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 reduced carb diet pointers:
* Food labels can be misleading Don't trust food labeling that boasts to be 'low carb' - check the real nutritional information on the rear of the tin or package. Quite a few are only slightly less and in some cases still greater than a competitors standard brand. In addition, beware of 'low sugar' and 'low fat' labels - 'low sugar' doesn't always mean 'low carb' - usually the carbs are just the same.

* Use soya flour or soy baking mix. When you need to use flour for baking, substitute soya flour or a bake mix like Atkins baking mix. In many cases, you can change your most popular recipes that use standard wheat flour to use these low carbohydrate alternatives.

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.