Fitness for Geeks

Chapter 5. Food Hacks: Finding and Choosing Food

Before you get the wrong impression, this chapter will not be dominated by descriptions of power apps that go and find great healthy food for you. For this activity, we’ll rely on the “wet app” that resides between our ears, and the accumulated wisdom that lives, metaphorically, somewhere in the vicinity of our solar plexus. The “gut feel,” in other words.

Note

Sure, we’ll mention a few food-choice apps later on, like Fooducate, GroceryIQ, and Restaurant Finder. You can find other food-shopping apps such as the ones that help with grocery lists at www.appbrain.com (see www.appbrain.com/search?q=food+shopping for a list of them), or www.apple.com/iphone/from-the-app-store/lifestyle.html for the iPhone.

The point is that a few rules of thumb, like “eat local, real food,” or some of food author Michael Pollan’s rules (summarized in the sidebar Choice Food Rules from a Food Writer), along with some well-known tips on managing a supermarket’s tactics, will get you a longer way toward fitness than punching out choices on an app screen.

Ultimately, the best food app around would be the one that reads a label from your phone or recognizes a shape and simply spits out an accurate “Yes!” or “No!” But that one doesn’t exist yet (Fooducate does represent a similar concept, though).

Eat Local: Leave the Big Boxes for the Extras

People apply a number of ...