Health Tech + Food Nerd Blog

The market for wearable health a fitness tracking gadgets may seem like the wild west, but it won’t for long. Something is taking shape, and the days of rapid and seemingly directionless horizontal spread without clearly defined market verticals emerging are numbered. Players are beginning to address needs that provide significant value to stakeholders with deep pockets.

Sometimes the best motivator in life is a deadline. That's exactly what signing up for a race gives you when it comes to your fitness routine. But looking beyond your fitness goals, races can also be great events full of new experiences to broaden your horizons. With that idea in mind, here is a list of four upcoming races spread across the United States in places that you might not have considered visiting otherwise. Check one out, but make sure you move quickly - they are all happening very soon!

Have you ever needed a quick healthy snack before a run or workout, just to realize you have literally nothing lying around? It’s honestly embarrassing how many times this has happened to me, especially on busy days when I’m in a huge hurry to squeeze a run in before a meeting, or more often, before dark. Because I’m what my mother would call “an utterly helpless single, male”  - which I will now translate into normal, less offensive speak as, “not a good planner” - I went on the lookout for a couple of services that could make my active lifestyle a little more convenient.

Enter a couple of my new favorite services, which are similar to one another in many ways, but below I'll break down the core differences and hopefully give you an idea of which will be the best fit for you.

It’s time to address an important question that I know has been on your mind … what’s going on with connected water bottles? Okay, maybe passive hydration tracking isn't a mainstream concern, but for some of us, the concept is relevant - and beyond that, the attempts at executing it are pretty darn interesting. While it might be awhile yet before your water bottle syncs with Nudge, that doesn't make it any less entertaining to keep an eye on the latest projects that are popping up on crowdfunding sites.

I've been a big nerd about tracking my fitness routines for awhile now, but I have to admit that when we got started working on Nudge, sleep tracking was totally new to me. It didn't take long until I was hooked. We all have our obvious reasons to avoid sleep issues - joining the ranks of the walking dead isn't ideal, and neither is being prickly as all get-out during the course of a workday - but there's also research suggesting there are plenty more serious reasons to pay close attention to your nightly rest...

The App Store is chalk full of strength training apps, and let's be honest, they aren't all worth the time it takes to download them. With all the riffraff out there it can be impossible to find a good place to start, and that's exactly why this "Shortlist of Strength Training Apps" was created. And for a list of only three apps all focused on strictly on strength training, these fantastic executions provide three wildly different experiences, and you're bound to become a fan of at least one.

For the quick workday circuit...

You know that guy that you hang out with at trivia night...but pretty much nowhere else. The guy who knows only the useless information that kills at trivia night but is otherwise useless in everyday life. Well, I think I have some useless information trapped in my head as well, and here it is:

"One serving of strawberries equals 152 grams of strawberries."

That fun fact gets me nowhere in my day-to-day. Because I don't know what the heck 152 grams of strawberries looks like. I do know what a baseball looks like though. I can even grab a handful of strawberries and get a sense of whether I'm holding a baseball-size amount in no time. Visual cues like the baseball bring can provide a practical and actionable twist to an otherwise impossibly complicated subject like nutrition. Here are three infographics that I use to understand serving sizes in everyday life.

As first-time founders of a company like Nudge, it can be hard to balance our instinct to obsess over our work with the pressure to practice what we preach (meaning live healthy in case you don't know what we're preaching here). In my life, striking the right balance between work and health is a challenge that's key to my personal happiness. When I don't fit a workout in, it piles on the same way that not getting around to that last item on my daily to-do list at work. The weight from all these missed opportunities piling up is also known as stress. And I hear it's a killer. But in my life, the work/health balance really boils down to finding ways to force exercise into my schedule. Force is a strong word. But these are also the drastic measures we take when all else fails. Here's how each of the Nudge founders do it in order of commitment, from minutes to...well, marriage.