Dieting made easy

One useful tip is to drink plenty of water. From time to time at some stage in a hectic morning, you guess that you want a snack but in fact you might just need a refreshing glass of water or orange squash. The feelings of needing food and needing a drink are quite similar, but one of the two can lead to a broken diet and the other is ok.

Some lower carb diet guidlines:
* Use reduced carbohydrate chocolate bars for cookies and muffins. Once you have converted your best loved chocolate chip cookie or muffins recipe using soy flour, you don’t want to add in those high carbohydrate full-sugar chocolate. Cut up a reduced carbohydrate choccie bar into small pieces and use that as an alternative.

* Use splenda instead of sugar. Many recipes that use sugar can be modified to make use of a sugar replacement instead. It doesn't weigh the same so you will need to do a bit of trial and error and it may not work for everything, but it gives pretty good results in most cases.

Foods containing lycopene
(includes apricot, papaya & tomatoes)

The chemical lypcopene is a simple coloring compound and member of the same family of phytochemicals as carotene. Lycopene is the agent responsible for the dark red colour of many foods.

Unlike most other vitamins, lycopene does not become less effective if cooked but is in actuality improved by going through the cooking process.

. Lycoprene's main medical value is that it behaves as an antioxidant and is thought to be of use in the fight to reduce the probabilty of contracting cancer.

This useful phytochemical is the most powerful carotenoid quencher of singlet oxygen, which is correlated with skin aging. It's also thought by many researchers to hamper the progression of atherosclerosis.