Healthy Gourmet

Forget dieting: it slows your metabolism, reduces your lean mass and accumulates toxins. Soon enough, you will put back what have you lost.

Forget counting calories: quality calories are full of nutrients, while poor calories increase our appetite. Cooking techniques are much more important than the calorie count; a chef can heal or poison by the way he cooks. Cook your food simply and quickly.

Forget the complexity of the commercially driven diet industry. The key principles for healthiness are few and simple. The goal of losing weight is already misplaced; you want to lose body fat, not just weight. Don't relay on scales, look at the mirror. In terms of body aesthetic, toned is beautiful, skinny is not.

There are three simple rules if you aim to lose excess body fat or maintain your ideal weight: eat well, keep the metabolism active and exercise.

On eating well, Michel Pollan, author of , puts it simply: "Don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognise as food."