Sparkpeople Revisit

I am once again bored at work, so I thought I'd blog a bit about Sparkpeople. I've talked about Sparkpeople in the past; how it's the best free online weight loss website. But it's been a while since I talked about it, and I thought new readers might be interested in learning more about it. And just to be clear, I do not earn a single cent from SP. The website is just that great for dieters like me, that I want to make others aware of it's awesomeness.

Sparkpeople is a free online service that is great for anyone who needs help keeping track of their daily calories. When you first register, SP asks you a series of questions about your goals, your lifestyle and your fitness preferences. Then SP takes this info and creates a customized program for you. For example, it asks "How many pounds do you want to lose?" and "When do you want to reach your goal?" Based on those answers, the system can identify exactly how many calories you need to consume and burn each day leading up to your goal date in order to meet that goal. It's a pretty brilliant concept, if you actually stick to the plan.

Once you are a registered user, you track your daily calories/fat/protein/whatever you want to track in your daily food journal. The great part about the food journal is you can store the nutritional info from items that you have in your home, as well as look up foods in the SP food database. They've got thousands of items in the database, most with namebrands, and many items from fast food/chain restaurants. If you're like me, you often take food to work and forget to check the label before you leave the house, so you're not sure what the stats are while you're trying to log the food in your diary. No worries! Just do a search on Sparkpeople and you will likely find the item. And if you can't find something in their database, you can do a quick Google search for the item, and usually you can find the stats at the namebrand's website. Then, just log the stats in your journal and choose to save the item in your "Favorites". Then the next time you eat that food, you've already got the info stored and you don't have to look it all up again. It's really convenient for people like me, who have their standard healthy snacks that they eat frequently.

Another part of Sparkpeople that I love is the Fitness Tracker. This feature houses a database of all different kinds of activites, everything from jogging to vacuuming! Let's say you just did a 30 minute aerobic DVD. Just do a search for "aerobics" and select "30 minutes". The tracker shows how many calories you burned (this is estimated, based on your current weight and height, which you would have originally logged in your account settings upon registering, I believe.) Then it records all this info (your minutes logged, your calories burned, etc.) in your Fitness Tracker and you can keep up on your progress.

The site also has a very strong community. You can create your own custom "SparkPage" which is like your own website on Sparkpeople -- you can post "before" pics and tell the SP community a little about yourself. There are also TONS of SP message boards where you can meet thousands of users just like yourself. The boards are really great as a resource to make new friends, gain support from people with the same goals/lifestyles as yourself, and help get your questions asked about SP or nutrition/fitness in general.

Did I mention the Points System? It's really a silly thing. For each thing you do on SP, you gain points (for logging your food, logging how much water you drank, reading an SP article, etc.) The points add up as you use the different features each day and after logging a certain amount of points you can earn "trophies". The points and trophies don't really amount to an actual tangible prize... but it's a fun way to motivate people to use the site. I, for one, am very competitive, so the points are really great for me. It motivates me to check out new things on the site.

The final part of Sparkpeople that I want to brag about is it's sister site --- SparkRecipes.com. I have found so many awesome recipes on this site that are easy to make and my husband doesn't realize is diet food! :-) What's also great is at the click of a button you can transfer the nutritionals from 1 serving of the meal you just made from that new recipe and it will log it in your Food Journal. How awesome is that???? And of course, you can submit your own recipes to share with the community. I've found so many delicious recipes to use with my Crock Pot --- I honestly believe that slow cooking makes even the most low-cal of foods taste better (i.e. chicken breasts.)

So that's the end of my rant on Sparkpeople. If you sign up, mention that FLIPTHISBODY was your referral. I earn more SparkPoints for each person that signs up, and even though those points don't win me any prizes, I still get a kick out of earning them. And if you do register, make sure to create a SparkPage for yourself and ask me to be your friend. It's like the Facebook of Sparkpeople. Let me know if you have any questions about the site and I'd be happy to help!