Sparkpeople?

[tlcmom]

Okay, I can't stand myself any longer. I am extremely overweight and I am tired of this way of living. I signed up for Curves on Friday, and I am wondering about the Sparkpeople thing. What exactly is it? Is it helping you? How would it help me? How do I sign up for it. I really could use the encouragement. thanks!

[Shelbelle7]

I have been going to Curves for about 4 months now and I haven't heard anything about Sparkpeople at our Curves. :confused:

[Rachel]

off and on for a couple of years and I think if you USE it, it works great.

 

It is a community of people trying to lose weight, get healthy, exercise more, etc...

 

There are many, many different components to SparkPeople so I'll just mention some......

1. Weight tracker (obviously track your weight)

2. Food tracker (this also has optional menus to fit within your personalized calorie intake and can be changed according to your preferences)

3. Goals- You can choose pre-selected or your own personalized goals that you want to accomplish weekly/daily and track your progress

4. Exercise Log- Log your exercise, choose from their selection

 

There are also message boards, tons of articles, recipes, exercise demos, charts, Teams that you can belong to based on your interests or personal fitness goals

 

There is more than this...but you can see how valuable this place is.......

[Jodi-FL]

just to have the food tracking accountability, but I'm not on the computer enough to use it. Since my laptop crashed (literally, the screen broke) we only have 1 computer and too many children who need it.

 

I think like someone else said, if you use it, it's great. I'm finding the emails annoying lately....

[Pam "SFSOM" in TN]

just to have the food tracking accountability, but I'm not on the computer enough to use it. Since my laptop crashed (literally, the screen broke) we only have 1 computer and too many children who need it.

 

I think like someone else said, if you use it, it's great. I'm finding the emails annoying lately....

 

I've never gotten emails. I think there's a feature you can use to disable them in your preferences. I must have checkmarked that when I joined.

[Julie in CA]

no, really! Sparkpeople is changing my life!

I mostly use it for the food/calorie tracking feature, but I find the suggested menu helpful too. My goals are both BIG and small. I (truthfully) have about 80 pounds to lose. That's BIG! On the other hand, I want to actually be able to stick to this for the long haul, so my weekly goal is to lose 1# per week (pretty small!). So far, I've been doing this for about 7 weeks, and I've lost 8 pounds. I only have to do the same thing I've already done ten more times, and I'll be there. I can totally do it. :cool:

One of the things I like about Sparkpeople is that it gave me a range of calories to shoot for each day. The low end for me is around 1500 calories, so I shoot for that, but my allowance is up to around 1800 calories, so on days that I need a whole extra meal(yeah, a small one) because I'm super-hungry, I don't feel bad at all.

I have high blood pressure, so it's very useful to me that when I enter in my food, not only does sparkpeople figure out the calories for me, but it also lists my sodium content.

I like that if you do weigh-ins, it will plot your progress on a graph. It's really helped me to connect the busy-ness of life with my eating habits. Some weeks are busy, and it's nice to be able to see how I did when I was busy versus when l got to stay home a lot during the week, etc.

I don't get a lot of emails from sparkpeople, I just opted out of receiving them. You can choose which ones you want them to send. Some of the articles are pretty good, some I delete unread.

What amazes me is that sparkpeople is FREE!

I'd pay {shhh, don't tell them}.

I'd pay a lot.

It's working.

What do you have to lose? (now I sound like a commercial:))

Just go to Sparkpeople.com and sign up. (Did I mention it's FREE!;))

[Kris]

I signed up for Sparkpeople a long time ago and didn't stick around -- I was bombarded with email. Apparently, I told them to send it all to me, but I didn't bother to try to change any preferences because the website interface was sooooooooo sloooooooooooooow.

 

I use Fitday to track stuff -- much faster, no email. But it's not a "community."

[Claire]

Okay, I can't stand myself any longer. I am extremely overweight and I am tired of this way of living. I signed up for Curves on Friday, and I am wondering about the Sparkpeople thing. What exactly is it? Is it helping you? How would it help me? How do I sign up for it. I really could use the encouragement. thanks!

 

Here's the Sparkpeople website. To get started, you just create a log-in name and a password. As others have noted, you will have an option to receive emails on different subjects or not.

 

What I use Sparkpeople for is to enter all the food I eat during the day. It tells me how many calories I have consumed, how many calories were from fat, etc. and the calorie range in which I can lose weight. This is really, really helpful for learning which foods are worth eating and which are so laden with calories they're worth a pass, and it has helped me make better food choices on a daily basis.

 

You can also enter in exercise on a daily basis and you can set goals for weight loss and exercise. You can enter in your weight on a weekly basis and it will display a chart so you can see if you are on target for you goal.

 

They also have chat forums, help forums, recipes, etc. I haven't used those because they are a little overwhelming for me. The website itself is run as a non-profit, so there are a lot of advertisements on it. You learn to ignore those.

 

Sparkpeople in addition to Curves would be a dynamite combination!