Although it’s been a while since we’ve enjoyed a romcom at the theater, it seems we’ll be able to make up for lost time with today’s opening of Valentine’s Day (New Line Cinema), Garry Marshall’s star-studded film that follows several romantic storylines (whether we’ll want to, based on the onslaught of scathing reviews, is another issue). The frothy feel-good comedy stars a veritable Who’s Who of Hollywood heavyweights, including Jessicas Alba and Biel, Bradley Cooper, Patrick Dempsey, Jamie Foxx, Jennifer Garner (left), Anne Hathaway, Ashton Kutcher, Queen Latifah, George Lopez, Shirley MacLaine and Julia Roberts. We caught up with Roberts, 42, and Garner, 37, at a recent press event.

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For a stretch of our teens and twenties, we found ourselves repeatedly dumped right after Valentine’s Day, before our rose bouquets had even wilted. (To their credit, the guys were decent enough to give us our walking papers after the holiday.) These days, we’re much better at picking partners, but now our current long-term relationship has us in a quandary: the Valentine’s Day dinner/flowers rut. In light of this, we rounded up some advice in preparation for Feb. 14.

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Whether she’s performing a triple loop or dancing the cha-cha, Olympic gold medalist and Dancing with the Stars winner Kristi Yamaguchi is always entertaining. So we were pleased to hear that she’ll be doubly visible this month, both as a Today Show and Universal Sports correspondent for the XXI Olympic Winter Games, and as one of the 12 celebrities whose ancestral roots are examined in the four-part PBS series Faces of America.

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We love chocolate, yet often feel guilty eating it. But from a nutritional standpoint, there’s no reason to: Cacao is a fruit tree and its seeds (known as cocoa beans) contain more than 800 healthy compounds that fight cancer and heart disease. The trick to enjoying the chocolate made from those beans without gaining weight is to eat the dark stuff because it’s less fatty than milk chocolate. Even better, satisfy your fudge fix with cocoa powder, which contains no sugar or fat, but is rich in protein, calcium, potassium and even fiber.

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During this time of year, well-meaning people always tell us we look tired. In need of a winter recharge, The Fatigue Prescription (Viva Editions, 2010) — promising to renew energy, health and life — by Linda Hawes Clever, M.D., caught our eye. “Many devoted, capable people with plenty of good things going on and lots to look forward to are felled by fatigue,” Clever notes in the book’s introduction. Fatigue often stems from juggling many responsibilities or from too much sorrow — Clever was inspired to come up with her prescription after a tough time in her own life: Over the course of a year, her parents died, her home was burglarized, she lost two jobs and her husband was diagnosed with cancer. The book, with easy-to-use workbook aspects, such as questionnaires, helps pinpoint the sources of your fatigue and how to make a fresh start.

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We admit that we attend Super Bowl parties mostly for the company, and the main bowl that holds our interest contains salty snacks. Thanksgiving is the only day that tops Super Bowl Sunday in American calorie consumption, and that includes four million pounds of fat from potato chips alone. According to Dawn Jackson Blatner, R.D., L.D.N., spokeswoman for the American Dietetic Association and author of The Flexitarian Diet (McGraw-Hill, 2008), an average woman can easily consume more calories than needed for an entire day during a Super Bowl party: To wit, two slices of cheese pizza, a half-cup of nuts, 15 nachos, two bottles of beer and one cookie add up to 1,900 calories.

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While we’re intrigued by the latest generation of alarm clocks that roll away or shake us awake, we still think the kind that lick our face and bark are the most effective. We’re talking about dogs, of course, which also happen to be our greatest motivators when it comes to exercise. Nothing — and we mean nothing — gets us moving faster than the threat of soiled carpet! Capitalizing on this truth, Seattle-based certified trainer Tricia Murphy Madden recently released My Best Friend’s Workout (Sparkworks Media, 2009), an exercise DVD that combines your fitness regimen with your dog’s.

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As snow softly blankets the trees outside or when a cold winter rain beats against our windows, there’s nothing quite so satisfying as a cozy chair, a great book and the promise of a lazy Saturday or Sunday. Good reads help us through our winter doldrums, transporting us to other places and times, as we’re absorbed into a compelling tale. Following are three very different new novels, perfect for winter reading — a little girl finds a sense of family she’s never known with her Southern aunt, a Manhattan lawyer plagued by a mysterious condition must walk away from everything, and a woman examines the sticky and sweet aspects of her ex-husband’s family candy business.

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Back in 1987, watching A Nightmare on Elm Street 3 with our fingers over our eyes, we never dreamed that the part that could come true was Freddy Krueger bursting out of a television set snarling, “Welcome to primetime, bitch!” More than two decades later, the once-verboten B-word permeates popular media. But rather than shocking, it’s acquired a veneer of sass. There’s Bitch Slap, a retro chixploitation film currently in theaters, starring scantily clad women squabbling over crime, and Skinny Bitch, the best-selling diet book series. The epithet pops up regularly on primetime television, everywhere from How I Met Your Mother to Grey’s Anatomy. A memoir called Bitch Is the New Black, about successful young African-American women, has already sold the film rights and gotten Hollywood buzz though it won’t be published by Harper until June.

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For years we’ve known that sweet potatoes are a superfood, both in terms of taste and standout nutrition. One large baked sweet potato contains only 160 calories and more fiber than a cup of cooked oatmeal. Sweet potatoes have almost no fat, cholesterol or sodium, and rank low on the glycemic index, meaning they won’t cause your blood sugar to spike. What’s more, sweet potatoes contain an impressive amount of heart-healthy vitamin E and so much beta-carotene per 1-cup serving that you’d have to eat 16 cups of broccoli to get the equivalent amount!

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