A few tips on healthy eating

In planning a diet, the important thing is to also endeavour to restrict your ingestion of refined carbohydrates, salt and fats.

Some low carbohydrate diet guidlines:
* You can create really nice smoothies with reduced carbohydrate yogurt. Admittedly, you can't really describe it as cooking, but if you are missing your smoothies you can throw them together with reduced carb yogurt and fruit. Obviously, you will need to make sure you use only fruit that is low in carbs and use the whole fruit as the fiber is important too.

* Make low carb bread crumbs for deep fried foods. Whilst you can sometimes buy low carb breadcrumbs, you can make them at home by using reduced carbohydrate bread. Simply toast the reduced carb bread in your oven on a sheet of baking paper. Once it is quite hard and crispy, process it in the food processor or blender. To store, keep in an airtight jar or container.

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.