If your shopping basket is full of ready-in-minutes TV dinners, chances are your hectic lifestyle means you don’t have time to cook or by the time you get home at night you are just too tired. Either that, or you are just plain lazy. Whatever the reason, ready meals tend to contain high levels of salt and are full of nasty preservatives, so you really should try harder to cook meals from scratch. You could even devote a few hours at the weekend to preparing your meals for the rest of the week.

Monounsaturated fats are great at lowering levels of LDL (or 'bad') cholesterol while simultaneously increasing levels of HDL cholesterol (the good kind). Foods such as avocadoes, nuts (particularly walnuts, almonds and pistachios) and canola are high in monounsaturated fats. Avocadoes in particular come in for some stick for containing levels of fat which far exceed any other fruit or vegetable; an unfair reputation if ever there was one. Monounsaturated fats actually aid weight loss.

It goes without saying that you should already be using olive oil instead of butter (or heaven forbid, lard) when you cook, but did you know that it’s good for your skin as well as your waistline?By substituting saturated fats found in butter for healthier unsaturated fats you will help protect your skin from the inside out, banishing dry skin and wrinkles in the process.