AMA Perfect Body Diet

In principle this program is a good idea. In principle. AMA Perfect Body Diet purports to be a health and fitness companion that can provide a handy diet and exercise regime based on some vital statistic entered into the system as you begin on the path to fitness bliss.

Unfortunately, though, it's hampered by a confused theme focusing on the unrealistic (and, in the majority of cases, unwanted) notion of becoming a world-class catwalk model. Neither does it inspire much confidence on the advice or procedures on offer.

For some unexplained reason, your first step toward Perfect Body Diet's promised health bonanza is set in a cinema auditorium, rather than a gym or a fat club. It's also narrated by a blonde stick figure full of teeth called Mya, who has a fair amount of difficulty stringing together sentences.

Mya talks in considerable detail about what a great looking model she is, which gets things off an the wrong foot since being repelled by the 'fitness trainer's pretentious attitude isn't the positive message AMA thinks it is. And quite what all this has to do with a diet and exercise program is anyone's guess.

Beginning with a questionnaire, the bumptious Mya determines what kind of lifestyle you current lead so she can begin to advise you on diet and exercise routines. While I'm certainly no expert on such matters, I found that many of the questions failed to offer suitable answers.

Chocolate, for instance, is brought up on several occasions (not literally) with optional responses being 'I eat nothing but chocolate' and 'I never touch chocolate'. Surely there are some of us who 'sometimes' eat chocolate and want to see what AMA Perfect Body Diet has to offer without labelling ourselves as cocoa-coated fat bastards?

Mya then offers up some advice on how to begin improving your healthy lifestyle. It seems that 90 per cent of the advice she has to give is based around changing your habits and perceptions, with little in the way of solid, practical recommendations.

It hardly takes the Green Goddess or Mr Motivator to uncover that particular piece of wisdom, and anyone likely to be looking for a system to help their new, healthy lifestyle along has already figured it out for themselves.

Another piece of rather nebulous knowledge she hit me with was 'Avoid food and drinks that emphasise your stress level'. A drink that emphasises my stress level? Does that mean I should avoid Angry Joe's Cola, or stop visiting the Despondent Whiskey Distillery?

This theme of vague and generalised non-advice seems to run throughout AMA Perfect Body Diet, interspersed at rare occasions with nuggets of reasonable, if obvious, counsel (such as the occasional exercise you can perform in your office chair) and downright bizarre and dubious suggestions like a guaranteed weight loss of 10lbs of after 12 days of eating grapefruit.

While there may well have been a certain level of professional expertise called upon during the program's development, there's a tangible feeling from very early on that there's no genuine, solid fitness foundation underneath AMA Perfect Body Diet.

The advice, routines and programs on offer are more akin to the lectures we've all received from someone who's managed to make their gym membership last more than two months, and comes on all ostentatious whenever they see someone keeping company with a cream cake. The gym snob has been digitised.

If it could shed the unnecessary narration and pointless cinematic presentation – and perhaps replace it with a demonstration of professional, scientific basis for the guidance on offer – AMA Perfect Body Diet might have proven to be a worthy fitness companion. As it stands it amounts to little more than a pocket-based guilt applicator and hollow motivational cliché machine.