- The weight tracking features on Start Your Diet are
available to subscribed members for free. Deluxe
membership opens up a complete set of features, the
cost of which is as follows:
-
- Annual: $29.95
- Trial deluxe membership for free for 5
days.
- Diet features:
- Easy to use tools help you to design a plan
that is perfect for your needs.
- Tweak your plan to personalize it to suit your
lifestyle and goals.
- Construct a daily and weekly food plan.
- Set online goals for motivation, name them and
sync them with an online calendar.
- Daily 'tasks' help keep you focused and on
track.
- Track your daily food with the database and
calorie counter.
- Use customizable weight charts to track your
progress.
- Learn key information about your eating
habits.
- Fitness features:
- Track your exercise, body measurements, water
intake and pedometer data.
- Expert Advice:
- Make use of more than 100 daily lessons from
Linda Spangle RN, MA to help you address your food
and dieting issues.
- Community Support:
- Support, share and motivate each other with
multi-topic message boards.
- Start your own diet blog - keep it private or
share it with others.
- Use the 'diet buddy' scheme to team up with
other users to motivate them.
- Help Files / Technical Support:
- A set of Frequently Asked Questions lets users
(and prospective users) get any of their questions
answered.
- Extras:
- Use mobile tracking to access Start Your Diet
from your iPhone or Blackberry.
Start Your Diet is a resource site
intended to provide dieters with a range of supportive
materials, tools and resources to benefit their long-term
weight loss plans. Start Your Diet, in contrast to many
of the free resource sites that exist on the internet for
dieters, only provides a weight loss tracker for free
users. This tool is not particularly useful, as all it
provides is a method for users to record their weight
over the period of weight loss and display it
graphically. In order to get access to the full
complement of features that are available on Start Your
Diet, users must pay the subscription fee, which
currently stands at $29.95 a year.
Subscription users get access to a range of features
intended to motivate them to continue with successful
weight loss. Studies have suggested that if dieters can
observe their weight loss in both a visual and graphical
sense (i.e. track their weight loss numerically, and see
how it is benefiting their overall health) they are more
likely to succeed in the long term. Users can construct a
daily and weekly food plan, setting calorie goals for
each day of the week according to their overall calorie
needs. These goals are a great way of motivating dieters
to achieve more - as they can set individual,
personalized goals, such as 'my wedding', attach a weight
loss target to that goal and then sync the goal to the
online calendar. As a dieter continues to track their
progress, they can see what they are working towards and
how close they are to achieving that goal. Similarly,
daily diet 'tasks' such as consuming 100 calories less
than the target goal, walking a further 2km or drinking 8
glasses of water for example, ensure that a dieter is
kept motivated to achieve more and continue to be
successful. One of the more impressive elements of Start
Your Diet is that the whole program can be accessed from
an iPhone or Blackberry using the mobile service. This
means users can update their details on the go, check the
calories in a particular food item whilst in the grocery
store or deli or get that motivational boost if things
start to slip. We were impressed by this feature, and
certainly think it should be a standard element of many
of the larger diet programs.
That said, there are a few problems with the Start Your
Diet service which unfortunately detracts from the
overall success of the program. Start Your Diet doesn't
offer users the chance to draw up a fitness planner from
an exercise database. These tools are incredibly useful,
especially for those who may not be particularly used to
going to the gym or engaging in regular exercise. A
printable exercise routine planner would be a great
addition to the Start Your Diet service. Equally, the
calorie counter and food tracker, even though it contains
more than 20,000 entries, simply isn't as easy to use as
many others we have tried (such as The Daily Plate, for
example, which is provided to users free of charge!).
Finally, customer support seems a little lax, with only a
brief set of FAQs available for users to find answers to
simple problems.
As the 5 day de luxe membership is the only free feature provided by Start Your Diet,
users would perhaps be better off trying alternative
weight loss resource sites that offer users a wider
selection of tools free of charge. We did however like
the goals and calendar system, so if you're willing to
pay the $29.95 a year membership fee for this service,
the goals feature will undoubtedly provide you with some
additional motivation.
Click on the button below to check out StartYourDiet.com for yourself...
