Intelli-Diet app: Healthful, but not tasty

Bathing suit season may be ending, but that is no reason to let your summer health and fitness gains to slip away. A new iPhone app, Intelli-Diet, takes a different approach to a healthy eating than most diet apps.

Instead of proscribing what you should eat, the Intelli-Diet asks first what you prefer to eat, then assembles that into three meals and two snacks a day.

You start by entering your starting weight and goal weight as well as your gender, height, age and activity level. Then you choose a plan to either maintain or lose weight, and set the rate of weight loss from a half pound a week to 2 pounds per week.

You also enter your food preferences. Foods are categorized under protein, carbs, fat, fruit, and veggies. Go through each category and click "on" for foods that you like. This is on healthy foods, so sorry, but you won't find a cakes and cookies category.

The program then calculates a daily menu, aimed at balanced nutrition within your calorie range.

The results certainly appear healthy, but they may not be much of a meal. It tells you what foods to eat, but it doesn't offer recipes. For instance, one dinner menu included one cup of beans, two large sweet potatoes, one avocado, one medium bell pepper and a generous helping of Romaine lettuce? What do you make from that? (Readers, do you have an app that provides a solution for those ingredients? And a salad doesn't count.)

If you don't like the ingredients you are dealt, you can press a refresh button to get a new list of ingredients. A refreshed dinner menu includes one cup of beans, a cup of low-fat soup, a cup of brown rice, one avocado, a half cup of tomatoes and two cups of spinach. Closer to a meal, although not exactly Cordon Bleu.

If it is just one ingredient that's off, click on that and you'll be given a list of substitutes. For instance, one meal said I can have 4 teaspoons of canola oil (yum!). But I could substitute two thirds of an avocado, 24 whole almonds or 32 large olives.

The app also tracks your body composition but does it using the Body Mass Index, which is famously inaccurate for fit people.

While it's not likely to appeal to foodies, hard-core "eat for nutrition" body builders and gym habitués might find this just the meal ticket.