Drinking Water – Android app

When I visited the doctor before the wedding, he told me, “Basically you’re pretty healthy, but you need to do more exercise, eat more vegetables, and drink more water.”

I knew I would have trouble remembering to do these, so I did what anyone would do and checked the Android Market for an app which would remind me. I found Drinking Water, and it’s just the ticket (for the water part at least).

To set it up, you tell it how many cups of water you should drink per day. I wasn’t sure about this, because it varies based on height, age, whether you’re pregnant or sick or not, and various other things. So I googled around and found that I should drink 8 cups of water a day. For my UK readers, a cup is half a US pint, or about 236ml.

The app then pings regularly to tell you to drink a cup, then you hit the button to tell it you have. You can then get a graph of how many cups you drank over the past weeks. I haven’t really used that feature – although I can see that my water drinking slacks off over the weekend, when I’m not at my desk with water at my elbow.

A good side-effect of drinking more water is that I need to stand up regularly and visit the restroom, and to go to the kitchen for a refill. Considering the fact that sitting down will kill you, the more times I have to take a stroll the better.

Drinking Water is a great app, and I feel better for it already. I used to get headaches toward the end of the day, and these seem to have died off considerably.

I’m still working on the exercise and vegetables.