You read this column for health-and-fitness information, not for my dime-store philosophy, but sometimes the latter helps illuminate the former. As a result, you get my thoughts - and probably one of your own: that I’ve overvalued mine by a nickel or more.

So here’s some, let’s say, two-cent philosophy. It’s called “The Two Rules of Sometimes.”

1.) Sometimes it’s best not to overthink things. 2.) And sometimes it’s best to acknowledge certain things you find distasteful as inevitable and accept them.

My students enjoy being allowed to read whatever books they choose for a yearlong assignment we call the IRA (Independent Reading Assignment), so when it came time in eighth grade to analyze a novel in a detailed manner, I followed rule number one and offered the same freedom of choice.

We vetted a number of classic and contemporary novels and then created groups of two to five students who wanted to a read certain ones. Since I needed to know the prices of their picks, I asked a boy to look up his using a laptop.

“Could I use my phone to do that?” he asked. “I’ll find it faster.”

The rule in our school is that cellphones are not to be in classrooms unless the teacher asks you to bring it to enhance a lesson. But that rule is followed - and enforced - with the same regularity as most posted speed limits.

My students know, though, that I’d rather not have them in class. They’ve led to a deplorable deterioration of verbal skills - as well as social ones! - which is just one of the reasons why there’s a clear emphasis on cerebral as well as casual conversation in my classes.

But the boy certainly would find the info faster on his phone, so I told him to use it. After all, I am also a firm believer in rule No. 2.

I need to remind myself of rule No. 2 whenever I write or advise about diet matters. Because I’m so fanatical about eating optimally, I find slapdash diets distasteful.

But they’re inevitable, so I need to deal with them.

I do so by telling those who don’t eat as well as they should to start small, to instigate one small change that strikes them as doable. One that I’ve suggested dozens of times is to consume three or four cups of green tea a day.

A study published last spring in the Journal of Nutritional Biochemistry using mice explains one reason why.

For eight weeks, researchers fed mice standard mouse food while they fed an equal number a high-fat diet designed for weight gain. But half of the mice in each group also consumed green tea extract.

When the group fed the high-fat diet was weighed at the study’s conclusion, researchers discovered that those not given the green tea extract weighed an average of 20 percent more than those that were.

Moreover, the mice given the green tea extract recorded lower levels of insulin resistance. Both of these differences were also found in the mice consuming the standard diet - though they weren’t as dramatic.

Lead author Richard Bruno, a professor at Ohio State University, feels that the weight-gain discrepancies occurred because “green tea encourages the growth of good gut bacteria ... and leads to a series of benefits that significantly lower the risk of obesity.”

So if you tend to eat too much and poorly, doesn’t it make sense to drink three or four cups of green tea a day to mitigate weight gain?

Additionally, another small step that could possibly negate weight gain is to regulate your eating on weekends. In the same way that many people simply try to survive the five workdays and live for weekends, others eat that way.

The weekend comes, and it’s Katie bar the door - the refrigerator door.

But a new study suggests that it’s just not only an increased amount of food consumed during weekends but also the change of mealtimes that leads to weight gain.

The researchers at the University of Barcelona in Spain who conducted the study and published the results this winter in the journal Nutrients know that fixed sleeping and eating schedules allow our biological clocks to work best, so they wanted to see how much damage was done when eating times were changed just because it’s the weekend. To do so, researchers analyzed self-reported data from more than 1,100 graduate and post-graduate students.

Because they suspected that altering eating times could be as disruptive as jet lag, the researchers called the discrepancy between the chow times “eating jet lag.”

Those with serious eating jet lag - an overall change of more than 3.5 hours between mid-week mealtimes and those on the weekend - had higher body mass index scores - even after other influences were mathematically accounted for.