“Right on.”

That’s the phrase the nearly 51-year-old female who’s worked out daily and often intensely since college - she’s done four marathons, one 31-mile, single-day hike, and now mostly cycles or strength trains - used in her email regarding the Sept. 16 article about the superpowers of sustainability.

That meant a lot to me.

Because that reader, you see, is more than just as crazy as I about exercise. She’s a certified physical trainer with a degree in exercise physiology.

Who recently began to doubt what she was doing.

“I keep trying to change things because I’m getting older and society encourages you to get rest days, Intermittent Fast, eat more protein, sleep more, yada yada yada,” she wrote. “Your article is encouraging me to stop trying to change and [to keep doing] what has worked for me for the last 30 years.”

While it’s satisfying to know I’ve helped a fitness professional, that in itself is no reason to write an article. What is, though, is to further explain something she’s figured out on her own.

“If I take off of exercise, I tend to feel depressed or sad that day. I’d rather feel happy and sore than sad.”

Acknowledging this displays something more impressive than running-lean legs, a tight tush, or six-pack abs. It takes shape in my mind as a pyramid and is expressed in a phrase more often associated with business and society than health and fitness.

The hierarchy of importance.

In business and society, it means constructing a system in which the members of a business or society are ranked according to relative status or authority. In health and fitness, it means you’ve prioritized the inherent trade-offs in any attempt to make yourself healthier.

The benefit of building such a priority pyramid is that you then know how to continue once you do what I urge you to do to optimize health and fitness. Experiment, experiment, experiment.

For instance, let’s say all you’ve read about eating patterns has led to you to try the most popular variation of intermittent fasting, the one where you only eat during an eight-hour window each day, often called 16/8. You do so not necessarily to induce weight loss but because of the reputed other ways it can aid your health.

After six-weeks of doing so, a few things become evident.

That after only a few days, you stopped feeling hungry during the 16-hour fast. That during the 8-hour eating window, you’re eating less - as evidenced by an unintended loss of a pound and a half.

That your mental clarity has improved, especially during the latter half of the workday. That you feel more energized during most of the day.

Until you start to exercise.

Then you experience lethargy. And it’s an especially troubling type of weariness because it gets progressively worse as your effort becomes more intense.

So what do you do next? The answer’s based on how you’ve built your priority pyramid.

If you’re a college professor who values mental clarity over physical performance, you stick with the diet - and maybe even increase the length of the fast to see if that improves mind function even more. If you’re one of his students who plays football and desires to get better at it, you abandon or alter the diet.

It’s as simple as that.

Basing your actions on a pre-established health and fitness hierarchy of importance works just as well in more serious situations, too. Consider this scenario where you’re addicted to sugar, drinking at least two liters of sugar-sweetened beverages a day, and so obese that your doctor says you’re slowly killing yourself.

So you adjust your priority pyramid so that losing weight ASAP goes on top, and you start drinking diet soda and artificially sweetened sparkling waters. You’re surprised at how quickly you come to enjoy the taste of both.

You’re also surprised at how quickly you lose weight.

You’re drinking a lot of both obviously to replace your at-least-two-liters-a-day soda habit, which is all well and good with you - even after you read about a study that suggests heavy use of artificial sweeteners may actually compromise the health of those who are overweight and/or diabetic in the long term.

That’s because in your hierarchy of importance, the short term has to take precedence over the long term - or else there might never be a long term.

Two important notes to end

Number one: Much of the recent research on the safety and efficacy of artificial sweeteners is good to know, so look for an article on that soon.

Number two: That never-named female in today’s article is Rosie Hulbert, proprietor of Rosie’s Boot Camp & Personal Training. If you’re in the Allentown area and looking for a new way to work out, why don’t you check out www.rosiesbootcamp.com?