As with the WebMD site, you search for the foods you would like to add to your plan. Your chosen menus will be compared to your ideal daily nutritional goals. The cool thing with this site is that you can do full-week menus pretty painlessly. You can duplicate a day’s menus to additional days, edit as desired, and print out a copy to take with you everywhere.
The downside of this site is you can’t adjust your goals too well. After you input your height, weight, age and activity level, the program gives you a calorie goal that may not be what you want. For example, my plan told me I should eat 1800 calories a day to lose weight, which I thought was a little too high. So I had to just enter daily meal plans that totaled the 1500 calories that I thought I should have, and the program told me my calorie count came up short, but I just ignored that.
NATIONAL HEART LUNG AND BLOOD INSTITUTE INTERACTIVE MENU PLANNER
Okay, this one doesn’t have all the bells and whistles of the WebMD or MyPyramid sites. But if you don’t have the patience and just want to spit out a quicker and more simple diet menu, this planner is for you: Interactive Menu Planner
This site operates through simple drop-down menus where you choose from several pre-determined options. For example, you choose a desired level of 1200, 1400, 1600, 1800 or 2000 calories per day. You choose from a set list of fruits, vegetables, milk, grains, meats, beverages and fats. Presto, you have a plan! As with WebMD, you can only plan one day’s worth of meals at a shot.
DIET BITES: FREE ONLINE DIET PLANS AND RECIPES
Maybe you just don’t care to have a personalized diet and fitness plan at all; you’d rather just look up your ideal weight, find a canned plan and be done with it. Diet Bites is a site that offers a lot of free information, recipes, and online tools such as ideal weight charts and lists of calorie counts in various popular fast foods: Diet Bites