FREE Online Diet & Healthy Community w/ Awesome Imaginary Points!
In order to talk about what I planned to discuss today I need to review a website first! I found this website last year but really didn’t start to use it until a few weeks ago. The website is called SparkPeople. It is a free online diet and healthy living community with over 3 million members who provide support and motivation to each other. There are so many features to this website that it can honestly be overwhelming. I think that the reason I didn’t really get into it a year ago was because the site is very busy and has so many things going on. I’ll break it down into different categories with pros and/or cons about the main features. You could literally be on here for weeks and still not go through everything on this site! It’s easy to sign up (typical information when registering for a social networking site plus information on your weight and height to calculate BMI and help set weight loss goals plus information on what type of diet and exercise plan you are interested in). Best of all- it really is all FREE! Click here to see my SparkPage and even add me as a friend!
When you first log in this is your “Home Page”. It has a little of everything on there and you can get anywhere from this page. I’ll go from left to right and talk about the features briefly and split it up over a couple of days-I don’t want to end up writing a 10 page long blog about a website in one post! But there are a lot of things this site can do.
MyTools
- Nutrition Tracker and Meal Plans- You can log in the food you eat and it will keep track of calories and other nutritional information and also give you a daily feedback analysis of what you ate. Based on the information you entered when you registered (which can be changed at any time in your account settings) the site creates a meal plan just for you. You can change the daily caloric intake or put in a special diet (diabetic or high protein for example). You can change the meals with other ones if you don’t like the meal it selected for you. You can also print off all the recipes, menus, and grocery lists with a click of a button!
- Fitness Tracker: You can create your workout routines using their Fitness Tracker and you can keep track of the calories you have burned and how much you need to burn to lose weight or to maintain weight. This is great because I am not a math kind of person so the fact they automatically calculate these things for me is helpful. As you can see on my fitness tracker I haven’t been keeping up with it. Shame on me.
- Weight-ins & Other Measurements: I haven’t even attempted to use this tool-but I should. Basically you weight in (the typical response from doctors and health care professionals has been to weight once a week on the same day at the same time) and it tracks your progress- or lack of progress in my case; which is exactly why I haven’t used it yet! But this gives me motivation to actually use it now so I can post another blog and say “See I CAN do it!”
- QuickTrack: You can track your goals here without going to the “Goals” page. The goals here are: how many servings of fruits and vegetable you eat, how many cups of water you drink and how many minutes you exercise. My day just started so I haven’t entered anything in yet. One of the coolest things about this site is you get these imaginary points when you use the site (I will talk about the points in more detail in another post). Who doesn’t like imaginary points?!
TO BE CONTINUED TOMORROW!
