Cell phones can dial up help in getting fit Chapel Hill NC

Losing weight sometimes requires nothing more than a good diet and an exercise plan. For others the answer to getting fit might be right at their fingertips.

There are now electronic devices and services designed to help you drop those excess pounds. But do they actually work?

“As a sports medicine doctor, part of my job is to promote lifelong fitness and health,” said Dr. Brian Babka of the Prairie State Sports Medicine Center in St. Charles. “Fortunately, with our modern-day busy schedules, anything that will help people to keep them on track with reminders, I am all for.”

Babka cautioned they might not work for everyone, but thinks they could work for some people in certain situations.

“If someone finds that having a visual reminder helps them, then I don’t think there is anything wrong with that,” he said.

Other experts agree.

Some of the features in the world of high-tech weight control include:

- The Food Phone – myFoodPhone Nutrition Inc. is a mobile health application service provider. Using a cell phone, you take a picture of all the food you’re about to eat. Then e-mail those photos, with a brief written description, to the myFoodPhone Web site.

Your photo food journal is monitored by one of the Web site’s registered dietitians who sends you comments and suggestions on how to improve your next meal.

For $9.99 a month, you can receive ongoing evaluation, advice, support and informative videos from your nutrition adviser. This service is available through most major cell phone carriers including Sprint, Verizon, T-Mobile, Cingular, Nextel and Virgin Mobile.

- The Fitness Phone – Nokia uses cell phone technology to help you meet your fitness goal. Nokia Sports Tracker is a GPS-based activity tracker that runs on S60 smartphones.

Information such as speed, distance and time are automatically stored to your training diary.

The application is free to download. To be able to use the application, you need a Nokia S60 3.0 or 3.1 phone with Bluetooth GPS device or Nokia S60 3.0 or 3.1 phone with integrated GPS.

- Cell Phone Diet Coach – For about $7 you can download a ‘diet coach’ application to your cell phone that will help you stay on track while losing the weight. By downloading various weight loss programs you can turn any Java-enabled cell phone or PDA into a dieting diary. Talk to your phone provider for programs available.

- The Sports Tracker program is very easy to download, a key thing that makes it easy to use, according to Jussi Kaasinen and Ykä Huhtala, research engineers from the Nokia Research Center’s Connectivity Applications Lab in Helsinki, Finland.

“This software is good for anyone who wishes to go beyond the four walls in the room,” Kaasinen said. “The idea is that when it is summer and it’s nice outside, you just grab your mobile phone and go.”