There are many ways to skin the Healthy Eating cat.  One good tip is that you should establish a healthy habit and stick to it through life.  Bingeing and yo-yo diets are increasingly common and not at all a good idea.  Eating moderately and often suits the body’s processes – three meals a day with a snack mid-morning and mid-afternoon.  Have a good breakfast, and a good lunch – to fuel your energy needs during the day - but only a moderate dinner. 

On a level plate of food half should be vegetables, a quarter carbohydrate and a quarter protein.  So half of what we eat should be vegetables and a lot of that should be leafy greens with not too much starchy varieties like peas, carrots, parsnips, beetroot.

Avoid “empty energy” – just carbohydrate and fat with no other nutritional benefit.  A frighteningly large proportion of the nation’s favourites fall into this category – chips, crisps, cakes, bread (especially with spreads such as butter  and jam), deep-fried Mars bars, pizza, pork crackling, batter, biscuits, roast potatoes, Yorkshire pudding and so on.  In general take your carbohydrates in a wholemeal, low GI, slow release form.

Cooking:  the best place to learn is from your mother (ok – or father).  Or you can learn at school.  Or you can go on a course.  Or you can just plunge right in, read recipes, try things, suffer a few burnt offerings on the way.  What you should NOT do is go down the pre-prepared easy cook route.  The Jamie Oliver book “Ministry of Food” is a really good starting point – he wrote it (and produced the TV series) for adults who had never learned to cook.  Saint Jamie is all over the Web, so too is that other popular teacher – Delia Smith.  See, for example, http://www.deliaonline.com/cookery-school/how-to where Delia explains how to avoid common mistakes.

An important part of home cooking is shopping for food.  One tip – never buy food, or make any decisions about what you’re going to eat, when you’re hungry.  Best plan in advance and shop for what you need for, say, a week’s menus.