Keeping the Home by Lori Seaborg - Free Online Programs for Weight Loss or Improving Your Health

Keeping the Home by Lori Seaborg

Wednesday, January 17, 2007

Free Online Programs for Weight Loss or Improving Your Health

If, as part of your decluttering process, or part of your New Year's resolutions, you want to lose weight (or, better yet, just to improve your health), I have a few websites for you:

The National Body Challenge is a health guidance program that will guide you through weight loss or weight maintenance. They give you a menu and recipes for healthy, non-processed meals. And they also give you exercise guidance. It's an 8 or 10-week program, put on by Discovery Health. If you are considering this, join now, because this program only continues through March.

Get an Edge is an interesting program by Shape magazine that focuses on exercise. After putting my numbers into the program, it came up with an exercise program customized to me. Better yet, the program is interesting because each day you do something different, such as swimming, walking/running, biking, or strength training. I like the variety and the charts in this program. Their food journal won't allow you to save what you input, so don't use it. Instead, use the following....

Fit Day is a food journal program. You input what you eat each day and it calculates the calories eaten. My favorite part of this program is the graphs, which include a chart of nutrients. I love seeing if I am getting enough of each Recommended Daily Allowance of nutrients. It is fun to figure out what to eat to make the numbers go up. This would be a good program for your homeschooled children, too, so they'd learn more about nutrition.

While searching for the calorie count of Moe's taco and side chips, I found another food journal/calorie counter at The Daily Plate. I think I may like this one even better than Fit Day's. It seems to have many restaurant items included in it and even gives recommendations of what you could choose instead of your normal high-calorie favorite. I'm going to try this journal and Fit Day's at once for a while until one comes out as my favorite.

Every program above is completely and absolutely FREE, by the way. Check them out!