Healthy Weight Week

New Year's Day has passed, and resolutions have been made. A huge percentage of people set a resolution involving losing weight or, more specifically, starting a diet. However, about 16 years ago a nutritionist from North Dakota initiated Healthy Weight Week, which is promoted during the third week in January. The intention behind this week is to “celebrate healthy living habits that last a lifetime and prevent eating and weight problems, rather than intensifying them, as diets do.” The tenets are to “eat well, live actively and feel good about yourself and others.” So instead of starting a diet, the goal might be instead to have a normal relationship with food.

Healthy Weight Network Founder Francis Berg came up with a list of 9 healthy living habits to adopt for a lifetime. Some of the habits don’t even involve food, but one that does involves an effort to rediscover normal eating instead of dieting. That seems very common-sense, but it is harder than it seems. This requires tuning into your body’s internal cues of hunger, and pushing away the plate when one is full. Foods that trick our bodies into wanting more complicate listening to these internal bodies cues.

Falling into this food trickery category are junk foods that present addictive combinations of fat, sugar and salt, according to Dr. Kessler, who wrote The End of Overeating. Dr. Kessler, the former commissioner of the US Food and Drug Administration, researched the addictive nature of junk food and found out there is a reason “you just can’t eat one.” So, a first step to healthy eating is avoiding foods that contain this combination of fat, salt, and sugar.

A second step in creating more normal relationship to eating is to eat real foods, such as vegetables, fruits and whole grains. As Michael Pollan has famously said in is book Food Rules “don’t eat anything your great grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.” This short entertaining book has 64 rules to guide you on making healthy choices, such as “don’t eat anything with more than five ingredients or ingredients you can’t pronounce, don’t eat anything that won’t eventually rot, avoid foods advertised on television, always eat at dinner at a table…” At the core of this book and others that he has written is the message: eat simple, unprocessed foods.

So this year change your goal from loosing weight to feeding your body well with whole foods that are nutritious. Give up the thought of dieting and withholding food from your body. Instead adopt the idea of giving your body the food to make it strong and healthy.

The best foods are the ones you make in your own kitchen using simple ingredients. If you're not a cook, learn a few standards that you can expand from. A few simple recipes are vegetable stir fry, a chopped salad or, for the more adventurous, a pumpkin bisque.

Spruce up some of your standards by adding more vegetables. Reawaken the joy of making a home-cooked meal, and knowing just how much salt went into the meal. Make a meal from actual food, no need for additives, trans fat, or artificial flavorings. Nutritious meals like these are what you deserve, not the empty calories you’re being sold in what Pollan calls the “food-like substances” that fill supermarket shelves.

Kate Goldberg is the Physical Activity and Nutrition Coordinator at Healthy Oxford Hills.