Summer Camps with a Healthy Focus

With the spotlight on rising obesity rates in children, summer camps are revamping age-old camp ways. Some camps are focusing more on their menu options providing healthier foods for campers and offering more variety from vegetarian to allergen free choices. Many camps are even changing the way meals are conducted, moving away from buffet style (which tends to promote lack of portion control and over consuming of less healthy options), to more family style meals.

Many camps are offering more diversity in the types of daily activities offered aside from the usual camp fair of swimming, boating and sports. In efforts to be more inclusive to all fitness levels, activities such as Yoga, Zumba and Pilates, etc are now available.

Another type of program becoming more common revolves around healthy lifestyle habits such as gardening, cooking and other related activities teaching good nutrition.

Camps are beginning to promote health, nutrition and fitness as part of their marketing concepts, whether these are integrated as optional activities or the focus of the camp altogether.

One Girl Scout camp in Milwaukee is putting fitness, nutrition, wellness activities and gardening front and center as the central theme for their camp.

The focus of this Florida weekend camp is to promote healthy eating and physical activity in a fun manner to kids.

And yes, there are many camps whose sole purpose is geared to overweight and obese children. They will teach and instill healthy lifestyle habits such as this Indianapolis Day camp.  The focus is to comprehensively change lifestyle habits in a fun and safe way with activities. These may include cooking and nutrition under the direction of registered dieticians, plus gardening and a wide variety of physical activities which will appeal to all fitness levels and abilities.

The bottom line is that camps are great opportunities for kids to be kids. To get them unplugged and away from TVs, computers, videos games and phones. To interact “face to face” with other kids and to enjoy the outdoors, which in itself promotes activity while simultaneously prevents mindless grazing throughout the day. Another bonus is research has found that kids are likely to retain new hobbies/habits they pick up while at camp. Who knows, maybe they’ll even teach YOU a thing or two about nutrition or gardening.