Someone said to me the other day, “Two steps forward and one step back is still heading in the right direction.”

Such a simple concept, but it reminded me of how much negative self-talk some of us use when we have strayed from our absolute ideal. We have this concept that it has to be perfection or bust. And many of us choose ‘bust’ because perfection is pretty damn hard.

From the vantage point of heading in the right direction, suddenly there is less guilt, less conflict, less worry … and less likelihood of giving up.

From a diet point of view, you take the step backward and enjoy whatever you’ve decided to indulge in. At the next meal you’re back on track. No need to try to compensate for the indulgence—let it stand on its own. Just get back to your ‘best scenario’ food immediately afterwards.

Let’s face it. One step backward isn’t going to derail the train. It can even be considered as a breather from the relentless march forward.

And if you’re never prepared to take a step backwards, how will you ever learn the cha cha?

I’m sick of having half-baked ideas of what I might like to do or activities I’ve always wanted to try. This period of my life is for getting in and doing these things … or letting them go entirely. Either is fine, as long as they get out of the ether of my head and are either pinned down into a more concrete form or dismissed.

So how do I do this? Start with the end in mind, Start as you mean to go on. The important word in both those sentences is ‘start’. Just start. What’s the very first thing I need to do to actually start? There is always one simple action that can put me on the road to what I want to do.

The first step may hardly be a step at all. It might be looking up the names of music teachers in the phone book. (The second step would be phoning.) The smaller the step, the less challenging it is and the more likely that you will do it. Somehow just looking up the number is not threatening but the thought of ringing straight away is. So write the number on the list of tasks. That’s the step for today. One day—perhaps tomorrow— I’ll look at that entry and suddenly it will be easy to pick up the phone and start the ball rolling.

The other aspect is that some of the activities we’d like to do are things we’d simply like to try rather than make them a permanent part of our lives. I think it’s quite legitimate to have that attitude with everything. I’m just going to try this for a while. I’ll put my heart into it while I’m trying it, but it’s also okay to say that I’ve had a go and I’m happy with that, then be able to drop it without guilt or a feeling of failure or giving up. I’ve done that with a few interests and have reached a place where I can say I’m happy I’ve had the experience but I don’t need to be the world’s best at that skill or try to carry it through the rest of my life.

What a relief that is. I get to do the things I want to do but don’t need to feel, when starting, that I need be tied to it forever if it’s something for which I end up having a relatively short attention span. And I don’t get to the end of my life wishing I’d had a go at piano, bricklaying, pottery, singing, leadlighting, cello, my own website …

On my deathbed I don’t want to have regrets that I let life pass by without trying activities that take my fancy. I don’t want to die wondering.

Have you ever noticed that happiness is easier to recognise in retrospect? You can think, “I was happy then,” while honestly admitting that you might not have been thinking much about happiness at the time. You were just living your life in the moment. Experiencing it.

Happiness is part of living. So is sadness. Our eternal quest to be happy has a built-in failure switch, for life will always bring some grief, some anger, some kind of angst.

I’m starting to recognise another way for this sliding scale that goes all the way from absolute joy to deepest sorrow. Okayism.

I’m really happy in this moment, and that’s okay. I’m grieving for a lost one and that’s a natural part of life too, so that’s okay as well. Once everything is okay, whatever it is, you can get on with feeling the emotion that comes with it, watching the thoughts that crop up and dealing with life’s challenges and difficult moments with equanimity. When everything—good or bad—is okay, it puts you on a much more even keel.

So next time when someone asks me what I want from life, I hope I don’t say, “I just want to be happy” because I know deep in my heart it’s not always possible. But equanimity? I’ll be okay with that.

When we were on holidays some years ago we came across an old cattle watering site. There was a very, very long concrete trough which could water hundreds of cattle at a time.

The other day I was thinking of that trough as a parable for the way we live our lives. We come to a challenge.That is our trough. We can power through, which might be scary but is soon over and we get out on the other side, wet but ready to walk on firmer ground. and never see that trough again.But we have other options. We can get in then decide to stay on the safe side where we’ve already been. We can get out and walk up a bit further, only to find the trough is still there and the distance to swim is the same. Even worse, we can swim along the length of it and stay in that trough forever.

It’s an interesting analogy for the way we live our lives, isn’t it?

