made the list? Let me know! I am currently trying out a few new apps as we speak, but I haven’t decided yet how much I like them. When I have my reviews ready – I will certainly share them!
This blog also concludes my official Self-care series! If you have read all 5 – Thank You!! And a huge thank you to all of you who have shared this blog – I appreciate it. It has been fun sharing this with all of you. If you missed any of the blogs in the series, here’s a quick recap:
- Self-care with a Capital S
- Acupuncture for Self-care and Balance
- My Imperfect Self-care Strategy
- My Fab 5 Self-care Books
Let’s keep making it easier for us women to take care of our Selves by encouraging one another to slow down and being more understanding when we hear the word “no”. It’s not often easy for a woman to set boundaries and takes a lot of courage to say this small two letter word “no”. Let it inspire you to do the same so you can carve out time for your own Self-care.
Now I said that concludes the “official” Self-care series and here’s what I mean by that. There is still a TON of Self-care resources I want to share with all of you, but I also want to share valuable health resources on nutrition, fertility, pregnancy, stress management and more. So I’ll be writing articles on a variety of topics but will continue to share Self-care resources throughout those articles, as well as through my Facebook page and on Pinterest.
Take good care of your Self until then!
Wanna become a Self-care warrior?
Click the button below to join Dr. Odette’s FREE Self-care Warrior e-mail list and you’ll receive her Self-care videos, articles, and inspiration right in your inbox!
