Focus on eating more vegetables, fruits and whole grains. Plan your meals around these most health-protective, naturally low-fat foods and use high-protein animal foods more as condiments than as the centerpiece of a meal.

Sacrifice a little of your free time to prepare nutritious meals at home. The only way to be sure of the nutritional quality of your meals is to make them yourself. Cook in batches and freeze well-labeled individual or family portions for wholesome instant meals later on.

Avoid rigidity. Any food, however caloric or fatty, is O.K. now and then. The secret to a successful, healthful diet is variety, not limitation; moderation, not elimination, and gradual, evolutionary change, not revolution. Consider changing one meal every week to something more nutritious. By year's end, you will have a new way of eating and be much less likely to miss your old, less wholesome habits.

Use exercise, meditation, yoga and other reliable relaxation techniques to help reduce the stress in your life. Stress undermines the immune system and can increase susceptibility to infections, heart disease and cancer. There is nothing to gain and much to lose by countering stress with health-damaging habits like cigarette smoking, drug abuse or excessive alcohol drinking.

Devote at least a half-hour a day to an activity you enjoy that makes you breathe harder and perhaps sweat a little. The benefits to your body--your heart, bones, blood-sugar level, digestion and more--are almost too numerous to mention. And recent studies indicate that regular exercise also protects against cancer. An equal dividend is the feeling of well-being you get after exercising. Even when mentally or physically drained from the day's demands, I head for a pool each evening to swim for a half-hour, then return home a renewed and more relaxed person.

Diet and Health

A new booklet Diet and Health: Recommendations for Cancer Prevention, is available free from the American Institute for Cancer Research, based on the World Cancer Research Fund report, Food Nutrition and the Prevention of Cancer: a Global Perspective, prepared by a worldwide panel of experts on diet and cancer.

This 34-page booklet has practical suggestions with explanations for their advice, and includes sensible discussions of vegetables, fat, salt, food storage and handling, cooking methods, dietary supplements, alcohol and tobacco.

Single copies of Diet and Health are available free by contacting the American Institute for Cancer Research, 1759 R Street, NW, P.O. Box 97167, Washington, DC, 20090-7167. 1-800-843-8114 or 202-328-7744.