6 Healthy Halloween Tips

📷@jontyson

We all know Halloween candy runs give meaning to the term "sweet tooth". There’s no reason you can’t make smart eating choices this halloween, in spite of your candy craving. In addition to your healthy halloween snack recipes, use these 6 healthy halloween tips to stay on track with your wellness journey.

SO… you bought giant candy bags for your trick-or-treaters who didn’t bother to show up, because we’re in a pandemic.

(In an ideal world, we’re not giving out candy. We’re serving germ-free homemade snacks and smoothies we made using recipes from the Share & Savor wholesome eating course. But this is reality.)

How do you keep yourself from eating all those added sugars?!

Make the candy hard to reach, literally.

How to Deal With Halloween Candy Cravings

The phrase “out sight, out of mind” is an underused but extremely helpful mindful eating trick. Think about it. A surefire way to turn a small snack into a binge fest is to give yourself unlimited access to the snack. We’ve all been there. You’re at a party or just at home netflix-and-chilling and you find yourself sitting next to a huge bowl of chips. You purposely take one or two then return your focus to the party or your movie.

Before you know it, you’re touching crumbs at the bottom of the bowl. You’ve eaten all the chips without realizing it! With easy access to a giant bowl of chips, it’s a no-brainer that you’d eat them. And that rule applies to all of us for any food we at least moderately enjoy. Try these tricks to avoid binging on all your leftover halloween treats:

List of 6 Healthy Halloween Tips

1. There’s strength in vulnerability- in recognizing your weaknesses and removing the source of the temptation. Pay attention to which Halloween treats are hardest for you to say no to and make sure those are the ones you give away first to trick-or-treaters.

2. Declare a “No Candy Zone” for your living room and your office (and wherever else in your home you spend hours sitting down). When you’re in those No Candy Zones and you crave candy, you’ll have to get up to grab it from the kitchen. Set a limit to keep yourself from grabbing more than 1 or 2 pieces per trip. You just might decide that mini snickers isn’t worth getting off the couch.

3. Tie multiple plastic bags around the candy, stash it in a place that you can’t reach at a momen't’s notice like the trunk of your car or in a high drawer or that way wayyyy back corner of your closet you hate leaning into.

4. Store your candy bag in the freezer. Put a giant candy bag in the freezer. Take out one piece at a time when you have a craving. By the time you wait the 10-20 minutes for it to thaw, you might not want it anymore

5. In addition to hiding the candy in your pantry or somewhere out of reach, give yourself a 15-minute exercise rule. When you have a candy craving, make yourself walk around your home (or dance, or squat, etc) for at least 15 minutes before you’re allowed to reach for the candy. This 2015 study found that people’s food cravings dropped by more than 1/3 after 15 minutes of moderate-intensity walking.

6. Donate your extra candy (make sure you buy individually wrapped candies so organizations will accept the bag even after you’ve opened it. Check out this list for updated sites to donate your leftover candy to.

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