How to Enjoy Halloween Candy Without Guilt

Fall has officially commenced here in California. Tops of trees are turning to their crisp burnt color, morning air feels slightly chillier, and a quick walk around the neighborhood can reveal pumpkins and some lurking ghosts and ghouls. Halloween can feel like our grand kick-off to the rest of the end-of-year holidays. And while the Halloween holiday is spooky, we hope you can share in the fun of what it is best known for - sweets and treats.

The holidays can generally be spooky all season long for those struggling with eating disorders or disordered eating (more on that in a later post), but Halloween in particular launches us all the way to one’s “fear” foods - candy. We’re all aware of the health messaging regarding Halloween candy - from the doctors office to the dentist office to even gyms encouraging us to bring in our candy to donate (although I am not knocking this charitable act). I hope that most of us (if you celebrate) can recall a fun memory of Halloween candy before it was inevitably demonized by diet culture. 

The Dietitians at As You Are Nutrition want you to enjoy your Halloween candy. We get that some may feel terrified at the thought of even opening the wrapper, while some may feel the need to hide the whole loot to consume in one sitting. The restrict-binge-shame cycle occurs when we restrict a food, binge on it, feel shame, then go back to restriction. Check out our blog post on this concept. Halloween candy can have a place in our meal and snack repertoire, just the way we work to normalize other foods. We want to empower you with tools to approach candy with mindfulness and gratitude as well as the social reward of being able to partake in the fun with others.

Here’s a quick guide for trying your Halloween candy: 

Dig through and set aside the ones you like, and ditch or donate the ones you don’t. Give yourself permission to eat the candy whenever your body genuinely feels like it.

Try practicing some mindfulness skills: look at the shiny wrapper - is it enticing? Does the candy look how you’d expect it to look? What does it smell like?

Take your first bite - hopefully it’s good! What is the initial flavor? Is the texture what you expected? If it’s a pleasant experience so far, take another bite!

Ask yourself the same questions. As you make your way to the end of the candy, ask yourself if the last bites taste as good as the first?

Now take a deep breath and congratulate yourself for getting through a candy exposure. We can do this as many times as we need to in order to normalize the candy and make it feel less fearful. We can also give ourselves permission to throw it out if we genuinely don’t enjoy it. 

There can also be various forms of hunger taking place leading us to Halloween candy. We can vacillate between things like taste hunger to mouth hunger to eye hunger. Different types of hunger can lead us to different drives for eating, and in this case Halloween candy. Does the candy look visually enticing even if we don’t feel physical hunger? Does the candy evoke a certain memory of taste and satisfying flavors even if we don’t feel hungry? Does the candy give us a satisfying feeling in the mouth of either chewy, gummy, or smooth? These can all be various reasons to engage with the candy that are also permissible outside of just physical hunger. 

We hope this year can feel a little different with the ways we either engage with or have previously avoided Halloween candy. We hope you can enjoy true preferences when it comes to candy and help to silence inner critics telling you what you “should” or “should not” have. If you’re a parent to kiddos partaking in the activity, we hope you can model a healthy and healed relationship with all foods, especially when it comes to our fun foods such as Halloween candy.