To lose weight, the first priority is to watch your calorie intake, as it is a simple formula that calories eaten in a day need to be balanced with calories used each day to maintain your weight. To lose weight, calories used each day need to exceed intake! Fat is the second most important thing to monitor as fat has the highest calorific content out of fat, carbohydrate and protein (nearly double!). Also, a high fat diet can have a negative impact on your health too. This is why your food diary sets you daily calorie and fat targets and, if you meet these, you should lose weight.

After calories and fat, the next ingredient I would check on a pack would be the sugar content. This is because sugar increases blood sugar levels rapidly, which causes the production of the hormone insulin. Too much sugar can cause overproduction of insulin, which can lead to blood glucose levels falling too low. This can result in shakiness and cravings ? bad news when you are dieting!

Sugar is also of negligible nutritional value to the body, so are wasted calories in this respect. Unfortunately, low fat products can sometimes be high in sugar to make them more palatable, so it is worth checking the label. Government guidelines are 90g of sugar a day for a healthy adult.

Here is some simple guidance on what to look for when trying to understand food labels for different food groups:

Per 100g

A lot / A little

Sugars : 10g / 2g

Fat : 20g / 3g

Saturated Fat : 5g / 1g

Fibre : 3g / 0.5g

Salt : 1.25g / 0.25g

Sodium : 0.5g / 0.1g

However, for sugar, bear in mind that any natural sugars in a product (for example, from fruit) will be included in the sugar content per 100g. Fruit sugars are more slowly absorbed and cause less disruption to blood sugar levels and are obviously healthier than artificial sugar. So, a good double check is to look at the ingredients list to see if sugar is listed and how high up the ingredients list it features, as ingredients are listed in descending amounts.

If all this is a bit much, I go back to my first point that calories and fat are the two most important things to monitor! Keep an eye on the sugar content, if you can, but don't give yourself too much to worry about - dieting can be hard enough at times.