SparkChallenges: Fun for Personal Goals or With Friends!

By , Always looking for new challenges to keep you motivated!
2018 is well underway, and we know you’re knocking your resolutions out of the park this year. Way to go! :) But if you feel your resolve slipping a little this January, or if you’d like to one-up your goal game, we have a new and super-fun feature you can start using today. Queue inspirational music:

SparkChallenges: Strive for Your Personal Goals or Contend With Friends!


We built a whole new challenge platform that will help you to make small improvements to your fitness, diet or general wellbeing for as little as a week or as long as three months! They’re a fun and positive way to feel a sense of accomplishment for healthy habits you set and stand by, even if you’re just getting started with a seven-day challenge. You can set up a personal challenge in a few minutes, or--if you want a little friendly rivalry--you can invite your friends, your Sparkfriends or even your family to participate too!

We have six new challenges to get you started (with more to come soon):



Eat the Rainbow: Fuel your body by eating more fruits and vegetables.

Move It: Get in more fitness minutes each day.

H2Whoa: Finally get around to drinking the recommended 8 cups of water a day. (You’ll be glad you did!)

Fitness Feats: Rack up 10 fitness wins a day for as long as you can--they’ll add up quick!

Food Feats: Make at least 10 healthy nutrition choices daily and see how you feel.

Goal Feats: The wildcard--you define the goals you want to achieve and you see how many you can hit each day.

Easy to Set Up, Easy to Share:


We want this tool to help you reach your goals as fast as possible, so we made it super easy to set up a new challenge (and share it with your friends if you want to). All you need to do to set up your first challenge is go to the top of any page on the site and click on “Challenges.” (Go ahead and look for it--we’ll be here when you get back.)

You’ll now see two options: Calendar Challenges (wonderful in their own right), and our new SparkChallenges. Click on the link and you’ll see all of our new challenge options. Tap the “Create” button under the challenge you want to start, name your challenge, set the the number of days you’d like the challenge to run and the goal you’d like to achieve and get going!

Once you create your challenge, you can track your daily progress with a tap. You can also interact with other people who have joined your challenge, or the greater SparkPeople community--it’s totally up to you.

If you want to use this tool to focus on your own goals, that’s A-OK. But if there’s a special someone you’d like to encourage to reach the same goal with you--SparkPeople member or not--it’s easy to invite them to join your challenge.

Each challenge comes with its own special link--just shoot your friend a link and they’ll be invited to join your challenge with just a couple of clicks! Or--if you’re more of a Facebook user--you can click a button to share your challenge with whoever you're connected with there. And finally, we made it super easy to shoot an invite to your SparkFriends, because your SparkFriends are super awesome! We built the tool so that people who are new to SparkPeople can get started with just a few clicks--if they want to only use the challenge tool and nothing else on the site that’s perfectly fine.

Be a Healthy Leader!


As many of our members can attest, sometimes a small action or an invite to our community can “spark” great and amazing changes in someone else’s life. So if you’re open to a friendly competition, we encourage you to invite all your friends--even people who have never used SparkPeople before--to join your SparkChallenges.

We know that it can be hard to invite some people to a dieting and fitness site, but challenges are a great way to introduce someone new to the SparkPeople community. We intentionally built these first, six challenges to help everyone live healthier, more motivated lives; they aren't just weight loss oriented. This structure makes it easier to spark your friends, family, coworkers, and community towards a healthy lifestyle, even if they aren't interested in losing weight.

It can be so rewarding when you focus on a simple, healthy habit together with the people who are important to you. Every new person you bring into the community helps us reach our mission of helping as many people as possible live happier, healthier lives. No matter what your friends' goals are, we can be a healthy and positive resource for them--you already know this, and soon they will too. Encourage your friends to better their lives in simple ways, and be a healthy leader!

So give our challenges a try and tell us what you think in the comments below. We want this new tool to be as useful as possible and we are most definitely open to your suggestions. No comment is too small, so please share your thoughts.