Be alert when you click: Look for specific, concrete help. To be useful, a site should require information about your height, weight, age and activity level to tailor an accurate activity log and daily calorie requirements.
For example, caloriecounter , a marketing-oriented site that offers hyperlinks to commercial weight-loss sites, is very different from the similar-sounding caloriecount.about.com.
The former aims to sell products and services. The latter is a free-registration site affiliated with . It offers virtual community support, logs to record food intake, activity and weight, and impressive food and recipe databases.
Here’s a handful of other weight- loss sites geared to motivate people into making the lifestyle changes required to lose weight and get fit:
traineo.com: Free. Calorie and activity log, plus Motivators — support from invited friends or relatives who keep users accountable, diet tracking and a forum for posting success stories, advice and questions.
hungry-girl.com: Free. Useful and witty, with such links as Chew The Right Thing (seasonal recipes and advice) and Girls Bite Out (product and menu picks and pans).
hyperstrike.com: $90 a year includes an online fitness assessment, more than 600 detailed video exercises and a workout calendar to log progress.
sparkpeople.com: Free. Great for the gregarious, with tons of e-mail and support from other members, merit-point rewards and excellent articles.
thedailyplate.com and .: Free. Require registering through livestrong ., the foundation associated with cyclist Lance Armstrong. Thedailyplate is user-friendly, and basic — data in, data out — with a menu of activities even longer than Bodybugg’s. Claire Martin
