In many of these columns,"optimal health and fitness" is used as a catch-all term and for good reason. Workouts and diets you see as well-suited for you may be ill-suited for someone else.

That's because different readers not only have different goals and different medical histories, but also widely differing ages. A demanding workout routine for a boy of 16, for instance, might be too difficult for a woman of 36, and too dangerous for anyone over 60.You need to consider your state of health, your state of mind, and your stated goals to best apply - and most likely alter - any insight or advice you read here or anywhere else.Unless you're willing to alter the diets and workouts offered, you'll be stuck with average results because health-and-fitness have to be written for the average person. And that is someone you are surely not.To move from the general to the specific, consider a column penned by the "Stone Age Doc" and published in newspapers in the last week in March.In it, Dr. Philip J. Goscienski expresses a really worthwhile idea, an alternative to the typical low-carb, high-fat diet, but one that has little worth to me personally - until I alter it.Goscienski first explains the false success found in a low-carb diet. By eating virtually no carbs in the typical induction phase of such a diet, you burn up all stored glycogen (energy) in the liver and muscles.This weight loss, however, gets doubled because glycogen also holds equal amounts of water, so go a week without carbs and even small framed fellows should weigh four, five, or six pounds less. Overweight and oversized men can lose 10 or 12 pounds.But the loss of weight, Goscienski explains, is fool's gold for it is not a loss of fat. Furthermore, the loss of any weight comes to such a screeching halt that those few stubborn souls who stick to a low-carb diet for an entire year, average only a 12-pound weight loss often after dropping that much after one month.Worse, half of that weight is generally not fat but muscle mass, so that lighter body now requires far fewer calories than before. If the old amount of cals is consumed after the diet is over, that person regains all the lost weight and then some.Because of this, Goscienski offers a great alternative - the one that's useless to me unless I alter it. He tells his readers to simply eat in the manner that they normally do with this exception: "four or five times a week replace your usual dinnertime pasta, rice or potato with a second vegetable, preferably a leafy but naked (little or no dressing) salad. That substitution will eliminate 100-200 calories from each of those meals . . . [and provide] appetite-satisfying fiber."While that might be great advice for you, that's not the case for me. I already average more than 100 grams of fiber a day, so I don't think I will obtain any added satisfaction from another five or six grams.And the size of my dinner salad already requires more than the oversized bowl that normally holds an entire family's salad; furthermore, I never eat traditional pasta or any type of rice. (I do eat baked potatoes but only after really long rides as a way to replace muscle glycogen.)But even though I cannot directly benefit from Goscienski's specific idea, I can alter it to suit my eating habits and benefit. What he's really advocating is something I've written about frequently: the value of replacing a higher-calorie food with a lower calorie item.In fact, in the column from March 18 - published, by the way, 10 days before Goscienski's - I extolled the dramatic savings in calories when one replaces traditional pasta noodles with shirataki noodles.In that column, I wrote, "Eat [shirataki noodles] twice a week instead of the two and a half servings of whole wheat noodles and guess what? You lose a bit more than 12 pounds in a year.Is it any wonder that the Japanese call the food 'wonder noodles'?"It's single substitutions like these that can allow you to improve your diet without really ascribing to an established published diet. And that's the way it should be.That author didn't have you in mind. He or she had the typical person in mind - as well as the notion that the diet needed to embraced by as many people as possible to increase sales and generate profit.