It’s inevitable. The longer you do something, the easier it is to lose touch with why you are doing it.

That loss of touch leads to feeling listless and lethargic. Feeling listless and lethargic for too long adversely affects your health.

It’s inevitable.

That’s why really healthy people tend to have a designated downtime, a specific slowing of the fast — dare I say foolish?— pace at which we lead our lives. And during that downtime, they take time to reflect.

Writing a health-and-fitness column creates the opportunity for such reflection, but after creating nearly 1,500 of them, I must guard against losing touch of why I do this. The thought, the research, the writing have to do more than defeat a deadline. But what?

Help you from losing touch with yourself.

Reading this column and then ruminating upon it allows you to slow your pace, decompress, deliberate, consider your body, your current condition, your mental and physical health. As this all happens, I hope you also gain some important information.

Sometimes this info provides answers; sometimes it provides a plan. And sometimes, just sometimes, it bequeaths a grander gift.

Hope.

As I write this, for instance, my glutes and hips are aching as if it were five days ago instead of five years ago (to the day, by the way) that I fractured my pelvis. But strangely enough, I’m looking forward to riding the bike and increasing the ache (at least temporarily) after I’m done writing.

Why? That ache harbors hope. I’m nearly four months into a rather intense weightlifting program geared towards making me a better cyclist, and it’s my hope that the ache I feel now is a “good” ache, different from that one I felt before.

That it’s the byproduct of muscles growing and pressing against metal screws and titanium rods and that once that issue gets resolved much of the power that I once placed upon the pedals will be restored.

But I don’t want this column to be about my new workouts and my old injuries. The idea for this article came from reading about how obese the U.S. has become.

According to a Los Angeles Times article, nearly 40 percent of American adults are obese, making us the fattest affluent country in the world.

Historically, Americans have been a driven people; it’s what made this country great. Now the people, at least many of the obese ones, seem to be driven by despair because they can’t seem to lose weight.

In all but a few of the oddest cases, though, that despair is unwarranted.

Whether obese or just a bit overweight, you can lose weight. Or better stated, you can rid yourself of excess fat.

But the endeavor to do so can’t be part time. It can’t be anything less than a priority.

And, to borrow a line from the Philadelphia 76ers, you must trust the process, a process that’s essentially no more than following four words: Eat smarter; exercise more.

Please note that the catchphrase does not instruct you to eat less. In the diets that I often suggest when readers seek guidance, they find themselves actually eating more food.

Not by caloric content, though. By volume.

An exceptionally sound and safe eating strategy has emerged from the research led by Barbara Rolls, a PhD at Penn State. Early studies there found that most people tend to eat just about the same amount of food by weight each day.

What differs daily for many, however, is the food’s caloric content.

If you follow the eating strategy Rolls calls “volumetrics,” you replace light but calorie-dense foods, like potato chips with heavy foods not nearly as calorie dense, like baked potatoes.

Frying foods not only adds a significant amount of fat without adding significant weight to them; broiling or roasting meats doesn’t. As a result, volumetric advises you to avoid the former and embrace the other as a way to consume fewer calories while reaching your typical day’s weight of foods. Similarly, vegetables are steamed or eaten raw, and the whole fruit instead of its juice is consumed on this diet that really isn’t.

It’s simply a matter of eating smarter.

If this smarter eating enables you to eat about 250 fewer calories a day, that will allow you to slowly but steadily lose weight. If you increase your daily caloric burn a bit by exercising more by either increasing time or intensity, that is.

Doing this does more than increase caloric expenditure while the exercise is occurring. It also creates what’s called after-burn.

In a study published in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise a half dozen years ago, subjects pedaled a stationary bicycle really hard for a bit more than 45 minutes. On average, the subjects expended 519 calories during the exercise.

But the researchers kept monitoring the subjects’ caloric burn for the next 14 hours and found that it remained higher than typical resting levels during that time. In fact, during that time, the subjects burned an average of 190 more calories than expected.