by Rachel Funk

Created on: October 15, 2009

Chris Downie developed a personal improvement program to help him self overcome anxiety and shyness as a young man. His program included nutritional goals, fitness goals as well as mental wellbeing. He implemented this plan and through living it, inadvertently inspired a co-worker to make her own changes. She lost fifty pounds. Realizing the effectiveness of his plan, he decided to focus his energies on helping people. As many people as he could. He became founder and CEO of the Columbus, OH based online company, SparkPeople.com. Chris Downie and his employees at SparkPeople have one common goal, to change millions of people's lives. And to do it all for free.

SparkPeople is a user-friendly website offering guidance in any area of diet and fitness a person could want or need, all provided at no cost to the user. There are no fees or premium accounts, every member of SparkPeople is equal and all receive the same guidance, information and support to change their lifestyle. Foremost, free is wonderful, but if it's difficult to get information, it's not worth the trouble. That is not the case with SparkPeople; the site is easy to navigate, broken down into five main components: My Tools, Healthy Lifestyle, Your Health, Community, and the Store. In each of these five selections are sub-categories that provide a more specific selection for that particular aspect of the web site.

For example, My Tools is where a member will find tracking tools to help reach their goals. There is a weekly weigh in and measurement tracker, to track and view progress as the member works through the program. There is the nutritional tracker that allows the user to enter foods eaten, even fast food and casual dining restaurants are included on the list to choose from. With this guide a person can not only manage calories eaten, but also can monitor other nutrient intake as well such as fat gram, sodium, and fiber, to name only a few. Or if that seems too complicated, there's a Quick Tracker for fast information entering. Another tracker provided is the fitness tracker, where the member can either have a fitness routine built for them by SparkPeople, or they can make one of their own design. For the cardio workouts, SparkPeople figures and displays the calories burned for that individual based on the weigh in information provided, since calories burned varies from person to person. All of the information put into these trackers can be viewed in a graph format to show progress from weight

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