What is Sparkpeople.com? It’s not just another weight loss program; it’s a FREE weight loss program that emphasizes healthy lifestyle, above all else. It has fitness tools, nutrition and fitness tracking, support through online resources, and a broad array of fitness videos with instructions on how to safely do the exercises in your home.
The site’s promo copy points out countless activities you can do to get healthy and reach your goals. Among those activities are:
- Lose weight
- Live a healthy lifestyle even if you don’t want to lose weight
- Guides to nutrition, fitness, and motivation
- Health and wellness information about conditions, treatments, and health news
- SparkPeople experts
- Recipes
Awesome Reason #1
It’s FREE: This is not a hook to get you started on a 10-day free trial with a fee kicking in after that. It is 100 percent FREE. Every resource is available to anyone who signs up. That isn’t to say there aren’t items available for sale, including a fee for direct coaching if you think you need it. But you aren’t required to buy anything. Sign on and have immediate access to tools you can use.
Awesome Reason #2:
Spark. You receive regular e-mails from SparkPeople with links to helpful articles. Do you want to know more about living a healthy lifestyle, weight loss, exercise, diabetes, high blood pressure, allergies, or wellness concerns? SparkPeople has articles to answer your questions. These daily e-mails spark you to log on every day, which is the first step to following through.
Awesome Reason #3:
Goal setting. You can’t know where you’ve been until you know where you are going. How many 
times have you said, “I’m going to lose 25 pounds by my cousin’s wedding, or my class reunion (or whatever special date or time is out there).” That kind of thinking leads to yo-yo dieting. SparkPeople’s strategy is to spark participants to embed lifelong changes designed to ensure good health. By setting realistic goals, you set yourself up for success.
Awesome Reason #4:
How many times have you read that keeping a “food journal” or an “exercise journal” is crucial to weight loss success? Have you tried that? Writing down every single thing you eat throughout the day? Writing down your physical activity? I’ve tried. I just can’t do it. SparkPeople has trackers. All you need do is search for a food or activity, select the measure and add it to your tracker. Not everything is there, so you may need to add something now and then, but it is, for the most part, easy to do. (I say “for the most part,” because there is a learning curve, but you can do it.)
Awesome Reason #5:
This site has terrific articles and videos about health related subjects. And I cannot overstate this – it is all FREE. Select from nutrition, fitness, motivation, health and wellness, weight loss, Spark recipes, and more. You will find multiple articles or videos on subjects of interest to you.
There is more to the site. Explore. See if it will work for you. It is working for me. I’ve lost 12 pounds over 40 days, have not felt deprived, upped my activity, and physically feel better than I have in years.
One thing I don’t like about the site is the very reason it is free; it is loaded with ads, and the pop-ups are annoying. But I reiterate the site is free to you. SparkPeople developers learned early on that if you have a good idea you can make “passive” money by offering something everyone wants, and then charging advertisers to offset the cost of delivering that content to readers. SparkPeople hit the mother lode. SparkPeople.com gets more than 100 million page views a month and has more than 15 million registered users. That’s a lot of potential buyers for advertisers. The ads are sometimes annoying, but not to the point of detracting from the mission of SparkPeople.com: to provide tools for a healthy lifestyle, a service people want and are in need of… and it is FREE to the consumer. You can’t beat that.
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Note: I am in no way affiliated with SparkPeople.com . These are my thoughts based on my experience. There may be other similar programs in the marketplace. I have not tried them.
Sharon Vander Meer 