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 pointers:
* Use soya flour or baking mix. When you require flour for baked goods, substitute it with soya flour or a soy baking mix like Atkins soy baking mix. In most situtations, you may change your best loved recipes that use white flour to use these low carbohydrate alternatives.

* Make great smoothies using low carb yogurt. Yes, you can't really call it cooking, but if you are missing your smoothies you can make them with low carb yogurt and your favorite fruit. Obviously, you should make sure you use only fruit that is low in carbohydrates and use the whole fruit as the fiber will help.

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.