You want to become healthier? Easy! Just get your brain involved in the process. We all know what is good for us as far as exercise, diet, and other factors are concerned, but establishing consistency in tracking ourselves can be a problem. Not surprisingly, medical studies show that people do better when they weigh themselves every day, and keep track of other things such as exercise and diet.

The Wellness Diary from Nokia is a free app that makes all of that much easier to do. It takes a few minutes to initially get it set up and adjusted to your personal preferences and lifestyle, but I found daily maintenance after that to be quite easy. The fact that my Nokia N8 is always with me was a plus that helped me to record exercise just after I had finished it, weight just after I measured it, and food just after I had eaten it.

The Wellness Diary has evolved from earlier versions for Symbian OS, S60 3.x devices like the Nokia N95 to a touch screen version for S60 5. devices like the Nokia N97, and finally to new Symbian devices like the Nokia N8. To learn more about the progression of this project, take a look at Nokia Beta Labs to see where it all began. This short video shows some of the original features included in the app:

Now, in the latest version of Wellness Diary released this week, Nokia has added a De-stress monitor, so that people can track how well they feel in recovering from stress.

For my particular needs, I wanted to monitor my weight, exercise regimen, and diet over time, and here present the results of the first week of using the app. Besides these, I could have also monitored sleep, smoking, alcohol, and the number of steps that I take in a day, but I wanted to keep it simple.

To get started, the Wellness Diary app connects to your Nokia account, so just use your Ovi Store username and password to make that connection. This connection will be used to send you news and feedback from the Duodecim.fi service. Once connected, the initial setup screen looks like this:

The upper icons are, from left to right, your Profile, Inbox, and Log. The profile asked for my height, weight, and gender, and presented a Setting icon that allowed me to make choices about metric or Imperial systems, whether to start up the app at phone startup, and whether the app should go online. Going back to the above monitor list, I selected Weight, Food, and Exercise.

The Food monitor gave me lots of choices, as shown below:

To keep it simple, I chose to just keep track of Soft fats, Sweet snacks, and Wholegrains. Clicking on the plus sign is the universal way to add a category across the app, as well as to add daily amounts within a category.

For each category, I then set a target. If you look within the Weight and Exercise categories in the screen below, you see a small target icon. I clicked that in order to enter my target weight (about 2 Kg less than my beginning weight in a week was ambitious) and a target amount of exercise (30 minutes a day is the default).

After initial setup of monitors and targets, the everyday screen looks like this:

This screen is from the end of a week’s monitoring. Each day, I just clicked on the Weight category to add the day’s weight, and similarly for exercise and food entries as they happened.

The satisfying part was that at the end of the week I could see that my weight was beginning to move downward. I saw this trend by clicking on the Trends icon in the upper right of the daily Weight entry, shown below:

This gave me a look at how my weight had been progressing over the week.

I was so pleased with the drop off in weight (even if it was small!) that I sent the trend chart to a friend via Twitter by clicking on the Share icon in the screen above and entering my Twitter ID and password.

There are clearly volumes of detail that could be added about this very useful app, depending upon one’s own particular health monitoring needs. For this space, I will just recommend exploring the Inbox  to receive news and feedback from external health services. You get there by clicking on the top middle icon on the everyday screen, and then clicking on Inbox items such as those shown below:

You can also view a more extensive demo of Wellness Diary by clicking on the Tutorial tab shown at the top of this page.

Wellness Diary is available for free in Ovi Store.