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10 Best Weight Management Tools
10 Best Weight Management Tools
Below we review the 10 most popular sites that help you to lose weight and keep it off. Take a look and choose the one that meets your needs (diet and technology wise) and start losing!
Manhattan Beach,
CA,
United States of America
(sardnews.org)
08/06/2011
Calorie Count (caloriecount.about.com) is a free website that allows you to track your food intake, weight, and activity levels. A comprehensive food and recipe database provides nutritional information on a variety of foods and allows you alter the serving size and add to your Log, Meal Recipe or Favorites. There are other useful tools to help you calculate the appropriate amount of exercise needed to burn amount of calories consumed. In addition, you can also find great coupons for your area.
FitDay (fitday.com) offers several membership options. With FitDay you can utilize the food journal, calorie counter, exercise log, weight loss tracker, and nutrition facts. It also allows you to analyze your progress and track your actual activities vs. planned activities with graphs. On the downside the food and exercise databases are not as comprehensive as others, but you can journal how you feel and your moods. There are a number of articles and forums on a variety of topics.
LiveStrong (livestrong.com) developed Lance Armstrong, offers several subscription options. The website includes a large amount of health, nutrition and fitness content that is well-written and easy to read. MyPlate is a great feature that allows you to track food and fitness and look up recipes. The Get Fit section includes various tools such as Loops, BMI Calculator, Target Heart Rate and Body Fat Calculator. The Loops section allows you to map your running, cycling, etc. route and share with friends. There is a great Community section and a section that shows moment-by-moment what Americans are eating today.
MyFitnessPal ( http://myfitnesspal.com ) is a free and easy service where you can search and select food, record exercise, and analyze your progress. Various tools are available including BMI, BMR and heart calculators. The community section also offers a great forum with loads of discussions.
SparkPeople ( http://sparkpeople.com ) is probably the easiest to use site. It is a free site that claims to be the #1 weight loss and fitness site and boasts over 9 million members. The site offers personalized diet & fitness plans, calorie counter, workout tracker, exercise demos & videos, answers from dietitians & trainers, and community forums. The MyTrackers section allows you to track nutrition, fitness and weight. The Nutrition tracker makes it easy to find a food, adjust the serving size and add to favorites. If you're not sure what to eat for the day, you can select Show Meal Plans. The plans create a menu for you plus a grocery shopping list. The report section offers a wide range of reports to track your progress. The Resource section includes a lot of content on nutrition, fitness, motivation and wellness. If you're looking for how to change your diet & lifestyle, SparkDiet offers a four step process. The Community section includes groups, challenges, personal homepages, success stories, message boards, secrets of success, member blogs and community highlight. The online store sells everything from t-shirts to nutritional tools (e.g., water bottle, mats, stability balls) and DVDs, etc.
WebMD Food & Fitness Planner ( http://webmd.com/diet/food-fitness-planner ) is a free service that is intuitive and easy to use. After creating your profile, you can enter information into the Food Log and Fitness Log then track your progress through Reports. The Food & Fitness Planner section includes downloadable PDFs like the healthy shopping guide & list, portion-size guide and Inside the Nutrition Facts Label. Other tools include the Personal Diet Evaluator which allows you to assess your weight loss goals and habits, determine your starting point, and consider the lifestyle changes you may face. Members can participate in a number of communities with themes for diet, fitness & exercise, food & cooking, sports medicine and dieting clubs. Within each community are discussions, tips and resources.
There are many other websites out there that can be useful to you. No matter which one you use, you'll have some start-up time in the beginning. This is especially true if you eat non-packaged, processed foods such as a fruit salad (which is what you should be eating!). To get around this issue, I estimated the amount of each fruit in my morning fruit salad (e.g., handful of blueberries, 1/8 apple, 1/8 orange, 1 slice pineapple) and then saved as a favorite. You'll also find that because you must enter every food you eat, sometimes it's just not worth eating that snack. That's because it takes more effort to enter the food than to eat it! Now, that's a weight loss plan!
Contact: Gregg Towsley, gtowsley@gmail.com, (310) 909-8835
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