She’s just watching the pounds fall off! (Thinkstock)

Apple’s latest iOS 8 update comes with a long-awaited feature: the ability for health and fitness products to connect and share information with your iOS device through a new service called HealthKit. Whatever the apps track — the distance you’ve walked, the hours you’ve slept, or what you’ve eaten — can be stored on your phone, right there in a nicely organized database.

Categories for health data are vast, and HealthKit is still in its early days, so things are a little chaotic in this space. Each compatible app is fighting to be your go-to health dashboard, and, as a result, there are a lot of options to work through. (For instance, Jawbone’s UP integrates with Apple’s HealthKit, but it can itself use data from other third-party apps. It’s complicated.)

Want to experiment with HealthKit? Our advice is to take it one step at a time. Download an app or two from this list and see how it influences your daily habits. The last thing you want is to feel fatigued by fitness apps before you’ve even gone for a run.

Here are the best apps to get started with.

1. UP

Previously, Jawbone’s UP app worked only with its line of wearable activity-tracking bands. But, starting this week, anyone can use it, band or not, and it now fully integrates into the Apple-approved HealthKit stats folder.

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UP tracks the three pillars of your general fitness: steps, sleep, and food. If you have the band, the first two of those things are generally taken care of for you. The third requires you to either enter in the food items you eat manually or to scan a barcode with the app. But this process can be incredibly time-consuming, especially when it comes to entering in portions. I don’t know about you, but I rarely measure the amount of spaghetti I eat during a meal in terms of ounces.

Socially, however, UP is a rewarding app. It allows you to join your friends’ “teams” and offer words of encouragement on their activities (however creepy they may sound). And it subscribes to a philosophy of positive reinforcement, setting goals for you and offering congratulations when you achieve them. You can adjust the settings so that it doesn’t ever mention weight loss, if that’s not something you want in your face every day.

Free; download it here.

2. MyFitnessPal

MyFitnessPal is the go-to tool for anyone who wants to sign up for a hardcore exercise regime. It allows you to set up a profile with an aim to either lose weight, maintain weight, or gain weight. Then it asks a couple of questions about how active you are at work and your current personal stats. At the end of the survey, it calculates a total number of calories per day that you’re allowed to consume (unfortunately the only way you can keep track of this is by entering your meals, which, again, is time-consuming). It’ll also tell you the date that you should reach the first milestone in your goal, and the amount of weight you’ll have lost by then. This is a satisfying way to cross-reference your progress within the app with the changes in your tangible human body.

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