Reducing your risk of heart disease could be as easy as changing up the type of carbs you eat -- from refined carbs to whole grains. In fact, according to recent studies, eating just one serving of whole grains can reduce your risk of high blood pressure by 4%. That might not seem like much, but it's a pretty promising result for such a small change in your lifestyle. Imagine the difference you could make to your heart health if you changed all of your grains to whole grains?

Cutting your blood pressure risk is as easy as switching from regular pasta to whole wheat, from white toast to whole wheat. You might not like the taste at first but you'll get used to it. I used to live for white bread and now I only eat whole wheat -- it's the only kind of bread I have a taste for these days.

Another thing to keep in mind is to check the labels on supposed 'whole grain' products to make sure they really are. If 100% whole grains isn't the first item on the ingredients list, toss it.

I'm a bit of a carboholic. Ok, BIT is an understatement. I love carbs. I could live on bread, pasta and baked good like bagels and croissants. But I don't because excessive carb consumption is bad for your waistline -- and your heart, apparently. A study found that women who had diets rich in processed carbs with high glycemic indexes were more likely to develop heart disease. If carb-heavy diets are linked to obesity, this study makes a lot of sense, though I'd have thought that low-carb dieters, who tend to have diets high in saturated fats, would be at a higher risk.

So think twice before ordering the pasta and scarfing down the whole bread basket at your favourite Italian place -- a salad might be your better bet.

When it comes to losing weight, so much of it is mental. It requires the conscious decision to begin exercising and eating right. It requires a mental commitment to following through on reaching your goals. And, above all, it requires using your cognitive ability to make educated choices. Still, we are human, which means that we make errors in judgment from time to time. As a result, we sometimes think we are doing something healthy, only to later learn that it wasn't nearly as healthy as we thought.

I find that people tend to make this mistake most often when it comes to their food-calorie estimates and their exercise-calorie burning approximations. Allow me to explain; in many cases, people think that a certain food has, say, 500 calories. But, in reality, that food actually has twice as many calories. The same misstep happens quite frequently with exercise. Someone will think that the half an hour of moderate jogging they spent on the treadmill burns a certain amount of calories, only to be rather disappointed when they see that it burs far less than they expected.

To help you gauge where your own accuracy lies with this sort of thing, I've compiled a short list of foods (source: University of Pittsburgh study) that demonstrate the average miscalculation people have in estimating the impact each has.

1) Hamburger and Fries: Estimated Calories: 777. Actual Calories: 1,240

2) Fettuccine Alfredo: Estimated Calories: 704. Actual Calories: 1,500

3) Chicken Fajitas: Estimated Calories: 704. Actual Calories: 1,600

It seems that especially when eating a restaurant, people tend to underestimate their caloric intake by half of what their meal actually contains.

What's a good way to combat this? My suggestion is to visit www.fitday.com to find out exactly how many calories, carbs, grams of fat and sodium, etc. are in some of what you consider to be your healthier meals. You may be surprised to find that a change in your diet is what has been hindering your progress.

Mushrooms are an excellent source of antioxidants -- just as good or even better than carrots, broccoli, green beans, tomatoes and red or green bell peppers. All kinds of mushrooms -- from your everyday white button mushrooms to the more expensive gourmet shitake and oyster mushrooms -- contain rich heart healthy free radical fighters.

Both raw and cooked, mushrooms contain high levels of chitin and beta gluten -- known to lower cholesterol. Interestingly, the white button variety -- along with its brother the brown crimini and the larger portabello version -- had a higher antioxidant readings than the more exotic varieties. Full of fiber and protein, mushrooms are delicious in all kinds of dishes from pasta to risotto.