Sparkpeople.com

Hi everyone!

It's been awhile since this blog has seen any action, and I definitely haven't done my part as a contributor, but I wanted to let you know about a website that I just started using ("just" meaning today--but so far it seems great).

sparkpeople.com

You put in your goal (lose weight, maintain, etc.) and it comes up with a customized plan for you. It gives you menus for exactly what you should eat for each meal and snack, as well as the breakdown of calories, carbs, fats, and protein in each item. If you don't follow the recommended meals, though (which I didn't), you just enter in the food that you did eat. You can search for just about anything, even restaurant food (I had Subway for lunch and it was in there). You can see the range of calories, carbs, fat, and protein you should be eating each day to reach your goal, and the site keeps track for you.

It does pretty much the same thing with exercise; gives you a recommended work out for the day (complete with demos), or you can enter in whatever you decide to do on your own and it will calculate the calories you burn. The site also has groups you can join of people in your area, age group, etc. if the group dynamic helps you.

I've seen sites like this before that seemed confusing or time consuming, but this one seems to be really intuitive and fun. Like I said, it's only been a day, but I like it so far...

I promise I don't work for sparkpeople.com either--I was not paid to write this:) Oh, and speaking of money, the site is free (or you can bet I wouldn't be bothering with it).

I've also heard of one called fitday, but haven't tried it.

Let me know if you give it a try!