The Spark: The Breakthrough Plan for Losing Weight, Getting Fit, and Transforming Your Life
Product Description
Abridged Audiobook • 4-CD set
A revolution is taking place! Millions of people are discovering a new way of thinking about their weight, their health, and their lives. They are taking part in a visionary approach to weight loss that combines goal setting, nutrition, exercise, motivation, and community that has a proven track record of ten million pounds lost. From the experts who created SparkPeople.com, one of the most successful online weight-loss programs to date, comes The Spark, ground-breaking work that focuses on what you can do, instead of what you can’t do. The Spark is about transforming your life and your idea of what dieting means. This abridged audio book distills the best of SparkPeople’s medically accepted nutrition and fitness plan and infuses it with a program of personal empowerment. You’ll discover: · Secrets of Success—the best habits of SparkPeople’s most successful members… More >>
The Spark: The Breakthrough Plan for Losing Weight, Getting Fit, and Transforming Your Life
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True or false: People fail to lose weight and keep it off because they don’t realize they need to eat healthy food and exercise.
We know that isn’t true– everyone knows about healthy food and exercise. But isn’t that the message of most “diet” books? Once you find the right magic foods and the right magic exercise, once you have that secret knowledge not found in any other diet book, then YOU will lose that weight!
If we are willing to be honest, the real reason we are not losing weight is US— we end up choosing to eat that dessert, to sleep in instead of pounding the pavement, to say to ourselves “this is never going to work.”
And that’s where The Spark starts: with how we view and live our life and how we can make sustainable positive change. In fact, it doesn’t even start talking about what foods to eat until page 84.
Where it starts is with four “cornerstones” of positive living: focus, fitness, fire, and positive force. The author takes a chapter on each of these concepts and lays out how they apply to life in general and a life shift like weight loss in particular.
So, does this work? Does the effort to really understand the principles of positive change make a difference? Well, this book is really just the distillation of a website & online community, [...], which has helped tens of thousands of people make meaningful change. In fact, the center of the book contains short bios and color photos of seventeen people, real people, real people who you can actually contact through the sparkpeople online community, who have used the principles to lose big weight (most of them 100+ pounds) and keep it off and really change their lives.
Yes, the healthy diet and exercise tips are in there, just like in every diet book. But what makes this book different, and special, is that the focus isn’t the food, but you: a practical plan to change your outlook and jump-start your motivation so that you can practice a healthy lifestyle and change your life. A very good way to start out the new year, or any time you decide to change for the better.
I’ve been a member of SparkPeople since it started in 2002. This book tied a lot of things I learned on the site together, plus taught me many more new things! My favorite part was the “Success Secrets” scattered throughout the book.
Whether you are a SparkPeople member or not I would recommend this book. It can help you lose some weight, but more importantly help you get your priorities straight and make healthy changes to your life that will stay with you forever.
The Spark is a great motivational tool for setting and achieving goals in all areas of your life! It’s definitely slanted towards helping you set and achieve diet/fitness related goals, but it also sets you up to use those goals as a springboard to start achieving goals in other areas of your life that you never thought possible.
I recommend this book for anyone who wants a dose of motivation and inspiration to take their life to a new level and start reaching their goals!
A chronic yo-yo dieter, I have owned every popular diet book ever published! Finally, I found SparkPeople and learned how to break that cycle of losing and gaining, losing and gaining once and for all! I’ve been at my goal weight, after a weight loss of 70 pounds, for four years now and attribute my success at maintaing my weight loss to the life changing strategies outlined in this book. The focus isn’t on what we shouldn’t do but rather positive steps we can take to conquer obstacles such as emotional eating, lack of motivation, and difficulty exercising. It covers goal setting, nutrition, physical activity, and motivation. The free website uses a social networking framework similar to My Space and Facebook to provide a community of “Sparkers” who inspire and motivate each other through teams based on personal interests, opportunities to blog and journal both publicly and privately, make friends literally all over the world, and challenges and rewards that make success fun! I would encourage you to read the book as well as joining the website. Personally, I went from an overweight 49 year old “couch potato” to a healthy 53 year old woman who now runs and completed a 5K race this year! If I can accomplish this using the Spark formula — anyone can!!
Everyone wants a spark of inspiration to live a healthier, thinner, fitter lifestyle, and there’s a good chance you’ll get it from The Spark. Author Chris Downie gives a formula for success that includes goal setting, positive motivation, an eating program, exercise, and community support through his worldclass website, [...]. In fact, the real magic of the Spark program revolves around participation in the sparkpeople website, which is more exciting than the book.
The Spark diet is a 4-stage process, which Downie bills as a way of life rather than a diet. However, it really is a low-fat, moderate calorie diet, and it draws heavily on the USDA food program guidelines. There are 4 stages, and each stage has several sub-steps. All these activities make the diet complicated to understand and implement. As for exercise, Downie advocates 10-minute “streaks” of continuous, positive activity every day.
The Spark has a lot of goodness going for it, and Downie’s positive, contagious energy is hands down the best feature of the book and his website ambiance. The program clearly works for a lot of people, and Downie has a legion of raving fans. That said, like many weight loss and fitness books, The Spark suffers from predictable, re-hashed information and consequently did not hold my attention.
Also, Downie’s organization of material creates confusion rather than clarity. A few times I had to read a whole page or more before I could figure out what the chapter was going to be about. In general, I had a hard time following his lead.
This book is recommended for people who are drawn to online interactions and who like a lot of support. It’s not recommended for the computer illiterate.