The Secret to My Weight Loss
Last October, I woke up one night with a terrible pain in the right side of my back. It turned out to be a kidney stone. After it’s removal, my doctor told me I needed to start drinking more water and that would lower my risk of getting more stones in the future. So I quit drinking Pepsi and replaced it with water. What was the bonus of doing this? Within 8 weeks, I’d lost 15 pounds. I didn’t change anything else with my diet, and didn’t start exercising.
After Christmas, I was feeling really good about myself. I decided after the New Year started, I’d work on getting myself healthier and back into shape. It was the middle of January that I found another website, which is the point of my story. I came across SparkPeople. This website, www.sparkpeople.com, offers free lifetime memberships.
The site includes a section to enter your diet and fitness goals, where you can enter the type of diet you are following (low carb, vegetarian, etc.), how often you want to exercise, your fitness level, the fitness equipment you have (if any), and how much weight you want to lose and by when. There’s a weight tracker for you to use to weigh in.
They say one of the most important things to do when you start a diet is to journal everything you eat. Sparkpeople has a nutrition tracker you can use to enter in all your meals and snacks. If you have trouble planning healthy meals, there’s a meal planner that will plan out your meals for you and even give you shopping lists. The nutrition information for thousands of foods has already been entered in the database, but if you can’t find what you ate, you have the ability to add any food that isn’t there.
Not sure what exercises to do? There’s an exercise planner to give you different strength training exercises you can do at home, taking into account the exercise equipment you have (and you don’t need more than a couple hand weights, a resistance band and a stability ball for any of them). There’s also an extensive list of cardio exercises to choose from so you can track your calories burned. You can also view reports that track your progress so you can see how you’ve been doing in every aspect of your lifestyle change.
Sparkpeople has added a feature for it’s members to create and join groups, and a workplace wellness program which can help you and your co-workers get healthy and fit. There’s also a huge library of helpful articles on just about everything related to nutrition and fitness. And if that wasn’t enough, they have the most supportive message board you can imagine.
The people that use this board are all following completely different diet and fitness regimens. Sparkpeople allows you to customize everything for yourself. It’s been said that the best diet for you is the one you can stick to. Over 95% of dieters fail because they can’t stick to their diet. This website allows you to set goals for yourself, goals you can actually follow. And the lifestyle change is gradual. Most diets fail because people try to change everything at once. Sparkpeople sends you emails with one new thing to add to your lifestyle change at a time. You start small, just tracking everything you eat, then you start drinking more water, then you measure everything you eat, etc. The point is, doing it gradually, it’s easier to adjust, and you’re therefore much more likely to be able to stick to it and keep these changes in your lifestyle even after you have lost all the weight you wanted to.
The best part of all this, of course, is that it doesn’t cost you a penny to get a membership to this website. They’re giving away memberships free, and the content you get from their site is priceless.
I would never have lost 35 pounds without www.sparkpeople.com. I still have about 20 pounds to go to reach my ultimate goal, but I know I can get there.
