By the time you read this, we’ll already be nearly two months into 2010, so it’s a bit late to call this the New Year issue. If you made any New Year’s resolutions they’ve either got lost in the January snow, or have become a habit.

So we’ll just steal a line from the magazine that the woman next to me is reading on my train: It’s never too late to be the new you.

Most of the pieces in this issue have some relationship to becoming healthier: giving up smoking (see Off the hook); exercise (see That feel-good factor); eating well (see Having a happy, healthy African new year); and even avoiding heart attacks (see What's the real story?).

Even the piece on the UK and European HIV treatment guidelines (see Guidelines, which guidelines?) might, to stretch a point, be entitled How to make your pills work for you.

Other lines from my travel companion’s magazine offer gain without pain: Five-minute moves that really work; The expert plan anyone can do; Results in just four weeks.

If ‘anyone’ could develop a god-like body in four weeks with five-minute exercises, ‘everyone’ would. They don’t work, of course, but we’re still suckers for fitness routines that promise instant results. We don’t like to think of all the effort, the loss of guilty pleasures, and the sheer willpower that self-improvement requires. We want to be the ‘new us’ straight away and skip over the nasty business of becoming it.

I discovered this myself, when in the process of researching Off the hook. I discovered that being a non-smoker may be easy, but being an ex­-smoker is bloody difficult, and is still a state I fail to maintain regularly…

So how do you get through the first few weeks of not smoking, or on your diet or starting your gym regime? There are no magic answers, but there are some things common to success.

Firstly, you have to be unsparingly honest with yourself. Do you really want to change? Or are you trying to change because you feel you should? I think I didn’t so much want to give up smoking as want to be the kind of person who could.

Secondly, you have to replace the thing you want to stop with something that at least stands a chance of being just as enjoyable: no hair shirts here. Find something you actually like to do, then call it your exercise regime.

And last, you have to forgive yourself. The more you hate yourself for doing something, the less you’ll feel like someone who can stop doing it. If you can manage to let go of your perfect expectations of yourself, you may manage some smaller triumphs. Have fun trying.