Healthy Outlook Blog

Pic Healthy Photo Food Diary Mobile App

By Lisa Collier Cool | Posted April 12 2011

New free app makes healthy eating easy and fun

How healthy are your eating habits? A cool new app, Pic Healthy Photo Food Diary, offers a fun way to crowdsource the answer. Before a meal or snack, take photos of the food you plan to consume, rate how healthy or unhealthy you think it is, and then let your friends be the judge. Couldn’t resist a bacon cheeseburger or chocolate cake? Your friends can comment on the photo to help get you back on track. Opted for carrot sticks or apple slices as your midday snack? Your friends can applaud your nutritious choice.

To make healthy eating fun, the app lets users earn points for choosing healthy foods. Points are also awarded just for participating, since tracking food intake can help curb the urge to overindulge. Developed by GE healthymagination and MedHelp, the world’s largest health social network, the new app uses the iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch camera to take photos of food, or allows you to upload a picture you already have on one of these devices. There are four ways to earn points:

*Healthy. Share a photo of a food you ate and receive HEALTHY points if your friends rate it as healthy.

*Honesty. Slipped up on your diet? Share a picture of your meal, even if it’s high in sugar or saturated fat, and receive HONESTY points for how accurately you rate its healthfulness.

*Participation. Received PARTICIPATION points for each use of the app, both for voting on your friends’ food choices or to upload your own food photo. The more often you use the app, the more points you earn.

*Leaderboard. View the leaderboard to see how your eating habits compare to those of your friends and other users of the app.

Along with providing a photo food diary for easy tracking of what you eat and a fun way to earn points, the Pic Healthy app also lets you view galleries and slideshows of your food photos, categorized as Healthy, Unhealthy, Tasty, Not-So-Tasty, and Favorites. You can also sync/backup your photos to a personal online photo album on Medhelp.com, post food photos to Facebook and MedHelp, and access MedHelp’s health forums to post nutrition questions.

Eating a well-balanced diet that is rich in fruits and vegetables reduces risk for a wide range of conditions, including heart disease, high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes and obesity. That’s a great reason to use GE and MedHelp’s new app to make your meals the picture of health!

CONNECT THE DOTS

Download Pic Healthy free at iTunes. To learn more about this free app, visit the MedHelp website and GE’s healthymagination’s Apps page, which offers a growing suite of free mobile tools to help people manage personal health information. Also check out GE and MedHelp’s handy food tracker, My Diet Diary, described in our blog post, “Free Weight Loss App Combines Calorie Counter and Food Diary.” To learn more about healthy eating, visit the USDA’s MyPyramid.gov site.

JenniTins

As someone who has used almost EVERY single weight loss and diet iPhone app in the Health and Fitness Category. I can say that I was LESS THAN IMPRESSED with lose it app. I find myself half the time having to enter in a “custom food” because it’s not in their comprehensive database. frustrating, and then i stop using it because this happens day in an day out. In my opinion **THE BEST** iPhone diet app is hands down intelli-Diet! It just takes the thinking out of the equation and I just eat what it says. Down 12 pounds in a few weeks! I believe it’s sixty percent off now too so you should check it out before meal snap!

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Our blog is a collection of thoughts and stories that serve as inspiration for what healthymagination is—a shared commitment to creating better health for more people. It’s written by the people behind healthymagination, as well as members of our advisory board and guest contributors from around the web.

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