A healthy diet is key to successful weight loss and is one of the biggest things we stress at our weight loss camps.  Many parents and kids do not know where to begin when planning to eat healthier, however a common misconception that is out there is that eating fewer carbohydrates will help.  While this is true to an extent, you need to be aware that carbohydrates are a part of a healthy diet - the key is picking the right carbs to eat.

Carbohydrates are one of the three macro nutrients:  Protein, Fat, and Carbohydrates.  Protein macro nutrients are meats, nuts, seeds, dairy and soy.  Fats come from plant oils and animal fat.  They are found in various forms such as butter and cooking oil as well as being in animal protein sources and even in some vegetables and fruits such as avocados.

In our daily diets, we should eat roughly 20-25% protein, 20-30% fats and 50-60% carbohydrates. You can see where it's important that we choose the right types of carbohydrates given that they make up more than half of our daily foods.

Carbohydrates are mainly from plants, whether that means a piece of fruit or a vegetable or a manufactured product made from flour such as crackers, bread or even cookies.  However, kids, this does not mean that you can eat a cookie in place of a vegetable and still get the same carbs.

The problem with the cookie is that the nutritional part of it, the wheat that was used to make the flour, is no longer helpful to your body.  Plants contain some very important things such as vitamins, minerals and fiber.  Those are what make vegetables and fruits so good for us!  Once we take that plant, grind it all up, process it in a factory, add a bunch of sugar and fat to make it taste better, well, then we've lost everything that was good for us.

So, the rule of thumb is that if you have a difficult time tracing back that carbohydrate choice to Mother Nature, then you're going to have a hard time finding any nutritional value to the product.  So, which are healthy choices that we eat at our weight loss summer camps?

1.  Vegetables
2.  Fruits
3.  Whole Grain breads, rice and pasta (made with the whole grain kernel and not entirely out of flour) without a lot of added sugar or fat
4.  Nuts & seeds such as almonds, sunflower seeds and pistachios

So, keep this in mind next time you make the shopping list because you just learned something that many people don't understand about the problems with most of those carbohydrates on the shelf!

You may need some time to let your taste-buds adjust to this change.  You've been allowing that tongue to taste a lot of sugar, so the veggies and whole grains may not taste as good at first.  Over time though, you'll learn to love Mother Nature's cuisine a lot more than that sugary junk on the shelves!