The best exercise you can ever do is to push yourself away from the table.

That old saying may once have been true, but these days many people do not eat at the table—or at least, not all the time. Breakfast might be quick mouthfuls taken while you’re rushing around doing other things or while you’re sitting in the train on the way to work, a snack might be consumed on the go or while working on the computer, eating in the car might be the norm and watching TV from the couch might signal munchie time. You can eat standing, sitting or even lying down.

The problem with the lack of ritual is that every moment of the day becomes possible food time. In previous eras, there were set times for meals, and maybe morning/afternoon tea. People simply didn’t eat outside those times.

Habit is a powerful friend or a formidable foe. Even if we are not loathe to change our ways when it comes to the food we eat, we stil have to overcome the strength and tyranny of habit. Still, it can be done. Perhaps slowly, perhaps all at once. Some people find success in clearing the decks and starting new with a regime that they put a huge amount of energy into at the start to create new habits. Some like to change more gradually. First get breakfast right, then move on to the mid-morning snack (if eating mid-morning at all), then perhaps weeks later, look at lunch.

The all-at-once way can be harder … and easier. Harder because it’s a big change which you have to manage successfully and put a huge amount of effort into initially. Easier because you don’t have the slow torture of trying to change inch by inch only to find your willpower has become won’tpower while you were concentrating on something else. So you might have more success with the big change. Make the decision, put your heart into it, and give it everything you’ve got. Make some rules for yourself and stick to them.

One of the reasons that giving up the all-day breakfast for proper mealtimes works is that your brain automatically trains itself not to think about food so much. If you’re not going to eat again until lunch time, what’s the use of even contemplating it until then? Food becomes linked to certain times of the day and you can forget about it outside those periods. If you’ve been a grazer, food has been available through many moments during your day. By removing that, you might find that you have a great deal more time and energy for other tasks.

You can become more mindful of what you are consuming when you have set times and a set place to eat. Clear away the distractions and concentrate only on your meal. Enjoy the ritual of meal times. Food is vital  to your continued existence, so give it the importance and the thought that it deserves. Doing this creates natural iimitations on what you eat and allows you to truly see what and how much you are eating.

So don’t just count calories. Make other things count as well. Choose set times and places for consuming proper meals and see how you can use the advantages of limits in your quest for good health.

On those years when I do manage to make a new year’s resolution at all, invariably the resolution pops its head up a couple of months after everyone else has made their time-honoured list … and probably even broken or forgotten some of their promises. And perhaps because I come late to the table and the resolution seems to choose me rather than the other way around, I have just one resolution.

This year my resolution comes to me nearly half a year late. I certainly can’t be accused of being an early adopter! And for someone who uses 10 words when one will do, I think it’s ironic that I can find one word to describe my entire resolution. Last year it was light. This time, it is kindness.

Such a simple word, yet such a vast impact that it could have on all our lives if we were to internalise what it is to be kind.

With kindness as our foundation, we can make the people around us happier and more secure. Think about how you would feel knowing that someone close to you was never going to lay blame, find fault in a carping way or simply say something just to be a bit mean. Being the recipient of kindness is certainly not a burden!

Now think about being the person from whom the kindness is emanating. You are set free from worrying about whose fault something is. The kind way needs no opinion on that but can immediately steer towards a positive outcome, dealing with the situation with a gentleness that makes everything easier.

I am in a life situation now where kindness would be a wonderful trait to have and of course the realisation quickly follows that any situation can be made better with kindness.

For me it means slowing down a little, being more thoughtful on a moment-by-moment basis, being present and responsive to the person I want to be rather than unconsciously saying whatever pops into my mind. Over time, I am sure that better words will come to me of their own volition but at the moment I need to train them. And I need to become comfortable with the little hiatus that will surely occur between my habit-driven thoughts and words … and those of the higher self that I now want to choose.

I have many, many moments in the day when I can use my resolution and I’m sure that if I can get to that place where kindness is my automatic response rather than the occasional impatience, frustration and even damped-down anger, I will have experienced a wonderful inner growing that will brighten my existence as well as that of those around me.

There is a sort of dark satisfaction in being quarrelsome and critical. You can make an art form out of being judgemental, and if you’re cleverly articulate in your opinions it can all become quite addictive. But if that whole strand was missing from the tapestry of your life, the space would be filled with something softer, gentler, lovelier. The milk of human kindness.

As I get older and the world seems to spin faster and faster with more and more information spinning around with it, I am feeling a great need for less. Less, and better quality. I am looking at any voracious appetite I may have as a possible addiction and am seeking to study if it really serves me.

This has gone past the usual suspects when people talk of addiction—alcohol, nicotine, other drugs,excessive food. This is more about an appetite for numbing my intelligence with  asinine blog posts, YouTube blah and forgettable television. Surely my time is worth more than that? My life time. Time that, once used, is gone forever.

Any kind of addiction takes away from my life quality. Why work hard on the alcohol and food segments but let digital consumption run rampant? Part of it is laziness because it’s easier to be entertained, however badly, than to get up and do something. Part of it is a desire to simply sit, but there are other and better ways to do that. In the end, it’s a choice. A  thinking person chooses a better option.

Sometimes when it has been a long time between posts, I regret calling this website the weekly column. Most of the time, however, it reminds me simply that I’ve always wanted to write a weekly column and this is one way I can do it without getting out there and selling myself or my copy. Without the hustle.

Because I really dislike hustle. I know it’s what people say you need to do to get ahead—and I’m sure if I had tried it even once I would have advanced further up the rungs of some ladder somewhere—but there’s a great difference between hustle and the way of living that involves simple enthusiasm and a desire to reach your potential.

Perhaps this is simply semantics. Am I trying to describe the same thing in different ways? Where I see the difference is in how much the ego comes into the equation. You don’t have to win anything to be enthusiastic. Enthusiasm simply implies a love of  the subject and a desire to pair that love with some kind of action. You don’t have to outshine anyone else to reach your potential. It’s a softer approach; one that doesn’t rely on a competitive attitude and a desire to get past other people on some frantic race to ‘the top’.