God rejse

Danish hygge has become a genre unto itself, as The Little Book of Hygge: The Danish Way to Live Well turns into a bestseller.

While there is hardly an English equivalent for the Danish word hygge, we can simply feel it, and forget about its translation. An oft-quoted idea of hygge is a bike ride in the pouring rain with a candle on the heads. Or eating cakes.

To coin my own way of hygge from scratch, I grabbed my running shoes right after waking up at six today. More hobby than workout, and more pleasure than chore, running in Copenhagen is simply something I heartily recommend myself for hygginess. As I weaved through the scenic trails in the park, I didn't keep track of my pace, learning to make peace with the natural environment instead of the stats.

The park is lively, picturesque, and makes me feel hygge. I saw many birds, and funnily enough, quite a lot of snails. To make sure we're feeling hygge, I didn't broach the subject who's running faster. I ran past a snail, reminding myself not to step on the creature, and sped up.

It wasn't long before I met another animal. A deer. I rubbed my eyes. A wild deer. And then it struck me like a revelation. Running together with a wild deer, obviously, is an instant hygge.

Meal

If I were to choose a meal to skip it would be the lunch.

If anything, breakfast should be the last one out.

To understand how breakfast gets in the way of keeping us healthy, we should take a look at the scholarly medical literature. A growing body of evidence shows that breakfast has important effect on the expression of "clock genes" that regulate our body's post-meal glucose and insulin responses. The field of body's inner clock, including molecular mechanisms controlling our circadian rhythm, is in fact the subject of this year's Nobel Prize for Medicine.

The case for a breakfast has been elegantly demonstrated by a Tel Aviv University study, in which 18 healthy volunteers and 18 obese diabetes volunteers took part in a test day featuring breakfast and lunch, and then a separate day featuring only lunch. In both healthy and diabetic subjects, having breakfast jump-starts specific "clock genes" that lead to better glucose control and more efficient weight loss. Breakfast skipping, on the other hand, has dire consequences on the clock-controlled gene expression.

In short, breakfast is indeed the most important meal of the day.

For many, it's often well-nigh necessary to have three meals to keep the brains well-stoked all day. I'm not so sure. From time to time, lunch slows me down, rather than speeding me up. I had raw carrots for lunch before my running yesterday, for example, and ended up cursing it for the stomachache during the race. I tried sandwich today but could not beat the post-lunch slump during the medical conference. In the end, I should probably skip lunch to get away from the dip, I told myself.

Run

When it comes to attending overseas conference, I'm basically a philistine butt-in-chair nerd. But here at Copenhagen - where I joined a four-day meeting in the field of kidney disease - the city is so attractive that it's called the world's most livable one.

One of the biggest temptations is the urge to sneak out and discover the city, unlocking the recipe for the Danes being ranked the world's most contented people. I'm lucky to learn about the official 5-km running race as part of the conference activity. That being the case, my running away from the lectures would seem to be more legitimate.

I joined the run without second thought. How can I resist it? Copenhagen, I'd been told, is a great city to be explored in a pair of running shoes. The running route, just a stone's throw away from the conference venue, turns out to be one of the most scenic ones in this capital city. Immediately after crossing the finish line, I told myself, "I better make sure to wake up an hour earlier tomorrow and come back to have another lap. An absolute must."