How is it that we can be on a winning formula and yet fail? I think it’s because we get bored. We adore the romance of something totally new (even if we’re not sure it will work), which is quite paradoxical when you think about how little we like change in other respects. Perhaps we just like change when it is led by our fickle nature!

The winning formula is not at fault. The boredom is not even the problem. It’s that we perceive that we should do something about the boredom. I am increasingly of the opinion that we shouldn’t take any different action but should slog through it without too much thought, sticking to our winning ways. We should look at the lure of the new for what it is: Something different that despite its bright and shiny look, its intrigue and persuasive nature, comes with no guarantee and may lead us down the tunnel of failure if we answer its call.

Boredom that leads to thoughts of change when we know we are succeeding with what we are doing should send out danger signals. I’m not saying that anyone should deny that there is a touch of ho hum from doing the unromantic, unthrilling, same old thing. But if that is progressing us to where we want to be, perhaps the boredom is a necessary stage that has to be lived through to get to where our actions are totally habit driven.

We never seem to get bored cleaning our teeth. And yet it’s the same old, same old. Perhaps it’s because we have gone past the place of boredom (with the help of our parents when we were small) into that secure little haven called routine.

Seeing our boredom as just a phase will take away its sting. It will put it in its proper place—just part of the overall picture—and keep us at peace with our inner selves. We already know the right thing to do. Even if it’s not exciting.

To me, acting with integrity when it comes to health means honestly deciding which foods are healthy and weaving those foods into my day. It means eating the amount that is needed by my body: No more, no less.

It means getting it right.

What is right is based on my belief system, which starts out being a pretty unconscious operation but which I can question and retrain over time. But here’s mine at the moment.

My belief is that my health is one of the most important gifts I have, even though for parts of my life I have gone along merrily not thinking about it much. I believe food is an integral part of good health. Should it be paleo, vegan or some other incarnation? My personal jury’s still out on that, so I stick with the other beliefs I have; green vegetables are king, other vegetables and fruit come a close second, protein is necessary, some starch is important, the right fats are essential … and the less processed my food is, the better.

That means everything I eat is as fresh and as close to nature as I can find it. And if I can work within those parameters, my diet will automatically improve.

Using my integrity to guide me makes me an ambassador for my body. It brings out the best. It improves physical condition and it satisfies the soul. In this day and age of digital distractions, it also means making decisions in advance so I don’t find myself in the position where a lack of preparation or planning puts me at risk of making decisions that are not congruent with my sense of integrity. And after a while, that becomes the norm. I eat my three meals a day (and two snacks) according to my weekly menu plan and my choices when eating out are based on decisions I made before I got hungry, stressed or rushed.

My whole attitude to food changes in a gentle but profound way.In time, this way of eating  becomes simply part of my nature …  it’s just how I do it. No questioning, no wishing it were otherwise, no conflict of any kind. Bliss.

Goals are funny things. We think they will help, so we kind of fixate on them. We gain a vicarious kind of energy from them, but that energy doesn’t always translate into the actions we need to take to attain them. We’ve all heard people say, “My goal is to lose 5kg,” and then never do anything about it. Or they start and don’t follow through. Some people have great successes with goals. But they’re like New Year’s Resolutions. More of us seem to fall by the wayside than succeed with them. Or we attain them briefly then fall back into the mire, only to make a new goal and claw our way up the same slippery slope again. And again.

Goals seems substantial, but in reality they are ephemeral. Values are another story altogether. Although you also can’t touch, hear or see them, they are an intrinsic part of who you are, as opposed to a goal which is a kind of outside, made-up influence. If you ignore your own little creatures of the night (I say that because some values don’t see the light of day much!) they will still be there but they will be vague ghosts lurking uncomfortably in your subconscious, and their   unhappy fragility will keep them forever sidelined; cut off from being a powerful entity in your life.

Bringing them out into the light of your consciousness changes all that. Living by your values puts your ducks all in a row. There’s something just RIGHT about your life. All your decisions, and therefore your actions, are in sync with your inner being and you have, for the first time in your life, an inner peace. Even if you don’t know where you’re headed, you feel surefooted. You don’t need to look to other people or other people’s solutions because you are living your solution. No matter what happens you can feel totally secure in yourself.

