One day last week, I did drink a lot of water and had an epiphany - I wasn't drinking during the day! I found that I wasn't even finishing my first 16 oz cup (that's about 1/2 a L - I bought these huge cups 3 or so years ago specifically to drink more water). A little background - I don't buy juice or soda for the house and I don't drink alcohol regularly so my drink choices around the house are water or 1% milk. I'd have my mug of coffee in the morning over breakfast with my husband and then pour a glass of water from the Brita pitcher in the fridge. It would proceed to "sweat" next to me while I drank sips here and there but the majority would still be there 6 hours later when the kids got home from school. Sometimes, I'd have a mug of hot decaf tea in the evenings too.
So I posted on my facebook timeline also joking that I should set alarms (since I am constantly using that feature on my phone). Among the suggestions to find my favorite bottled water to put water bottles in the fridge to ecofriendly reusable bottle alternatives (honestly, guys - having water available isn't the issue, it's actually drinking the cup sitting next to me), one friend said "There's an App for that..." So here I am reviewing water drinking iPhone apps. There are 2 kinds of drinking water apps - the track your water consumption apps and the find free drinking water apps. I'm looking only at the track consumption apps today.
The one that kept coming up in searches first is Waterlogged Drink More Water, Track Daily Water Intake, Get Hydration Reminders by Daily Water, Inc. It has a nice user interface. The home page tells you your daily goal (which you can easily change by tapping it) and how far you have to go to meet that goal both visually (a water bottle or glass that fills). The scientist in my loves that you can easily switch to metric (which I have). You record when you drink something either by the 16.9oz/500mL bottle or 8oz/250mL glass (1/4, 1/2, 3/4, full) or by entering a volume. You can see what time you logged the drinks by clicking "Edit Drinks" and see a graph of daily water consumption to compare days. It's integratable with FitBit (which I don't have). But the one thing that is missing from the free version of the app is reminders. With the free version, you can set a single "time reminder" (such as everyday at 10:30) to remind you to drink but to set more, you need to upgrade (I can't figure out the price - lifetime subscription is $2.99, unlock reminders is $3.99 so I do have to purchase both?).
The second app that shows up in searches is Daily Water Free by Maxwell Software. There are some things that I like better - the ability to set you serving size, free notification settings - but I don't generally like the home page. It's a grid of 9 glasses (unchanged if you change your goal) which toggle checked (for drank) or unchecked and I'm sure I'll accidentally check or uncheck something. And there are ads that hide your goal too. The other thing that's difficult is that you can only set a single serving size and it's all or nothing unlike Waterlogged where you can enter a volume or choose a portion of a serving. You also can't see what time you logged your serving.
Day 1's results: 2500 mL consumed and I remembered what we needed at the store last night (bread for sandwiches and milk) and made banana bread this morning after drinking my first 500 mL of water this morning.
I'm going to try these out for a couple more days before I move on to App#3...AppCrawlr - you are my best friend!
ShopTalk - these cutie booties are available in an assortment of colors and appliques.
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UPDATE: Week 1's progress via Waterlogged (I think I'm going to figure out what each price point means). It's before 10am on June 11, so I'm doing good so far today.
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