weight

When it comes to getting fit or losing weight, there's no shortage of books, blogs, diets, workout videos, or group exercise classes to help you out. 

Now, tech fiends can add another category of helpful resources: mobile apps. Androids and iPhones both have a large selection of exercise and weight loss apps, but how do you chose among them all?

To help you reach your fitness or weight loss goals faster, I found the most interactive, effective, and fun apps available. Here are three of the best, free apps for Android and iOS to help you get in shape (in no particular order):

RunKeeper (iPhone, Android): This free app lets you track your outdoor activities like hiking, jogging, and running.… Read more

When Apple put the original iPad under the knife, it yielded a fetchingly slimmer iPad 2. IHS iSuppli shows how they did it.

"Thinner is better" is an Apple mantra. And the popularity of the MacBook Air, iPhone, and iPod proves that consumers agree. The iPad is no exception.

By shaving off a sizable 34 percent of the original iPad's body fat--to 8.8 millimeters from 13.4 millimeters--Apple got the weight down to 600 grams, down 15 percent from 700 grams for the iPad 1.

How did it do it? The biggest reduction in thickness came in the iPad 2's battery subsystem, wrote Kevin Keller, a teardown analyst at IHS iSuppli, in a research note today. This part of the iPad 2 is 2.5 millimeters thick, a 59 percent reduction from the 6.1 millimeters of the original iPad, according to Keller. … Read more

LAS VEGAS. Losing weight is a sensitive topic. Principally because most people are embarrassed about the need and depressed about their ability to achieve their ideal size and shape.

So when I espied the word "slimming" at the CES booth of Korea-based Ahrong Eltech, I knew I had to stop, just in case I had magically stumbled upon the solution to so many people's largest problem.

"Slimming" is one of the most powerful words in the world. More powerful than "change." More powerful even than "money." Claim it, and you will … Read more

Yesterday I celebrated my birthday with way too much pizza and cake. Much as I enjoyed myself, the bulging belly I'm staring at today is a reminder that it's time to drop a few pounds.

I know from past experience that apps can make this a whole lot easier. After all, weight loss is nothing more than math: you just need to burn more calories than you consume. And apps take the guesswork out of it by tracking your caloric intake, deducting calories burned during exercise, and so on.

I've rounded up four winners. Take a look:… Read more

There's no gentle way to put this, so I'll just come out with the cold, hard message from the Mayo Clinic this week: Letting even a small amount of weight creep onto our abs increases the risk for coronary artery disease and cardiovascular events, and furthermore, should not be considered a normal part of aging.

The Clinic studied 43 healthy volunteers with a mean age of 29, measuring blood flow through arm arteries to test the health of the inner lining of their blood vessels.

Over an eight-week period, some volunteers were instructed to maintain their weight, and … Read more

In years of economic downturn, there are still a handful of sectors that manage to remain profitable, and the health and fitness industry is one of them. Mobile apps are also enjoying quite a bit of popularity at the moment, thanks in part to the fact that so many of them are affordable. Combine the two and you get something along the lines of MyFitnessPal, a free Webware service that offers companion apps for the iPhone and Android devices (BlackBerry coming soon).

As the name suggests, MyFitnessPal is a community-oriented site designed to help you lose weight and track fitness … Read more

If you're looking for a weight loss boot camp, the Tent City Jail in Phoenix may be your solution. Controversial Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who dubs himself "America's toughest sheriff," is providing the inmates there with a new amenity: cable television. But to watch their favorite shows, they're going to have to pedal.

Arpaio installed an energy-generating stationary bike (PDF) attached to a TV when he found that 50 percent of the inmates were overweight, many morbidly so. As long as an inmate is pedaling, the bike will produce 12 volts of energy--just enough to power a 19-inch tube TV. But if an inmate stops pedaling at a moderate speed, the TV shuts off.

Because inmates can't be forced to exercise, access to cable TV could provide incentive for them to do so. Female prisoners will test the program first, because they were more receptive to it, Arpaio says.

This isn't Arpaio's first attempt to trim inmates' waistlines. Some years back, he cut inmates' food intake from 3,000 calories to 2,500 calories. "You're too fat," CNN reported Arpaio as saying to the inmates. "I'm taking away your food because I'm trying to help you. I'm on a diet myself. You eat too much fat."

"America's toughest sheriff" hasn't always had an easy time implementing his standards, which have included assembling a female chain gang and making inmates pay $10 every time they need to see a nurse. Human-rights groups consider Tent City jail to be among the harshest in the nation, according to CNN, and numerous civil-rights lawsuits have been filed against the sheriff.

The program that Arpaio is calling "Pedal Vision" might be received with less criticism, though. Watching TV while serving time is a privilege, not a right, so inmates are choosing to take advantage of it. But what if every prisoner pedaled to produce energy? … Read more

General aviation pilots can use Aircraft Weight and Balance to check their aircraft before takeoff. It takes into account the weight of the pilot, the plane's oil and fuel, plus the weight of any front or rear passengers and their baggage. The program has presets for one actual aircraft plus two dummy presets. Users can edit the program's INI file to input data for their specific planes.

The program's interface is basic but functional, and pilots will understand it easily. The first question we had when we opened the program was how to make a preset for … Read more