Healthy eating

These practical tips can help you make healthier eating choices...

To maintain a healthy diet, the two key things you should remember are:

• you need to eat the right amount of food for how active you are
• you need to eat a range of foods, giving you a balanced diet

Living a modern sedentary lifestyle means that we generally eat more food than we actually need. This means that we put on weight because our body is taking in more energy than it can burn off. But, by eating smaller portions and fewer calories, and increasing the amount of exercise we do, our body's metabolism will break down what we're eating a lot more easily and we'll maintain a healthy weight.

A healthy balanced diet contains a variety of types of food, including: lots of fruit, vegetables and starchy foods (such as wholemeal bread and wholegrain cereals); some protein-rich foods (such as meat, fish, eggs and lentils); and some milk and dairy foods.

That said, we all want to feel healthy and trim, but no-one wants to deprive themselves of all the things they love drinking, eating and doing. In fact, cutting out the things we love often means we don't keep up the changes we make for very long - so any good work we do is easily undone later on.

One of the best ways to be healthy is to make some swaps and build them into your life for the long term. The more you do, the better you'll feel - and you won't have to say 'no' to everything. Click here to see Change4Life's top tips for making those small changes and swaps!