While you won't be told to do as I do in this column, you will learn about my workouts and be encouraged to adapt and use the elements of them that might work for you.

Granted, you probably don't care to know how a few weeks of escalating intervals just below your lactate threshold on bike rides in April and May could help you do better than you've done in years in the local road race held every July. But you could apply that concept to create a similar increase in your exercise intensity to help you look the best you've looked in years at the family reunion held annually at the same time.The articles detailing my diet usually follow the same pattern as the ones about exercise. I'll write about my habits not with the hope of you adopting them, but so you can understand them, learn from them, and possibly alter them to suit your needs.In short, my habits rarely become your habits. I'm okay with that. That's the way it's supposed to be.Normally.Today's column, however, is an anomaly.That's because a dietary habit of mine that I thought was too extreme for the mainstream may not be too extreme after all. In fact, a variation of it is suggested in an article that appears in a rather conventional health-and-fitness magazine.Jacqueline Andriakos's article for the January/February issue of Health features "eating tactics" to help readers not only "shake off food guilt," but also "enter the new year slimmer and happier." In it, Dawn Jackson Blatner, RD, the author of The Superfood Swap, uses a phrase that succinctly summarizes my eating pattern, "delicious monotony," and cites that pattern as a key to "keeping to a healthy [eating] routine."Blatner says, "When you're a creature of habit with food, it streamlines your diet and keeps you from making snap decisions about what you're going to eat and whether it's healthy." Equally important in her estimation is that embracing delicious monotony decreases the time needed for grocery shopping and food preparation, as well as the stress from either.While Blatner makes important points, there are other ways that delicious monotony - the eating of just a few different healthy meals in a planned rotation throughout the week - aids me. First and foremost, it's my best defense against eating just to eat and allows me to recognize perceived rather than real hunger.While I rarely feel ravenously hungry, eating up to eight small but frequent meals throughout the day and exercising 14 hours or so each week, combined with my unabashed love of food - albeit healthy food - seems to create an I-could-eat-right-now feeling in me much of the day. Just about every night while I wash the dishes, for example, I already feel like having a snack.What keeps this feeling from fruition, however, is what I've learned from years of eating just a few different healthy meals in a planned rotation throughout the week.There's a certain type of supper I eat on a school day after an early-morning workout, another supper I eat on a school day after an after-school bicycle ride, which is really similar to the supper I eat on weekends after long, tough rides or races.I've used this pattern for more than 20 years. It has kept my weight where I want it to be while keeping my work days and bike rides energized.So when I'm washing the dishes and thinking about eating more because of perceived hunger, I realize that 20 years of success doesn't lie and that the perceived hunger is exactly that. Perceived hunger. That mental exercise is enough to keep me from eating until my scheduled after-supper snack, which is - you guessed it - always a mixture of whole-grain cereals augmented by three or four cups of decaffeinated green tea.If you can't imagine alternating between two types of breakfasts, three types of lunches, and two types of suppers for years on end, you may be forgetting the diet's name. Delicious monotony. I know that tastes are acquired and that I've acquired some rather unconventional - albeit healthy - ones, but I wholeheartedly enjoy the meals I prepare.In my variation of delicious monotony diet, the first modifier dominates to such a degree that it changes the meaning of the second. On those days I'm dragging near the end of an early-morning workout, I'll receive an instant boost when I remember that there's one cup of Fiber One cereal, two heaping tablespoons of erythritol and a calorie-free Walden Farms product (usually caramel), and a good dose of stevia, swirled into 16 ounces of Greek yogurt just waiting to be consumed as soon as I get finished, get showered, and get to school.How's that for motivation to start the work day?