Sparkpeople: Helping People Lose Weight

I made a new discovery today. After watching the finale of The Biggest Loser last night, I was inspired to really put my best foot forward and get back into the weight loss game. I toyed with the idea of joining The Biggest Loser Online Club, but am currently to short on funds to do this. I joined a little Myspace group made up of Biggest Loser fans. One of the members on there directed me to a really great FREE calorie counting website, called Sparkpeople. is a website that is designed to help you set up and achieve personal weightloss or maintenance goals. When I signed up today, I was pleasantly surprised to find out that not only was it FREE FREE FREE, but when you fill out the information to set up your goal, it gives you a realistically time frame that you can reach your goal in, as long as you are losing about 2lbs a week. Then an outline is given to you that displays to you the amount of calories, fat grams, carbs and sodium grams you should be taking in daily.

You can either use their meal plan function which personalizes meal plans for you depending on your food preferences, or you can manually input the food you have eaten. If you are not sure of the nutritional information, you can do a quick search on their calorie finder and it will bring up that information for you and then add it to your food journal. Sparkspeople also outlines a personalized fitness regimen for you. It gives you demonstration pictures on how to do each exercise, and you check them off as you do them, kind of like the food journal.

My personal favorite feature so far, is that you can set up a profile page that somewhat resembles a Myspace page. You put your pictures, interests, goals, and get to choose from a really cool weightloss signature tracker. I chose a fish that will be slowly swimming across the ocean to the other side of the island, because my when I reach my goal weight, I am going to spend two weeks in Hawaii, LIVING at the beach. Other options are a football, that will slowly make it to your goal, a runner that will run across a track, a bowling ball, and various others.

The message board community is a big part of Sparkpeople's success. We all need that extra motivation, and having other people to chat with about our issues makes it that much either. There is a section called Sparkteams, where you can do a search for a specific team to join other people and set up small weightloss goals and challenges to achieve. I joined a Biggest Loser challenge. I am very impressed with this website. You can so much information and resources, but unlike a place like ediets, all of these resources are given to you at no cost. What a bargain!

The only downside, is that some people feel that the calories given are a bit low if you are trying to tone and build muscle. I think I might agree with this, as The Biggest Loser book gives me 1,750 calories, yet Sparkpeople gives me 1,550. I may up my calories a bit of I am feeling hungry, as I enjoy lifting weights and feel I need a bit more fuel than that to do this. Other than that, I am really liking the way this website is set up. However, it may not be for everyone. Some people prefer a website like ediets, because even though you have to pay, you get more options meal plan wise. This works for me though! Sparkpeople was originally a pay subscription site but is now advertiser supported.