Sparkpeople: A Cubsicle PSA

Contrary to everything I believed about eating before I took a Nutrition course in college, I don't necessarily think calorie counting is such a bad dietary practice. Doing so religiously is probably a little crazy, but we should all know a little about what we eat and how much and what kinds of foods we should eat to attain our dietary goals, even if that goal is to gain or maintain weight. I don't mean everyone should meticulously catalog what they're eating, just that it's helpful to care and pay attention to at least your habits. Other than that, you should eat when you're hungry, you should stop when you're full, and in general if you're trying to stay thin just don't be an idiot about what you put in your body. But if you need help paying attention, the web is a great place to start looking.

Enter a website I've been using called SparkPeople.com.

When you first sign up for a FREE account on Sparkpeople, it asks you if you're trying to lose weight or if you're just trying to maintain a healthy weight. Based on this decision you can set goals that the website will help you track, including fitness goals which you can track on the site. Then there's the nutrition tracker, which allows you to approximate how many grams of carbs, proteins, and fats you're consuming every day just by searching for the site's database of popular foods. It can be easy. For example, Sparkpeople is pretty sure it knows how many calories (and grams of fats, proteins, and carbs) each specific Dunkin Donut has. (This information is pertinent to me). Where it can get tricky is if you're eating or drinking something that's not listed. The other night I ate stir fry made by a company called Pictsweet, and while Sparkpeople actually did know a bit of Pictsweet foods, it did not know anything about this particular bag of stir fry. So in that instance, you can pick something similar or find the bag and input the nutritional facts (down to specifics like grams of magnesium) for you and others to use in the future. Here is a screen shot of what the nutrition tracking looks like.

At the end of every day Sparkpeople gives you a report about the specific goals you reached and did not reach for that day. This is pretty funny at times, because it tries to give you report before you're done logging your food intake for the day, essentially saying "you're done, right? You can't possibly have eaten more than this." Helpful, nonetheless. And I stress "FREE" because there are a lot of programs for purchase out there that essentially do the very same thing.