Life was great when I could eat or drink anything I wanted and not worry about consequences. But those days are long gone.

When I was younger, my consumption habits were best reflected in a line from a Billy Joel song: "Ate an awful lot of late-night drive-in food, drank a lot of take-home pay."

When I wasn’t a sportswriter I was a bartender, and that’s what sportswriters and bartenders tend to do, especially when they’re young and single.

The drinking part is no longer an issue. Somewhere along the line I lost the taste for alcohol, and I now imbibe just once or twice a month with rarely more than two drinks.

Food, though, remains a challenge, a constant battle to achieve a balance between satisfaction and healthfulness. Things were simpler when choices between "tastes great" and "less filling" pertained only to beer, not full meals.

I’m 50 now. I have no intention to stop eating the things I enjoy, no matter their nutritional value or lack thereof. But some kind of compromise between yin and yum is imperative if my later decades are going to be healthy ones.

As the years went by and I packed on the pounds, it became clear that my eating (and exercise, which is a story for another day perhaps) habits would have to change — that is, if I wanted to be around for a long time.

With heart disease and diabetes in the family tree, I’d have to adjust my mindset and habits to something closer to Socrates’ "Thou shouldst eat to live, not live to eat."

It sounds simple enough, but there are challenges involved with this endeavor, including: the prevalence of non-nutritious food choices, especially in restaurants, and a lack of desire to consume most nutritious options.

If you’re like me and you really love all kinds of food, it doesn’t make sense to deny yourself all the time and feel miserable.

My solution has become to cook more often, even though, since I live alone, it’s usually just for myself.

One excuse for not cooking was having to eat the same food as leftovers for a couple of days. The answer in this case is to prepare food that can be revamped in different ways. Roast chicken, for instance, can be transformed into chicken salad or a burrito filling. It also helps to make food that will keep so you can skip a day or two before eating it again.

Nutrition experts say home-cooked meals are better for you because you control what goes into the dish and how it is prepared. Taken a step further, you control what goes into your refrigerator and pantry while making purchases.

It takes more discipline to order the fish rather than the steak at a restaurant than it does to buy a piece of fresh fish that you will prepare yourself.

My doctor told me I can still partake of my favorite foods — loaded with cholesterol, sodium, unhealthy fats and calories — "once in a while." But no one will pin down exactly what that means. You have to figure it out for yourself and be honest about it.

So, for others in similar situations (or anyone who just wants some tasty food), I present two recipes that together make a balanced meal. By "balanced" I mean that they meet the approval of both that devil poking his fork into one ear and the angel nagging into the other.

The first entails one of the unhealthy foods I refuse to give up: fried rice. There are ways to prepare this dish more healthfully than I do, but this is one case where "tastes great" wins out over "less filling."

Fried rice is like a couple of other things in life in that everyone seems to think they do it best. I’m no exception. My little tricks involve egg and oyster sauce.

I have no idea why some scramble an egg, chop it up and throw it into the rice. That has minimum impact. Instead, I crack the raw egg into the rice and spread it around, bi bim bap style. Perfect fried rice means to me a golden sheen on every grain, lending moistness and additional flavor.

Oyster sauce doesn’t really taste like oyster, but a little bit of it in fried rice pumps up the flavor exponentially.

I add in Portuguese sausage or whatever available meat I have, and I realize this might be my eventual undoing.

On the other hand, salmon, fresh peppers and onions, boosted with salt-free spices and a healthful preparation, is the other side of my nutrition equation.

Slammin’ Salmon is almost as easy to make as fried rice and just as flavorful. It’s also much healthier, especially if you forgo salt. This dish remains moist because it is steamed in a foil packet.

Since it makes three servings, use leftovers in salad or with scrambled eggs — unless you go for seconds.

Ugh, portion-size issues. The battle never ends.

FRIED RICE FOR ONE

1 tablespoon sesame oil, plus more as needed
1 tablespoon minced garlic
1/4 onion, chopped
1/2 small Portuguese sausage, cut into small pieces
1/3 kamaboko slab, sliced into strips
1 cup steamed rice
Dash EACH soy sauce, oyster sauce and chili-pepper water
2 eggs, divided
Salt and pepper, to taste
Green onion, as desired

In pan or wok, heat oil and sauté garlic, onion, sausage and kamaboko over medium heat. Remove mixture, leaving whatever liquid remains.

Add more oil if necessary, then add rice. Continually stir rice while adding soy sauce, oyster sauce and chili-pepper water. Return meat mixture to pan.

Add one egg and mix it quickly throughout, and salt and pepper to taste. Remove from heat and top with green onion. Top with a fried egg.

Approximate nutritional information (not including salt to taste, and assumes 2 ounces Portuguese sausage, 2 ounces kamaboko and 1 tablespoon each of shoyu, oyster, chili pepper): 800 calories, 41 g fat, 5 g saturated fat, 450 mg cholesterol, greater than 1000 mg sodium, 69 g carbohydrate, 1 g fiber, 3 g sugar, 34 g protein

SLAMMIN’ SALMON

1-1/2 bell peppers of various colors
1/2 small sweet or red onion
6 mushrooms
1 pound salmon
2 tablespoons minced garlic
1-1/2 tablespoons minced sun-dried tomatoes, or to taste
2 tablespoons salt-free all-purpose seasoning, or to taste
2 tablespoons chili-pepper water

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Slice peppers, onions and mushrooms. Cut pieces large for more crunch and to preserve nutritional value, or smaller if you prefer vegetables cooked through.

Place salmon on large piece of aluminum foil set on baking pan, skin-side down. Coat with garlic, sun-dried tomatoes and seasoning, and drizzle with chili-pepper water.

Top with vegetables and seal foil well. Bake 20 minutes or until flaky but still moist. Makes 3 servings.

Approximate nutritional information, per serving (not including seasoning to taste): 360 calories, 30 g fat, 4 g saturated fat, 95 mg cholesterol, 150 mg sodium, 11 g carbohydrate, 3 g fiber, 5 g sugar, 36 g protein

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Nutritional analysis by Joannie Dobbs, Ph.D., C.N.S.,