Even though you are on a diet, you should still enjoy your food. Just because you have to reduce your calories and watch what you eat, shouldn’t mean that your food has to be plain, uninteresting and bland.

Don’t go for just plain chicken and a salad, or a tub of cottage cheese, make it more interesting!

Poach the chicken in a can of low-cal soup, cook it with a can of tomatoes and add some chopped onion or sliced mushrooms. Add a hard boiled egg to your cottage cheese, try a chopped apple, or a dash of curry powder, or chopped pineapple, either fresh or canned in natural juice, anything that will make it more interesting and tasty.

Try all the different salad vegetables that the supermarkets stock. Use a selection of lettuce leaves to add colour, put fresh fruit with your salad, apple slices and a few grapes, slices of kiwi fruit, grated white cabbage, grated carrots, sliced raw mushrooms, courgette’s sliced into sticks, all these will add colour and texture and make that salad much more interesting.

Ask yourself what you can have that’s delicious, but that won’t spoil your diet. Treat yourself to a piece of fresh salmon, or how about some prawns. We all plan and cook for our families, but not for ourselves. Put yourself to the front during your diet, you deserve it! If you buy yourself a treat - DON’T let anyone else interfere, treat yourself! You’re far more likely to stick to the diet if you are really enjoying what you are eating. SPOIL YOURSELF as much as you can. Take a good look around the supermarket at the new foods that you haven’t tried before or the foods that you buy for special occasions and treat yourself - NOW.

Check out the fish counter and try something you haven’t tried before. Look at the wonderful range of fruit available, go on - buy something different, you might really enjoy it. What about foreign or continental food - try it, you might like it!

Choose your food carefully, with your restrictions of fat and calories in mind and you will start to lose weight, but you won’t be bored and you’ll be enjoying your food more than you ever did.

Try a fresh fruit on top of your breakfast cereal. Try a different juice for breakfast, rather than your normal orange. Different fillings for those sandwiches, tuna with grated apple, turkey with crisp bacon and pickle.

So, make yourself the promise that you will try something different and delicious that is on the diet. At least once, but as many times as possible really. You may find that if you persist, you actually end up enjoying the food that helps you lose weight!