My kids are fairly healthy. But my daughter struggles with being a little overweight. She is pretty much following the same weight path as I did at her age. Making sure they limit their carbs is something I really want to work on with them so we can keep them healthy!
Each day my son gives me a rundown of what he had for the day and then asks me what he can have for a snack. We have to stop and evaluate what he has had so I can determine what would be a good choice. So I began to think, there has got to be an easy way to reference the carbs in his diet and for him to determine what he is allowed to have, in terms of carbs, when he is hungry for a snack.
So I came up with this little cheat sheet! I want to keep my kids around 150 carbs a day or less. The carbs on the top of the list, aside from the muffins & bread, are natural carbs. The bottom of the list are sweet treats & snacks that we all grew up eating as kids. My intentions is not to deprive my kids of the delicious foods & treats that all kids should be able to enjoy. Instead I want to make sure that these foods are consumed in moderation for optimum health!
Anything with a 1 next to it equals around 25 grams of carbs or less. Anything with a 2 equals around 50 grams of carbs or less. This of course is per serving for each of the choices. All they have to do is check their intake of foods with carbs and do a quick calculation of how much they had in a day. Their number should not equal any more then 6. Six equals around 150 grams per day!
The numbers will not be exact, but I'm not looking for perfection here. I am just looking for a way for all of us to monitor their intake of carbs so they eat them in moderation. Some days even with this list they will be well under the 150 gram goal, but others they could topple more toward 200 and I am ok with that. In keeping it simple, I understand that the numbers will fluctuate but at least it is within reason!
As you can see, non starchy vegetables are not included on the list. These are very healthy carbs and we have no plans to limit how much of these our kids eat!
Tonight I will present this to my kids and we shall see how they like this system!
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