8/19 weight loss thoughts: SparkPeople

Have you heard about SparkPeople? I hadn't until my friend Lisa pointed me to it.

One of the coolest things about SparkPeople is it's free and they're not after your money. Therefore, they're not serving Google ads about the 3 day diet that is guaranteed to take off 20 pounds ;-)

There are a lot of other things I like about SP: it's well integrated; it's got a lot of good tools; good emphasis on nutrition, fitness and motivation; you can earn SparkPoints (a nice, little if maybe silly motivation), and more.

Beyond that, frankly, it becomes a little overwhelming. I consider myself capable of handling complexity, but SP is still a little confusing to me. I do plan on putting in more time on it because I think it's worth it. And I will probably switch from tracking calories on the Daily Plate to tracking everything on SP.

Here's my SP profile (not sure if you can see it if you're not a member).

One specific SP item that pertains to what I wrote yesterday regarding measuring your health is what they track: weight, body measurements, subjective wellness ratings, biometrics (like blood pressure, etc) and 3 fitness tests. The fitness tests are pushups in a minute, crunches in a minute and blood pressure after a 3-minute step tests. I like these additional measures and plan on testing myself on them this Saturday and then monthly after that.

Other tests I'm going to look at: The President's Challenge Adult Fitness Test and the Army Physical Fitness Test.

Other ways of assessing fitness include before and after pictures and body girth measurements. I finally broke down and took those last night, but I'm not going to share them until I have better results to pair them with ;-)