[LancelotsLover]

I just looked at and signed up to Sparkpeople, so in case anyone's wondering about the differences, here's what I noticed. Fitday is more minimal in its web design; there's less obtrusive advertising, and for me it was more intuitively easy to figure out how to use it. It does a great job of analyzing nutrition, fitness activities, calories in/out, weight, etc. and there are simple tabs at the top to quickly navigate to your desired page. There is a pie chart on your food entry page for your macro ratios, that updates instantly whenever you add or delete a food. Simple to use.

Sparkpeople will offer you more "goodies" like exercise tips, networking with other fitness-minded people, newsletters, recipes, etc. I'ts very glitzy, flashy, lots of animated ads going all the time. I found it hard to use, a little cumbersome to add foods, the search box opens in a new window, and there are several steps to go through to find your pie chart of macroratios. And it doesn't like to give you your ratio breakdown until you have entered all the foods for the day. It breaks down your foods into specific meals, and you have to tell it which meal to add your food to every time you enter one.

If you are a magazine reader, Facebook-er, Myspace-er, etc. you will probably like Sparkpeople. If you are more minimalist, just want the basics with no extra glitz, and are less web-savvy, you will probably like Fitday. For me, Fitday won hands down. It's simple.

P.S. One feature I did like a lot on Sparkpeople is that it allows you to import a custom food from another member. So if you are tracking for you and your husband, for example, and you manually enter nutrition information for a custom food that you both eat, you can enter it once, and import it for the other person without having to reenter it. Fitday doesn't have that, so I have had to enter foods three times to track for three different people. Kind of a pain.