January 15-21, 2012 is Healthy Weight Week, when people are encouraged to improve health habits in lasting ways: to eat well, live actively and feel good about themselves and others.

Healthy Weight Week is not necessarily about losing weight, and certainly not about dieting. In fact, it discourages fad diets and over-hyped products, both of which can be dangerous and offer only short-term results at best.

Instead, Healthy Weight Week is about eating not like you are “on a diet” but adopting healthy living habits that last a lifetime. Recommended habits include:

• Eating well. Choose balance and variety, focusing on fresh options from all the food groups. Enjoy your food!

• Avoiding deprivation. Instead, eat in moderation at regular times (three meals plus 1-3 snacks) to satisfy hunger, and tune in to your body’s internal signals of when you are hungry or full.

• Being active in your own way every day. Focus on the pleasure of movement and its health and energy benefits, not only on calories burned.

• Relaxing. Find ways to relieve stress in your life.

• Starting now, decide it’s time to be your own best self!

Note: We often recommend the Mediterranean Diet as the ideal diet for heart, brain and overall health and longevity, or the Portfolio Diet for improving cholesterol levels and heart health. Both also have the added benefit of helping to achieve and maintain a healthy weight.

These are not actually “diets” but ways of eating for life; highlighting and adding a range of wholesome foods rather than counting calories, focusing on restrictions or relying on one specific food to magically take off the weight. Actually, living like a Mediterranean native encompasses all of the above recommendations – no wonder they are so long-lived, healthy and joyful!