How good would that be? I’m not there yet, but I believe it can be done. I could sit and cogitate on my personal set of values and decide that every single decision in my life was going to be made on that basis. But what I’ve found is that really, only one thing can be done at any time. So let me think about one value and really hone in on it and what it means to me in specific circumstances so I can build up my strength in that area.

One of my core values is integrity. To me, that is a foundational state which operates from a place of honesty without unkindness. The word makes me think of structural soundness, wholeness, a deep cognisance of what is morally right.

From that base, I craft the kind of life I should live, remembering that my personal belief system will colour my thoughts and subsequent actions.

I’ve often wondered why checking your emails in the morning before you start work saps your energy. it appears to be a simple enough little task. But when you realise that you’re making decisions about every single email you open, you can suddenly see how decision fatigue can become a factor in your day even before you’ve started work proper.

I am most successful when I have set up habits that work. Yes, it takes a little time for any activity to become automatic, but once it’s an accepted part of your day there is very little decisionmaking to do. You just get on with the task at hand.

Going to the gym becomes easy. If you have it scheduled in and you go as a matter of course, that’s a whole lot of decisions you haven’t had to make. You want to have a protein-and-salad lunch every day? If you make it as part of your morning routine (or even the night before), it’s going to be a lot easier to eat well when the time rolls around to lunchtime.

In fact, even if it’s not all automatic, making decisions in advance can be a great help. (The automatic part is then following the plan you’ve written.) Meal planning—including having a good idea of what you’re going to do to cope with the office birthday party or the night out with friends—means you’re making considered decisions as well as saving time and effort. You can sit down and make all your decisions for the week, if that’s the way you like to roll. Then you have one piece of paper in the kitchen where all the decision making has been made. You feel so much lighter knowing that’s sorted. You know what to shop for as well. Otherwise just deciding the night before, perhaps soon after dinner or the last thing before bed, can also be successful. It becomes part of your nightly routine. Brush your teeth then sit on the side of the bed and jot down tomorrow’s must-dos and what you’re going to eat for breakfast, lunch and dinner, then slide under the covers, turn off the light and sleep soundly. Tomorrow’s only decision for all those things will be to stick to the plan.

Losing weight, as hard as it can be, is the easy part. Lots of people can do that. The real success comes in keeping the weight off so you can go through life with the body you want, the health you want and a bit of self esteem intact. And if making your decisions in advance will do the trick, then I’m all for it. Putting yourself in the driver’s seat by putting things on automatic pilot might seem a contradiction in terms, but I say viva contradictions if they work!

If you’ve studied even the simplest economics, you’ll be familiar with the Law of Diminishing Returns. It basically states that there comes a point where you actually get less benefit from increasing your investment (be it labour or some other input in the production of a commodity).

Your returns—the output per worker, perhaps—grow at first as you add each worker then reach a peak … and then diminish if you add any more workers. Obviously the smart thing to do is to find the peak and stay around that mark.

My Law of Diminishing Expenditure actually has a different slant. You start expending a lot of energy and as familiarity (habit) kicks in, you need to expend less effort. On a graph where you are plotting kilos lost, the effort expended is the vertical axis and the kilos show on the horizontal. The graph starts high and drops as you start to get more comfortable with your new diet and exercise regime over time.

To me, this works with nearly everything. You want to start going to the gym. At first it’s pretty hard. You need to find the time, organise your clothes and transport and actually get there and get sweaty. Then you need to do it again in two days’ time. The first few weeks can be pretty dreadful until it simply becomes part of your weekly schedule. No questioning about whether or not you’re going (expending more effort and adding to the decisions that have to be made that day)—it’s pretty automatic after a while, as long as you have scheduled an exact day and time in your diary.

Changing the way you eat is the same, especially if you’re following a specific programme. You have to learn how to follow the programme, perhaps buy different food and do preparation that is out of your comfort zone—considerable effort expended—but once you’ve become familiar with it all, as long as you have set in place a process that follows the guidelines, you can easily keep the momentum going.

The trick is to get out of the effort phase as quickly as possible. Work on your schedule and your habits and strengthen them to automation. Then just trust and follow the process to enjoy steady but sure results.

You’d think in this sophisticated, knowledgeable world we would know by now an easy way to get ourselves eating right.

