Top Free Sites For Reaching Your Weight Loss Goals
February 27th, 2008 | by Jeniffer |“I went on a diet. Swore off drinking and heavy eating, and in fourteen days I had lost exactly two weeks.”-Joe E. Lewis
How are your New Year’s Resolutions going?
Are you still going strong, plowing your way to success at whatever it is you professed to desire, or have you slowly lost any enthusiasm for the endeavor?
Could it be that you need encouragement, support of others, perhaps even a mentor to help push you to carry out those lofty goals?
If weight loss was on your Resolution List, have no fear–I am here with information on some free sites that will provide you with just that!
Studies show that support is one of the major factors in weight loss success.
Best of all, these sites are all free!
FitDay
Fitday is a free online tool to manage and monitor your weight loss with an easily navigable, pretty much self evident layout.
You can record your current weight, then enter the weight you want to be and a date you’d like to be it by (yesterday isn’t the correct answer!) and it will instantly tell you how many pounds you need to lose per week in order to meet your goal.
There is also an option to pay, to enable you to access the information without being online.
Check it out at FitDay
Spark People
I love Spark People.
It’s a free weight loss tracking tool, support system with nutrition tracker, a physical activity tracker that includes suggestions for exercises, and detailed descriptions on how to do them.
There are healthy living and weight loss articles, and communities you can join for added support and encouragement.
I have used it to lose weight before, and was successful in doing so (I gained it back due to pregnancies).
When I entered my current weight and goal weight, they gave me a realistic date to achieve it by. They also gave suggested calorie intake levels, as well as how many calories I should burn per day to reach my goal. You can also easily calculate your BMI.
Check out Spark People at Spark People
PeerTrainer
Peertrainer is another free site, featuring weight loss articles, daily logs for you to record your workouts and goals, a calorie counter, groups for support and accountability, and teams.
PeerTrainer emphasizes the accountability factor I always talk about. It makes you accountable not only to yourself, but to others as well.
Check out Peer Trainer at Peer Trainer
NutriDiary
Nutridiary is a free online food and exercise diary. It features tracking tools for weight and body fat percentage, plus nutrition summaries of various foods.
There are forums as well, to help you discover people whose goals are similar to your own. That is where you can share weight loss/get fit tips, and provide motivation and support to others.
Check them out at Nutri Diary
General Thoughts on These Sites
1) All of the above sites emphasize the importance of knowing what and how much you eat. Monitoring is done by recording meals, snacks, and every other thing you may devour, onto the pages of a food diary.
It’s amazing, when you see it written out in front of you, how quickly all those little extras add up over the day.
Maybe you have 500 more calories per day greater than you require for weight maintenance.
3500 calories equals one pound.
In one week, you will have gained a pound. Add that up for the fifty two weeks in a year, and you have yourself a weight problem.
Congratulations, for having decided to be proactive in changing this aspect of your life!
2) Another thing all the sites featured was the importance of burning off those calories.
Not just those that you are consuming for weight maineenance, but extra calories as well, to promote weight loss.
I also liked the emphasis on nutrition in every site, and was especially delighted to see helpful, fact filled articles on those sites which featured them.
Knowledge is power, as they say, and if you are working to lose weight, the more you understand what it is you are doing and why it is you are doing it, the better.
3) I love the communities which have developed on some of these sites.
The people are so encouraging to one another–too often those closest to you in your life are not so encouraging, especially in a long term effort such as weight loss. People who do not face the same battle may fail to understand why you need to tell them four weeks after you started, what you did and how much weight you lost, and–well, everything.
Having people who are going through the same thing you are, as well as those who have been there, done that, is extremely motivating and helpful.
4) I liked that, because these are all online sites, they are accessible not only from your own computer at home, but anywhere that you have access to the internet.
5) I also liked the encouraging, “you can do it” tone of the sites overall.
Every one of these sites is worth a look.
Choosing which one you want to join, if you choose to do so, is the biggest challenge among them!
If you have tried one of these sites in the past, or are a current member, and would like to add something, please feel free to do so. Comments are always most welcome!
