How to Make Up For All the Halloween Candy

With bowls and bags of Halloween candy scattered around the office and home, it’s understandable to eat more sugar at this time of year than perhaps you typically would, especially if you usually restrict sweets.

Thanks to diet culture, for many of us, eating episodes like this are considered a "food sin" and often lead to a punitive make-up mentality that sounds something like this:

To make up for eating all that candy, I will…

• skip breakfast and lunch tomorrow.

• cut carbs and work out extra hard all week.

• not eat sugar for the next month.

• go on a 7-day detox diet.

Perpetuates Vicious Cycle
This penance approach typically perpetuates a vicious cycle of restrict-binge-repeat.

It’s ineffective, physically and psychologically damaging, and causes a lot of unnecessary suffering.

The key to avoiding this painful cycle is to stop believing you have to make up for your eating.

Instead, when you feel like you’ve committed a “food transgression,” remind yourself that it's normal to eat a lot sometimes—especially when a food is restricted, scarce or novel (and tasty!).

Rather than feeling guilty, beating yourself up, and engaging in compensatory behaviors, simply resume your regular self-care practices.

Most importantly, listen to your body. It will tell you what it needs.

For example, after a night of enjoying lots of candy, you may wake up the next day and find your appetite is smaller than usual. So, eat a smaller breakfast. 

Or, you may find you’re hungry for your usual breakfast or something completely different. Go for whatever sounds the most nourishing and satisfying.

Don't deprive or punish yourself and your body because you feel you ate badly. Doing so always backfires. 

Instead of adhering to diet culture’s harmful rules, honor what your here-and-now body is needing and desiring. 

By avoiding a make-up mentality on Halloween and any time of the year, you’ll experience a greater sense of ease and peace with food and your body—and in your life.

Donuts, Video Games and Ease

When I was a kid, one of my best friends lived across the street. Her name was Jennie.

A few days a week, Jennie’s mom Betty would babysit me. This basically meant getting to play with Jennie for hours on end. It also meant going wherever Betty needed to go. 

Back then, playing in a bowling league was a popular pastime for many of our parents and once a week we would go to the bowling alley with Betty. 

While she threw strikes and picked up spares, Jennie and I would have a blast running around the cigarette smoke-filled alley, yelling over the loud music and crashing pins while spending all our allowance on video games in the arcade. 

To keep us fueled up and out of her hair while she bowled, Betty would buy us both a cake donut. I loved eating those donuts, especially the ones with chocolate frosting, just as much as I loved gobbling up all those Pac-Man dots.

A Sense of Ease
Besides my joyful memories of freely roaming the bowling alley with my best friend, what I also cherish about that time is the sense of ease I had with eating.

I didn’t yet have a diet mentality and a bunch of food rules dictating what I should or shouldn’t eat. 

I hadn’t been taught yet to count calories, to fear fat grams, to worry about carbs or to question if I deserved to eat something. 

I hadn’t yet learned to not trust my body and to feel bad, guilty and ashamed about my eating. I just knew what tasted and felt satisfying. 

Before diet culture tainted my relationship with food (and because I never faced food insecurity), I had an easy, relaxed relationship with it. It didn’t dominate my time, energy and headspace.

Like best friends and video games, food was just one of many sources of pleasure in my life.

After years spent riding the dieting/restriction roller coaster with all its rigid food rules, it’s this sense of ease that I longed to reconnect with. 

Reclaimed My Ability to Just Eat
By reclaiming my ability to eat intuitively, which included ditching my diet mentality and food rules, challenging my anti-fat bias, and giving myself unconditional permission to eat with attunement to my body’s needs, I was once again able to simply eat a donut and move on. 

This reclamation wasn’t fast or easy, however, the food freedom, peace and ease I reconnected with on the other side made it so worth it.

When was the last time you experienced a sense of ease with your eating? 

What was different about that time? 

How would your life change if you felt a sense of ease with your eating again, or perhaps for the first time?

How to Deal With Your Trigger Foods

Do you have any trigger foods?

Are you afraid to keep certain foods in your house because you feel like you lose control with them every time you eat them?

There is a very valid reason why some foods feel triggering.

Restriction.

If you’re like most people, your trigger foods are triggering because you are restricting them.

Natural Scarcity Response
Potato chips are a common trigger food, so let’s use them as an example.

Let’s say you love potato chips but you rarely let yourself eat them because you consider them to be a “bad” food and every time you do allow yourself to have them, you feel completely out of control with them.

When you do break down and buy a bag, you can’t stop thinking about them sitting in your cupboard and you keep returning to the kitchen all afternoon for more until the last salty crumbs are licked off your fingers. Once the bag is gone and you’re full of chips and guilt, you decide the safest thing to do is to not eat them at all.

“I can’t be trusted to have potato chips in my house! I’m never eating them again!” you proclaim to your friends who can all totally relate because, thanks to diet culture, they have trigger foods too.

But here’s the thing:

When you don’t let yourself eat potato chips on a regular basis, you create a sense of scarcity and deprivation with them.

The natural human response to scarcity and deprivation is to consume as much as possible of your restricted food when you do allow yourself to eat it.

Basically, your very wise brain is thinking “I never get potato chips therefore I must eat as much as I can right now because I don’t know if I’ll ever have access to them again.”

On top of this, if you’re telling yourself while you’re eating the chips that you shouldn’t be eating them and won’t let yourself eat them again, you are amplifying the threat of scarcity and deprivation, which will further drive you to eat as much as you can right away.

Unconditional Permission to Eat
If you want to stop feeling out of control with potato chips, you need to give yourself unconditional permission to eat all the potato chips you want whenever you want.

This means stocking your kitchen with potato chips and freely eating them with meals, between meals, for breakfast, for dessert, however you desire.

This continuous exposure to your trigger food is called habituation.

The more you eat the potato chips, the more you habituate to them.

In time, their reward value and power over you will diminish and they will become ordinary and neutral—basically, no big deal.

The goal of habituation isn’t to no longer want your trigger foods, but rather to create a trusting and satisfying relationship with them, one that’s free of fear, guilt and shame.

Understandably Feels Scary
Giving yourself unconditional permission to eat your trigger foods can, understandably, feel pretty scary.

It’s so helpful to understand that it’s completely normal to eat a lot of your trigger foods in the beginning of the habituation process because, well, you haven’t habituated to them yet.

This phase of making peace with food freaks a lot of people out, which is why it can be so helpful to get support, whether it’s from an Intuitive Eating counselor, coach, therapist or online community.

When working with my clients, we talk about various strategies that can help them with the habituation process so it doesn’t feel so overwhelming and send them running back to the land of restriction.

Once my clients start habituating to their trigger foods, they start to see that, despite what diet culture wants them to believe, they can trust themselves with any food, regardless of their history with it. And this trust and food freedom is truly profoundly liberating.

Here's what my client Jenny had so say about her experience:

"One of my biggest wins has been being able to have all types of food in my house. Before, I couldn’t have any sweets or baked goods at home otherwise I would just eat them all in one sitting. Having that stuff in my house and not bingeing on it has been a huge positive change. The day I started forgetting it was there was a big day!"

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*It’s important to note that habituation should be approached differently if you have a food-related health condition, such as lactose intolerance. Of course, you should never try to habituate to a food if you have a life-threatening allergy to it or a condition such as Celiac Disease