Some pundits say, just use portion control. And that’s right. Truly right. But until that moment when you’re in control enough to do that, it’s totally unrealistic and actually unhelpful advice. It just makes us feel worse when we fail, not just every day, but perhaps every meal and the times between as well, when we gorge ourselves into a sugar coma on confectionery.

I think portion control is probably part of the equation, don’t get me wrong. But I think it’s a complex issue and this kind of simplistic way won’t work for people who are a long way down the wrong road.

As an example, if I am an alcoholic it doesn’t matter how much I try to control portions, I will still binge because that is the nature of the beast. Two nights off the stuff or just having one glass, and the third night will be a doosy, with enough going down the gullet to satisfy the great dry.

If I’m a sugar addict, I can do the best I can all day with pure willpower only to come unstuck after dinner. Willpower, or won’t power really, only lasts so long.

So the argument for portion control isn’t where you should start your journey. It is possibly more suited to being the final step in a method that might take a long time to work through but that will help you win out in the end.

I’m talking, of course, about cleaning up the addictions first. And that requires headwork, not portion control. As I’ve said before, the older I get the more I believe that you truly have to change just one thing at a time. You only have so much extra energy in the day for these additional things, and you should preserve that energy to be used for a single accomplishment so you do actually accomplish it, for good.

If you have a host of problems—you drink too much alcohol, eat too much sugar and consume too much food in general (especially the calorie-rich addictives that usually come from the bakery)—I would start by going to the gym or doing some kind of exercise programme that you can keep up easily. It doesn’t have to be much; it just needs to become a habit. Habits take time, so you don’t need to rush into the next step. While you’re doing this, use the time to educate yourself on the lifestyle and eating plan that you think would suit you best. Be happy that you are at the start of a journey that will change your life. Know that this is the beginning of controlling yourself—your self—and that eventually you will be able to do anything that you truly want to do. The more you plan your changes and think like this, the more it’s like a tsunami—unseen until the swell has become an unstoppable force.

Then tackle the alcohol, which is the one likely to derail your attempts at eating well. Start taking vitamins, especially the Bs and a multivitamin to build you up. If you feel you’re really addicted, give it up all at once. Today is the last day I’ll ever get drunk. I may have a drink in the future but I will never drink to excess again. I will only ever have one drink then immediately switch to soda water or mineral water. But that’s in the future when I’m the one in control. For now, the only way to be in control is to stay away from the stuff altogether. Find a substitute drink (preferably lower in calories) and drink as much of it that you need. If you’re a bottle-a-day person, drink a bottle of the other stuff. Make sure it’s in the place where your alcohol usually resides so you don’t fall off the wagon from reaching for a bottle automatically. Do everything you can to make this successful. Clear your social calendar. Take up a different activity every night. This is the rest of your life that you are preparing for. Prepare well. Read books that will help. Read them again and again if necessary. Or read them once, get your vitamins, remove your alcohol and then never look back. It can actually be a lot easier than we think if we can make one decision and stick to it. Also keep in mind that if you were on a desert island and couldn’t find any alcohol, you would get through. Withdrawing from alcohol will not kill you, even though for a couple of nights it might be uncomfortable, right down to the DTs. Cravings come … and cravings will go if you you allow them to have their moment. Don’t try to think that you shouldn’t have these thoughts. They drop into your mind, so you accept that the thought has occurred. Be gracious, not fractious about any thought that pops into your head. Don’t fight it; just look at it. Perhaps after you look at it you want to use your own mantra so you can follow these thoughts with a conscious response. If the thought drops into your head that you need a drink, tell yourself yes, you will have a drink of water, and have one. If the thought is for wine, then have a nonalcoholic wine. Or really look at the thought and wonder, “Do I really?” And if the answer is no, simply let that thought be. But always have those non-alcoholic options on hand in the cupboard and in the fridge. Have much more than you could possibly ever need so you never run out. This is a time of rewiring your mind and retraining your body, so give it every chance in the world to work. My mantra might be, “I’m so lucky I don’t need to take action on that thought. I choose to have this instead.”

Then treat your sugar addiction the same way. If you have to chew sugar-free gum to get through, do so. Do so for a month, two months, three months. Because if you can get off this stuff you will find that you can easily make good choices with your food. Drink water, eat a good amount of protein, a huge amount of vegetables, some carbohydrate, some fruit and some fat, and eventually your weight will be the least of your problems.