A few tips on healthy eating

If you enjoy eating, but want to get in shape and improve your overall vitality, then, as most people know, you need to start a thoughtfully prepared well-balanced meal plan. In a perfect world, this needs to contain 5 standard portions of grains, fruit and vegetables daily and embrace the right proportion of food types.

Some lower carbohydrate diet tips:
* Replace sugar with splenda. Many recipes that use sugar can be modified to make use of a sugar substitute like splenda. It doesn't weigh the same so you will need to expirement with it and it might not be perfect for everything, but it does bake up nice for the most part.

* Know what is in your food Don't believe food packaging that boasts 'low carb' - check the actual nutritional information on the back of the can or package. Quite a few are only marginally less and in some instances still greater than a competitors normal brand. Also, beware of 'low sugar' and 'low fat' labels - 'low sugar' does not always mean 'low carb' - usually the carbs are exactly the same.

Foods rich in lycopene
(includes apricots, papaya & tomato puree)

The chemical lypcopene is a naturally occurring coloring agent and a member of the carotenid family of phytochemicals. It is accountable for the vivid red colour of many fruits and vegetables.

Unlike many other healthy agents, it is not damaged if it is cooked, rather it is actually increased in efficacy by cooking.

. Its key health contribution is that it is an antioxidant and is thought to help reduce the probabilty of cancer.

It is the most effective remover of singlet oxygen, which is connected with skin aging. It is also thought by many experts to curtail the growth of diseases affecting arterial blood vessels.