When it comes to eating right and exercising, I encourage you to subscribe to the 'Fad-Free' diet. What is the Fad-Free diet? It is using your common sense.

You already know what's healthy.

I think that most people understand the difference between things that are healthful and things that are not. I doubt that there are many people today who don't know that sitting around watching TV all day, eating potato chips and drinking soda pop is not a healthful activity.

Yet many people still look to the 'experts' for advice. We are all so specialized in today's world that we know how to do a couple of things well and rely on other people's advice on how to do everything else. A couple of hundred years ago we did everything. We worked our farms, built our homes, made our clothes, canned our foods, raised our children . . .

Specializations lead to reliance on experts.

Today, technology and the work environment keeps us so busy staying current on one or two specializations that we don't have time to stay up to date on things outside of our field. So, we hire accountants to do our taxes, contractors to fix our houses, mechanics to fix our cars, lawyers to take our money and doctors to treat our ailments.

This leads to our willingness to accept what the experts tell us because we just don't have time to figure it out for ourselves. When some Doctor tells us that carbohydrates and fat are bad for us we believe them. We don't test it against our common sense, we just buy it.

We all need carbohydrates, fats and proteins.

But we know that carbohydrates are the main source of energy and our brains need a lot of energy. We just need to eat the right kinds of carbohydrates. We already know that whole grain cereals and whole grain breads are better than donuts and chocolate cake. So eat those.

We also know that fat insulates our organs and protects our innards. We just need the right kind of fat. We already know that nuts, vegetables and fish are better than burgers and fries. So eat those. Something many people may not know is that the brain is mostly made of fat and requires a good dose of healthy fats from our diet.

We all need somewhere around 65% of our calories from carbohydrates, 15% from fats and 20% from protein - give or take a few depending on whether or not you are trying to win an Olympic competition. Even then, these values only change by about 5% or so.

We all need fat, we all need carbohydrates and we all need proteins. Just get them from the sources that you already know are healthy and you will be fine. Of course, there are subtleties that people in the nutrition field know more about than most folks. But for the most part you can go along way toward achieving health by using your common sense and avoiding the fad claims.