SparkPeople Tracker App

SparkPeople.com has been a well-kept secret apparently! I found the site one night after stuffing my face at my family's house for Christmas. I was looking for a diet/nutrition/fitness tracker that was free (keyword: free) for my Blackberry lol. I stumbled across the SparkPeople Tracker app and fell in love. I tried other apps, but they weren't what I was looking for.

When you first sign up for SparkPeople, you enter your current weight and weight loss goals. It designs a personalized program to help you accomplish your goal. It breaks down how many calories you should eat and amount of exercise you need. It puts together a graph showing how much you need to lose each week, in comparison with your actual weight. This helps to visually let you know when you're on track and when you're slacking, which I definitely need. It also puts together meals for you, complete with directions on how to prepare the meals and a link for a grocery list to help you plan accordingly (I just got a printer and it's payday week, so I'll actually buy healthy groceries for the first time lol).

In addition to all of this, there's an online community to help you stay accountable. If you're on SparkPeople, add me! My username is jamAKA1!

Here's why I like SparkPeople:

• Meal plans that are adjustable! Some of the foods I would never think to try lol, but you can go in and say "SUBSTITUTE THIS", and find something that still fits the nutritional value but that you enjoy.
  
  
• Different foods! When I think of healthy things to eat, I think of salad and leaves. *rolls eyes* lol. The tracker helps push me to try new things. Granted, I don't always try them, but it opens up my options significantly.
  
  
• Workouts are flexible! It has me on a schedule of workouts on MWF, and I can go in and add/subtract strength exercises according to what parts of my body I specifically want to target. For example, if I am focusing on my abs that week, I can go in and add more ab workouts.
  
  
• Workouts are fool proof! If they suggest a strength exercise that you have no clue what it is, you can just click it and gives you a video demo showing you how to do it.
  
  
• Many things count as cardio! Once you've done cardio, you just go in and type what you did and it calculates it for you. It's like a search engine. I type in what version of TaeBo I do, and it calculates it. If I walked a significant amount, I just type that I walked for x amount of mins at x speed and it calculates it. They also sell dvds that you can purchase to do at home.
  
  
• It's encouraging! I've been slacking on my cardio workouts, but I recently reached the mile marker of 250 mins of cardio this month (which avgs. about 10 minutes a day smh. but that's better than nothing!) and it sent me an email congratulating me! It sends me reminder emails when I fall off too lol
  
  
• It's easy to access! I use it on the computer, but it can also be used on Blackberrys, iPhones, iPods, etc.
  
  
• Food search engine is great! I had a burrito bowl from Chipotle, typed that in the food search engine, and it popped up immediately. I think it's 575 calories which isn't too bad for a meal!

If you're on SparkPeople, add me!

Update on weight loss: No pounds loss this week. In fact, I think I gained 0.5 a pound back, but that's not too bad! I'll do another update next Monday since it's the end of the month. I believe I'll be sending in pics to curlscoilsandkinks.com, according to the calendar of the weight loss challenge!