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The key to eating healthily is to eat real food. Everyone is in agreement that if you eat more fruit and vegetables, and decent quality proteins such as lean meat and fish, then you're not going to go far wrong.

For some people the idea of just eating fruit, veg and meat is quite alien because a lot of us are addicted to carbs (carbohydrates) in the shape of bread, pastas and processed foods. The quickest, most efficient way of getting healthy is to start eating more vegetables instead of processed or carb foods.

If it doesn't grow on a tree, if it hasn't grown out of the ground, if it hasn't swum, flown or run around a field, then it's not really food. If you use those rules then you'll find that, before long, you're going to start getting pretty healthy pretty quick.

Use your common sense. If you eat things like chocolates and sweets, it sends your insulin levels through the roof. Before you know it you're hungrier than you were before you started because your hormones are thrown out of balance. Stay away from the processed foods.

One of the biggest problems with the whole health and nutrition industry is that there is too much information out there. We're saturated with facts and figures about Mediterranean diets, caveman diets, high carbs, low fat, high fat, low carbs... There is no voodoo behind all of this stuff, it just takes a little bit of common sense.

Think of everything you eat as a pie chart, and install little wedges of the right types of food day by day. That way it's easy to see how balanced your diet is. You can also plot how you increase the portions of fruit and vegetables you eat. Before you know it you're not snacking on crisps or chocolate bars, you're eating real foods.

I often talk about something called 'periphery shopping'. This is where you stick to the edges of the supermarket to buy your food. That tends to be where all the fresh fruit and veg are - the fresh meats, eggs and dairy. You usually find the processed stuff in the middle. Stay away from that.

There's a lot of misinformation about drinking water. Where the idea that we all need eight glasses of water came from I have no idea, because there's no science out there. Some of us need much more than that. Some of us need less.

I advise my clients to drink a litre and a half of bottled water during the day. More important than the quantity of water is the quality. One of my biggest gripes is tap water. Try to drink good quality bottled water.