sparkpeople is a very intense group!

I joined sparkpeople the other day.  www.sparkpeople.com

It’s a diet website, er, system, that gives you an intense program for managing your fitness and diet. I believe there are several hundred thousand members.  And it’s FREE, which is rare in the diet industry.

It starts you out by helping you set goals. Since I’m actively losing weight,  I have no problems with setting diet, nutrition and fitness goals.

What it’s done for me so far is

• Give me some structure around fitness. I’ve probably doubled my activity in the past few days.
• Annoyed me a bit because it’s so large a site. Took me  a long time to find how to add a tracker to my message board postings, for example.
• Couldn’t set a final goal for my very large loss. Finally set a goal to go from 165 to 148 kilo
• Got me into a group of people (a “team”) to help encourage ourselves. Nice women, apparently, and I’m looking forward to sharing

Most importantly, it has NOT interfered with my pursuit of normal eating habits. I ignore the food activities mostly, except to take good advice about lower intake, lower calories, etc. My only rule remains: do my best to avoid binges and eat well and lose as possible.

I’m hovering around 158, sometimes a bit more, sometimes a bit less. Not bad, but I still prefer to lose a little more dependably. After succeeding a bit at 50% volume eating, I’m looking forward to the next time I manage that.

The best part about the exercises is they give me flash video and sample exercise lists. I do strength training about 3x per week and aerobic the same. I save the minutes for aquajogging, so I still get in a lot more than I ever gave myself credit for. And I LOVE the idea of becoming freakishly strong from the strength training!