6 Apps to reduce carbon footprint and improve wellness

Apps to reduce your carbon footprint and improve your wellness

Travel is an amazing pursuit for anyone who decides to undertake it. However, there are many of us who love to travel but also care about the environment and our own health. Unfortunately, while in personality types these things go hand in hand, in reality it can be difficult to maintain all three.

Travel is a notoriously carbon heavy task and constantly jetting off and being on-the-go can easily and quickly take a toll on your body. However, this doesn’t make achieving this trifecta impossible. With the right tools, amount of effort and maintenance, you can travel the world, monitor your carbon footprint and allow your health to thrive. These 6 apps make it easier than you could ever imagine to travel freely, healthy and eco-consciously.

⦁ GoodGuide

When you’re at home, it’s easy to live and shop ecologically. You know all your favorite products and where they’re available, so it’s easy to get into a good routine. Unfortunately, this routine can fly out the window when you start to travel.

Luckily, the GoodGuide app helps you make environmentally friendly product choices wherever you are. Its barcode scan feature recognizes over 70,000 products and companies and gives you a detailed analysis on the health, environmental and social impacts of everything you buy. You can also create lists of good products/products-to-avoid to make life easier in the future. This app is a god-send when on the move as you can shop freely while still continuing to make good choices for reducing your carbon footprint and for your body.

⦁ Locavore

Locavore is another great free app that helps you reduce your carbon footprint when traveling. It’s unfortunately unavoidable that, when flying we rack up a large amount of carbon emissions. However, this can be easily balanced by simply trying to reduce the air miles of any food or other products you consume during your trip. By buying local and in season, you can ensure that the food hasn’t been transported long distance, adding to the current carbon crisis.

This app allows you to search for nearby merchants that strictly dispense local food by using the GPS on your phone. Whether it’s the weekly farmers market or the local health food store, you’re sure to find delicious eateries with environmentally friendly food wherever you are. You can also share your favorite vendors and recipes directly to Facebook from the app.

⦁ Cronometer

It’s not just the environment that can suffer when eating on the go. Particularly when restricting your diet by being conscious of the food’s carbon footprint, it’s easy to overlook the importance of getting the right nutrition. Similarly, when traveling, it’s always tempting to indulge in all the local delicacies; however, one you have segued from your regular eating habits, it’s also very common to fail to get the right nutrition. This can have a drastic impact on your health and actually take away from the travelling experience.

Cronometer is a great online resource that allows you to track your daily intake and output. As well as counting calories, the app also focuses on massive 48 different micro-nutrient categories including individual proteins, vitamins minerals and fats. It also tracks exercise and biometric readings, such as sleep, heart rate and blood sugar levels. This means you can have a constant and accurate picture of your health and the way your lifestyle choices are affecting it, meaning you can maintain your fitness levels easily and enjoy your traveling experience unadulterated!

⦁ Nike+ Training Club

Alongside food and diet, another important element of wellness that can be easily overlooked when traveling is your fitness level. While exercise routines are easy to maintain at home, as soon as you get on the road, it becomes harder to get a daily practice in. Fortunately, the Nike+ Training Club app provides you with numerous, different workouts that can be easily done anywhere, from your hotel room to the airport-waiting lounge.

There are over 100 workouts devised and led by qualified professionals, and a range of exercise types that you can target to your own needs. Whether you want to focus on mindful movement with a yoga session, get your heart going with some cardio or improve your muscles with some strength training, this app can help. It can also go some way to reducing your carbon footprint by keeping you out of the gym and off those energy-guzzling machines!

⦁ Travel Health Guide

No matter how hard you try to maintain your health and well being when traveling there’s always a high chance you’re going to become ill. Travel is very hard on your body, and whether it’s because you’re constantly exposing yourself to new germs, pushing yourself into altitudes you’re not used to or eating a local cuisine that your stomach hasn’t had time to adapt to, it’s very likely you’re going to feel the pangs of bad health wherever you are. The Travel Health Guide is an extremely handy app developed by Dr. Deb—a medial professional and self-proclaimed travel doctor—that helps you identify common traveler problems and resolve them without having to go to a doctor.

It comes with a symptom searcher as well as a database of common conditions sorted by type. Once the symptoms have been identified, it tells you which medication you should use, the amount of risk you are in and any other ways you can relieve your symptoms. It also makes it very clear when you are high-risk and should seek help from a medical professional as well as having a full section dedicated to first aid skills.

NOTE: This app can be downloaded for about $3.32, but if you’re planning to make a last-minute purchase when overseas, but sure to remember to use a Virtual Private Network to encrypt your data and protect your credit card details from hackers on insecure public WiFi networks.

⦁ Pranayama

While much of our health and wellness is based on what we eat and how we move our body, this is not the whole story. Stress-reduction is a vital part of feeling good, and unfortunately, the erratic and stressful nature of traveling doesn’t always lend itself to this. Pranayama is a wonderfully simple app that guides you in a number of centering, stress-busting breathing exercises.

This free download offers a range of different settings, durations and difficulty levels so you can freely and easily breath your way through those stressful airport layover, missed trains and lost directions! Complete with relaxing music and onscreen visualizations, it’s a great way to get back in control of your breath and back in control of your traveling experience.

Creating the balance between nurturing your wanderlust, caring for the environment and maintaining a healthy lifestyle can be difficult. However, these apps can go a long way towards helping you create the perfect lifestyle! If you know of any other apps that should be on this list and have experience using the ones already mentioned, then please leave a comment below.

About: Jess Signet is a blogger who writes about technology, traveling and technology needed when traveling. Having visited places all over the globe, traveling is both her love and addiction. She does not want to be cured.

Many thanks to guest contributor, Jess Signet for this timely and healthful post about reducing your carbon footprint and staying healthy. Happy travels!