He was soft, but now he's shredded.

In 2003, John Stone was your typical pudgy guy: doughy arms, a beer gut and, by his own admission, "lazy, fat and unhealthy." But Mr. Stone, 40, didn't just decide to get himself a gym membership.

Instead, the Florida resident launched a website, www.JohnStoneFitness.com, to make his progress public. On the site he posted everything from pics of himself post-workout to diet tips to his daily stats that detailed his age, height, weight, percentage of body fat and measurements of just about every body part imaginable. Eight months later, Mr. Stone had dropped 55 pounds and his percentage of body fat had gone from 30 per cent to 8 per cent. Today, his site has 25,000 members and attracts anywhere from 8,000 to 80,000 users on any given day.

"The Internet is invaluable on the support side. Just interacting with people who are pursuing the same goals you are and supporting and encouraging one another, that part of it is huge," Mr. Stone says.

Mr. Stone's site is just one of many popular destinations for the body transformation community, a group of people obsessed with exercise and diet who congregate on online forums to swap tips, find training regimens and chronicle their change from schlub to shredder.

Shredder?

"Shredding is like past ripped," says Kiyan Azarbar, a Web developer in his early 30s who lives in Toronto and entered the body transformation community in January, 2008. Most people, though, are "soft." "You probably look like a normal dude. … It's the opposite of a hard body."

Mr. Azarbar's experience mirrors that of many in the body transformation community: A former athlete in university, his lifestyle had become sedentary. When he decided to get back in shape, he bounced from one fad diet to another. "I tried Atkins and South Beach and the Zone and all that stuff," he says.

Then a friend at work mentioned Mr. Stone's site. "I just started going on the forums and I realized there was this big community," Mr. Azarbar says. "I thought, maybe this is the answer."

On the forums at sites like Mr. Stone's, one can find every subject from gym equipment advice to the number of repetitions per set for optimal muscle growth. And while some questions posed on the forums appeal to the average person looking to get in shape – "How should I breathe when lifting weights?" – others are obviously posed by fitness diehards. As one person asked on the forum of www.BodyRecomposition.com, "What's my genetic muscular potential?"

Having found a trainer in the United States through Mr. Stone's site, Mr. Azarbar followed a strict regimen for three or four months and lost 20 pounds while going from 22 per cent body fat to 16 per cent. The regimen saw him having to do 45 minutes of cardio in the morning, all the while keeping his heart rate at 65 to 75 per cent of its maximum. ("No running/jogging" the instructions dictate.) His diet consisted of six meals a day, all of them to be eaten at specific times and comprising specific amounts of protein, carbs and fat. Add to that a seven-day workout schedule that worked him over from head to toe.

The regimen eventually became too intense, Mr. Azarbar says. "It was an extremely rigid schedule," he says. "You had to wake up at a certain time, you had to do cardio for 45 minutes before you ate, you had to eat like six meals [a day]."

He eventually switched to Martin Berkhan, a Sweden-based trainer who runs the site www.LeanGains.com.

Mr. Berkhan's program may strike some as equally intense. "My method entails 16 hours of fasting … followed by an eight-hour feeding phase," Mr. Berkhan says.

Weights gym owner and personal trainer Kurt Luzny works out in his gym in Vancouver.

Joining the online body transformation community is almost as addictive as any workout, says Mr. Azarbar. "It's almost like, not a secret club, but people feel pretty good to be experienced members of that community," he says.

But Kurt Luzny, who along with Bryan Runge co-owns Weights, a fitness centre in Vancouver, says there is no substitute for working with a trainer in person. "There are some very good resources on the internet. There's also a lot of confusion," he says. It can be difficult, says Mr. Luzny, for newcomers to weed out good information from bad.

"I would compare it to getting a university degree at school and being able to sit in on lectures and talk to peers in the classroom as well as talking to the professor afterwards versus doing a program online, isolated," he says. "You're going to get an optimal development in the first case. In the second, it's a lot easier to get on the wrong course."

"In terms of an optimal situation," he adds, "you definitely want to be with someone who knows what he's doing and have him right there to be able to interpret your body's response as you're going through the exercises."

However, the Internet is the only option for some people, says Tom Venuto, author of The Body Fat Solution. "In some cases, I've seen where it's the only place people have to turn," Mr. Venuto says. "People are so negative around them and just dragging them down all the time. Here you've got a place where it's a really positive community and people there are in their shoes."

There is no doubt online forums attract a large audience.

Eddy Poza, a 37-year-old bodybuilder in Montreal who launched the online forum www.CanadaBodyBuilding.com, in 2006, says the site has more than 17, 000 visitors each month. "When you meet people online who are doing this, you get more motivated and you feel like you're not alone," he says.

Andre David, who runs the Toronto-based site www.HypeMuscle.com, says there is another benefit to the distance of the Internet: "There are some people who are too timid and don't feel comfortable asking for advice face to face."

There are also some people who want to use the Internet to learn about steroids, of how to get and use them. The site www.CanadaBodyBuilding.com has a link to a site called www.LegalSteroids.com. However, many sites have a no-steroid policy that is strictly enforced, Mr. Stone says.

Mr. Azarbar says he does not visit forums nearly as much as he once did. But he is still in the gym as often as possible, still carefully monitoring his diet and still logging on to forums every now and then to seek out advice and post pictures of his progress.

As Mr. Azarbar says, "It's kind of a way of life."