With the New Year approaching, many people will be looking at evergreen resolutions such as cutting out, or down on, cigarettes, alcohol and junk food.
I remember an apocryphal story about someone whose recipe for success was smoking, drinking and eating only while driving his car to and from the office. How much damage to your health can you do during a twice-a-day, one-hour commute?
After crashing his car into a roadside restaurant, he emerged from hospital after a three-day stay, saying optimistically: 'I didn't have a cigarette or drink and lost about 2kg worrying about my court case!'
When I started jogging some years ago, I was spurred by the idea that losing weight would be one of the benefits from my early-morning, 16km outing. That is, until I read that one needed to run about 160km to lose 2kg in weight and that my running regimen had to be combined with a healthy diet.
'There's a sucker born every minute,' P.T. Barnum once said, and I found that one had to be extra careful about accepting what a plethora of dieting books in the now billion-dollar industry had to offer.
The recent furore about an alarming increase in obesity in the US has resulted in anti-carbohydrate, quick-weight loss books such as Dr Atkins' New Diet Revolution, the South Beach Diet and even a revived The Drinking Man's Diet arriving on the publishing bandwagon.
Robert Atkins, who died earlier this year (the post-mortem examination showed he was obese and had a history of high blood pressure and heart attacks), insisted that a high-protein and high-fat diet was the way to a slimmer, trimmer body. Ignoring that there are 'good' (slow-release) and 'bad' (quick-release) carbs, Atkins simply lumped them all together to sell his book and fooled many people.