This App Tells You How Much Exercise You Need To Burn Off Meals
These days, diet apps are a dime a dozen, but this new one, created by The Sage Project actually seems worth checking out.
The Sage Project is an online database with the goal of making food labels and information easy to understand, follow, and apply to your life. “Transparency, simplicity, and personalization” are the three pillars of the project, which has the nutritional information for upwards of 20,000 products online. You can click on one of the products online, and from there, you can check out the different categories that analyze the nutrition, attributes, and exercise needed to burn that product off. There’s also an option to see where the product comes from, and how it’s made.
When I tested the database online, I liked how easy it was to visualize the relationship between food and calories. A Cool Haus ice cream bar can be burned off with 28 minutes of swimming. That seemed like the right amount of struggle that I’d have to go through in order for the ice cream sandwich to be worth it. The Sage Project is cool because it’s not really about getting skinny—it’s just about understanding what you’re eating, regardless if it’s health or not
And it’s easy to understand, which is mainly my problem with apps, as well as understanding nutritional labels. In fact, any and all of the foods you might find at Whole Foods are listed on the app!
A NY Times article profiling the app explained that people don’t generally stick with diet or exercising apps, but The Sage Project isn’t about integrating any new method of dieting into your life; it’s just about accessing nutritional information. And while calorie-counting apps like MyFitnessPal and WeightWatchers seem easy to maintain in the beginning, after a while, it can feel hard to remember why you’d even want to count calories, after like, 4 days.
“These apps have trouble keeping customers loyal — if you use them successfully, you don’t need them any more, and if you don’t use them successfully, you may not think it’s worth it to try more,” Byrne Hobart, an app analyst told the Times.
Makes sense, right? Apps are only as good as they are useful.
