Frugal Friday: Diet and Exercise Tracker

For today's 'frugal friday' I'd like to talk about a great diet and exercise tracker program that is FREE and easy to use. SparkPeople is extremely user friendly and the phone app makes entering meals even simpler. The phone app is NOT as complete as the full website, however it is really convenient for quickly entering in a meal, exercise log, or some other daily goal. You can also read articles. The full website has a lot of free videos as well, though I have not tried to see if I can watch them on my phone.

Some of the daily goals are already set, however you can change or delete them and also add more or even make up your own. They allow you to either have a number system to track a goal (ex: how many cups of water you drank that day, how many servings of vegetables you had that day, etc.) or a 'yes' or 'no' response (my personal examples: exercise for 30 minutes [check the box for 'yes' leave it unchecked for 'no'], eat a light supper).

I've only been using this for a week but that's long enough for me to know for sure that this is a great program. Because it is so easy to enter meals and snacks it does not seem like a chore or become cumbersome. I've tried other meal tracker programs in the past like FitDay and NutriDiary but always gave up after a few days of tracking food because it took too long. I do not have that problem with SparkPeople, and their reports make it fun and easy to see where I might be lacking or where I am doing well.

There is some sort of social aspect to the website as well, however I have not explored that side of it. Maybe if you are on it you can be my 'friend' and then I'll learn how to use that feature? My user name is joannejsmith.

A negative that I have found is that when others enter foods sometimes all the smaller vitamins and minerals do not get added. For example, someone entered in earthbound organic celery but it only shows the vitamins and minerals that are listed on the package. When I select 'celery' however all sorts of vitamins and minerals show up for the same amount of celery. The only difference I guess would be that 'celery' was in some sort of national database put out by some FDA person (total guess) who knew all of the smaller nutrients. So ... instead of selecting 'earthbound organic celery' I select 'celery'. The computer system does not care of I eat organic or not :)  :) 

One more negative I found today is that raw, fresh juice has only been entered by members, hence the problem explained in the last paragraph. For this problem I just entered the individual components of the juice (like 'kale' 'celery' 'spinach' etc.) and make a mental note that I really did not have as much fiber as is listed in my daily breakdown (fiber hopefully being the only thing missing after the food is juiced).