Quick Weight Loss Tips - Get Real About Your Fruit and Veg
By Michelle Spencer

Eating your five portions day of fruit and vegetables is a familiar health message. In terms of weight loss, fruit and vegetables are naturally high in water, so weight-for-weight their calorie content is fairly low. Fruit can be higher in natural sugars, making it useful for satisfying sugar cravings without the excess calories you may get from commercial snack bars.

From a health and weight loss perspective, the benefits of eating fruit and vegetables are undisputed, but sometimes getting fresh produce can be a problem. How many times have you seen a festering tomato or soggy cucumber at the bottom of your salad tray, or gone to the supermarket in the evening to find only sad-looking fruit and veg?

Fruit and vegetables like these make reaching for starchy white rice and pasta an easy option. Getting real about fruit and vegetables is about helping you get more fruit and vegetables into your diet in a convenient way. You'll save calories, help adopt the Carb Curfew rule, boost your nutrient intake in your evening meal and have access to fruit and vegetables when you need them.

Believe it or not, fresh isn't always best for those short of time or money. In fact, fresh in some cases is not even fresh. A canned product can be just as nutrient-rich as a fresh one, and in some cases even more nutritious.

Even though we can buy a whole range of fresh fruits and vegetables all year round, lots of produce is shipped long distances. Foods that sit around for a long time after harvest lose nutrients. From root to fruit, a plant is a single living thing, and any vegetable or fruit begins to die the moment it's torn from the stem. The plant is no longer photosynthesizing. It's still living tissue but slowly dying as natural enzymes are released from cells and begin to break down.

Preserving foods - whether in your grandmother's preserving jar, a can or a freezer bag - halts this nutrient degradation. Canning uses high temperatures to neutralize naturally occurring enzymes that would result in breaking down of tissue. There are losses, however. Some water-soluble nutrients such as vitamin C and folic acid don't fare very well. Two minutes of blanching can cut vitamin C levels in a tomato by 10 per cent, while 15 minutes of cooking causes levels to drop by 15 per cent.

Other nutrients, however, thrive during canning. Carotenoids -- the betacarotene, lycopene, lutein and zeaxanthin found in orange, yellow and red produce -- are made more effective by heat processing. One study found that levels of lycopene, an antioxidant found in tomatoes, rose by 54 and 171 per cent respectively after the two and fifteen-minute cooking times.

Levels of antioxidant compounds in tinned sweetcorn rose by as much as 550 per cent after processing. When heated, these plant chemicals become more digestible and usable in the body. Sweet potatoes, carrots, sweetcorn and even canned pumpkin all potentially have more phytochemical actions when processed. And that results in more protection against cancer and heart disease.

How To Lose Weight Fast

Learning how to lose weight isn't just cutting down on what you eat -- it's about understanding how many calories you need to lose weight, following a healthy diet and watching your carbs, being aware of how different types of food affect your health and your weight loss, and getting plenty of specific weight loss exercise. To find out a healthy weight loss diet means you can actually eat as much as you wish, get Michelle's free weight loss diet tips newsletter. It covers everything you need to understand how to lose weight fast.

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