The Best Free Diet Website: Fitday Versus Sparkpeople
What They Have In Common
The versatility of simple nutrition and fitness tracking and self-reporting has planted it firmly at the core of both contenders for the best free diet website. Fitday.com and Sparkpeople.com have the same idea at their core: by tracking how you take on and expend calories, you will learn to make daily choices that leave you with a net caloric loss so that your body burns fat. This basic idea is useful to any dieter, whether you’re an Atkins fan or a vegan. So, this idea is what Sparkpeople.com and Fitday.com have in common. Both websites ask you to report the food you eat, and the exercise you do. Both offer tools to turn this information into easily readable charts so that you can self-monitor your changing habits at a glance. Both sites agree that these are features that the best free diet website needs to offer users so that they can individualize their programs.
What The Major Differences Are
The major differences in these two fighters for the title of best diet website is that one is minimalist and sleek, and one is packed with lots of features, but slightly clunky. Fitday.com is very bare bones, and consists only of a few pages where you can type in what you’ve eaten and what you’ve done, and look at how it’s added it. Sparkpeople.com is loaded with a huge set of articles on nutrition, fitness, and motivation, dozens of bustling community message boards, and a “sparkpoints” reward system where you earn virtual “trophies” for being active on the site. Which one of these seems like the best diet website depends on your diet style, and on your web usage habits. Read on for the details of the advantages and disadvantages of both sites in several key areas.
Ease of Use vs. Staying Power
The best free diet website should be easy to use the first time you log on, but should stay compelling throughout your weight-loss journey. In terms of ease of use, Fitday.com is far and away the winner. It offers a very intuitive interface that is a snap to navigate and needs no introduction. Fitday.com is the best free diet website for somebody looking for a clean, no-nonsense way to track diet, activity, and the ratio of calories eaten to calories burned over time. However, when it comes to retaining user interest, Sparkpeople.com is the best free diet website on the internet because of its active community and numerous features.
Databases
The best free diet website should give you an accurate picture of the calories you’re taking on, and the calories you’re expending through daily activity. To do this, you’ll need access to a full and accurate database of the nutritional value of different foods, and a full and accurate database of how many calories different activities burn. Unfortunately, neither Fitday.com nor Sparkpeople.com provide both of these things. Fitday.com has a great activity database that lets you find out the calorie burning power of activities that range from snowboarding to wrapping birthday presents. This helps you gently tweak your lifestyle to be more active overall, instead of just putting “exercise” in a box and lazing in front of the TV when you’re not at the gym. On the other hand, the food database on Fitday.com is unwieldy and somewhat incomplete. Sparkpeople.com has the most easily searchable and usable food database online, which makes it a real snap to see what’s in what you’re eating, but there’s a smaller selection of day-to-day activites that you can use to track how many calories you’re burning. Fitday.com is definitely the best diet website for anyone who is most focused on burning more calories, but Sparkpeople.com may be the best diet website for anyone looking to take on less calories in the first place.
Guidance
The biggest difference between Fitday.com and Sparkpeople.com is the level of guidance they offer to users. With Fitday.com, you’re completely on your own. The only guidance that Fitday.com offers is an estimate of how many calories a day someone of your body type and habits will burn, so that you see what caloric intake to aim for. Sparkpeople.com, on the other hand, creates a personalized fitness plan, offers you motivational tips every time you log on, has “challenges” that you can take with other users (like losing 8 pounds in a month, or skipping fast food for a week), and will even set up a complete meal plan for you with all the recipes you’ll need, plus printable shopping lists. So, here’s how the war between these diet website giants finally breaks down. If you just want to be left alone to do your own thing, without having to sort through lots of “motivational” messages, hand-holding, and suggestions at every step of the way, Fitday.com is probably the best diet website for you. If you want to be drawn in to a more complete plan designed by experts in the fields of nutrition, fitness, and psychology, and you enjoy having outside incentives to help you achieve success, Sparkpeople.com is the best diet website for you.
