Jan 15 2009
How to Get Healthy Without Spending A Lot
Okay. Raise your hand if this applies to you.
At least one of my goals for this year is to get healthier or to lose weight.
Come on now, don’t be shy, go ahead and raise your hand. 
According to the www.Forbes.com article Costly Calories in 2004 American’s spent a median cost of $85.79 per week on diet foods. That figure is just for the food! It doesn’t include the cost of joining the various programs.
Let’s say that you don’t want to join a diet center or attend weekly meetings. So you decide to find something online to help you in your goals.
Perhaps you might try:
- Weight Watcher’s Online — for the low price of $16.95/mo
- ediets.com — for the special price of $17.96 for 4 weeks
- Global-Fitness — just $59.95 for 12 weeks!
Plus of course many other possible places. Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that there is anything wrong with any of these programs.
What I AM going to tell you is that you don’t have to pay money to a website based program in order to lose weight!
You may be wondering how that is possible. When I first found this in June of 2006, I also wondered how in the world a website could offer so much, and NOT charge one penny for it!
Sparkpeople.com’s founder Chris Downey tells about how he came up with the idea for Sparkpeople.com and why he has chosen to keep it a free site in his First State of the Spark address.
Just how good can a FREE website be? Well, I can tell you from personal experience that it is a fantastic website!
On Sparkpeople.com you can create your own individualized diet and exercise plan, along with great tracking tools. If you need visual help in figuring out numerous strength training moves, or would like to see some online video fitness routines, you’ve got it!
As important as diet and exercise is in a healthy lifestyle, support of others who are trying to achieve similar goals is even more important. Sparkpeople.com offers Community Message boards where Sparker’s can communicate with each other. Each member also is able to create their own personal homepage to share who they are and their journey.
My personal favorite are the Sparkteams! There are Sparkteams focused on pretty much any topic you can imagine. Some of the teams include: Home and Garden On a Budget ; Beating the Recession Blues; Emotional Eaters; and even groups for people who follow particular diet plans such as Wendie Plan/WW Circle of Friends.
So, if you made the goal of becoming more healthy and or losing weight in 2009, check out Sparkpeople.com and save your hard earned dollars for healthier food!
Hey, thanks for the site highlight! This sounds like something I will certainly check out. I’m not one to:
- throw money at a gym (there’s a decent one here in the apartment complex)
- or get a personal trainer (I *know* what to do… it’s the motivation, and the mutual enabling of bad behaviour exercised by my husband and I..)
- or buy “diet food” (calories-in must be less that calories-used, that’s the basic tenet - don’t meet that, you ain’t gonna lose weight no matter what!)
… and yes, I do need/want to lose a whole lot of weight… it’s been stubborn… but I think this is the year things come together
Lynne,
Thank you for your comment.:) I also won’t spend money on diet food or any other diet supplements or drugs. I’m a huge believer in dieting (i.e. getting healthy) as naturally as possible.
One Sparkteam I didn’t include, but that you may want to check out is the Eating Clean team. I don’t follow it completely, but do try to keep my diet as ‘clean’ as I can accommodate easily.
I hope you like Sparkpeople!
Great post.
I’m going to check the site now.
I always make sure I exercise everyday and obviously watch what I eat.
I agree, you don’t need to spend a lot to keep fit. I’m a big fan of making a healthy lifestyle, which means less overhead on things like gyms, fancy diet food, etc. It’s all about small changes that often don’t cost a thing!