I bet you’ll be impressed by the boy’s observation, too.

Before it, I had asked the class to interpret a saying: “You can’t stop the waves, but you can learn how to surf.” When the class quickly equated “waves” with life and “learn to surf” with learning to adapt to it, I realized that our previous work with figurative and literal speech had — figuratively speaking — paid dividends.

Class ended. The boy approached me. “So if I can’t stop the waves, you know what I’m going to do?” he asked.

I shrugged, he smiled devilishly, and said, “Create my own.”

If you take that sort of proactive approach to your health and fitness, it can only help.

Take body weight, for instance. Whether you’re trying to lose it, maintain it, or even gain it, that boy would have one question for you: “What are you doing about it?”

According to a recent study, one rather simple and effective step is to weigh yourself regularly.

Researchers at the University of Georgia in Athens recruited 111 adults between the ages of 18 and 65 and issued a challenge: to maintain their present weight from mid-November to early January — a time when most adults gain weight because of the holidays. A related article written by Ana Sandoiu for Medical News Today, for instance, cites the average weight-gain range during these seven weeks to be between 0.9 and 3.3 pounds.

The 111 were given no help or advice on how to meet the challenge. They were free to eat better and exercise more, go on any type of diet they thought would be effective, or simply maintain the status quo.

The one request the researchers made: Keep tabs on how often you weighed yourself. The researchers themselves weighed the subjects immediately before the study and immediately after the study.

Despite their efforts, the subjects who did not weigh themselves every day gained weight. Those who did, regardless of the other strategies employed, either maintained or lost weight.

The leader of the study, associate professor in the Department of Foods and Nutrition at UGA, Jamie Cooper, Ph.D., explained the success of those who weighed themselves every day to Sandoiu this way: “Maybe they exercise[d] a little bit more the next day (after seeing a weight increase), or they watch[ed] what they are eating more carefully.”

Michelle vanDellen, associate professor in the Department of Psychology at UGA and co-author of the study, explains another reason why weighing yourself frequently works: “People are really sensitive to discrepancies or differences between their current selves and their standard goal. When they see [a] discrepancy, it tends to lead to behavioral change.

“Daily self-weighing ends up doing that for people in a really clear way.”

Another really clear and simple way to enhance your health is through creatine supplementation. For nearly 30 years, weightlifters, bodybuilders, football players, and others desirous of adding muscle to their frame have added 5 milligrams of the stuff to beverages (hot ones allow for the best assimilation of the supplement) four times a day for a week to 10 days to saturate the cells and then once or twice a day after that.

And it works.

In a 2003 review published in Molecular Cell Biochemistry, Richard Kreider, professor and department head of Health and Kinesiology at Texas A&M University, determined that in the over 300 studies available at that time, 70 percent of subjects experienced significant strength gains after creatine use, generally between 5 and 15 percent. More strength means more muscle.

But that’s not the only reason to use creatine.

A 2011 study published in the journal Amino Acids found that lab mice given creatine lived 9 percent longer than the control mice, which equates to seven years of additional human life. A 2012 American Journal of Psychiatry study revealed that women suffering from serious depression got relief from antidepressant medicine twice as fast when they also used 5 milligrams of creatine daily.

Most recently, creatine use has been linked to weight loss.

Last March, Nature Metabolism published a work where researchers made it so the transportation of creatine in the cells of mice could not take place. As a result, body temperature dropped and they got fat on a normal diet.

Other mice were given creatine and fed a diet designed to make them fat, but that never happened. The researchers believe that the creatine allowed for the necessary increase in body temperature during digestion to burn off the unneeded calories.

While no direct work was done on humans, the researchers did discover a correlation between human fat cells that possess an enhanced ability to accept creatine and a lower body mass index — as well as increased insulin sensitivity. That’s just more proof that adding 5 milligrams of a tasteless powder to a hot beverage once or twice a day could not only cause you to add muscle, but also shed body fat.

How simple is that?