When I wake up every morning and turn on my computer, the first page to load is SparkPeople. I've been concerned with weight loss my whole life since I was pudgy as a child (I love to eat and I'm an emotional eater, too) but the biggest help for me has been SparkPeople which is a free, online, diet and fitness plan, community, and so much more. It's completely free to join. SparkPeople is supported financially by showing ads and by Google AdSense. I haven't found the ads to be intrusive and I would rather have them in order to keep the site free.
I joined SparkPeople back when they were launching in 2003-4 and the site has grown tremendously since then. So many new features have been added. Some of the main features that I use daily are:
1) the food tracker - you search for foods and add them to your daily food log. You can track calories, fat content, carbohydrates, and more. You also have the option of using SparkPeople's daily food plans. I still log all my foods every day and it is a tremendous help to me.
2) SparkPoints - you earn points for being active on the site. To date, the points are used only as a measure of your involvement, but I keep hoping that sponsors might donate prizes so we can actually use the points. Some ways to earn points are logging your foods, logging in every day and spinning the prize wheel, reading SparkMail daily emails, tracking fitness minutes, reading health articles, and more.
3) SparkPeople message boards - through forums and private messages, you can interact with other SparkPeople for encouragement, motivation, sharing stories and recipes, and more.
4) SparkTeams - as an outgrowth of the message boards, users with similar interests can form teams and compete by using their SparkPoints as measures.
The founder and CEO, Chris Downie, is passionate about helping others and is very in the SparkPeople community and the message boards. He's open about
financial support of SparkPeople which can be found in his "State of the Spark Address" on the site, and it's fascinating to read the history.
The staff at SparkPeople is eager to keep improving the site, so please send them your suggestions for improvement. It's still amazing to me how the site strives to get bigger and better but yet feel so personal at the same time.
