5 Ways To Control Your Halloween Candy Cravings
For some, Halloween is joyful and fun holiday.
The opportunity to dress in expressive and creative costumes as adults and buy endless amounts of candy can be very exciting. But for many, the constant exposure to candy in the house, office, at friend’s houses, or elsewhere can lead to an increased feeling of being out of control around Halloween candy and increased cravings for candy.
What are candy cravings and why do you have them?
Cravings for food can be described as the experience of thinking about food often, food taking up a lot of headspace, having a hard time not thinking about a particular food and a desire to want to eat the food with immediacy, sometimes in larger quantities.
So when it comes to Halloween candy, a craving might look like thinking about snickers candy or candy corn all the time, wanting more than ideally you would like to eat and having the candy take up a lot of headspace. You might be out running errands or sitting in your home office and notice thinking about where the candy is in your house, how much you have and how much you want to eat it.
And when it comes to these candy cravings, most of the advice given is to decrease your consumption of candy as a way to control your cravings. Craving Halloween candy? Eat less. Craving Halloween candy? Keep it out of your house. Craving Halloween candy? Fill up on fruits, veggies and whole grains so that you will have less interest in candy. Craving Halloween candy? Drink a glass of water. But odds are, if you’re reading this you’ve tried all of those strategies (and more!) and nothing seems to ever work. You keep thinking about the candy and feeling out of control around it when you finally do eat it.
Unfortunately, there are many things in this culture that blame you and your body when you feel out of control with (Halloween) candy which leads you to believe that you don’t have enough “willpower” to control your cravings. This keeps you stuck in cycles of feeling like there is something wrong with (i.e. shame) you because you feel like you should “know better”. But the reality is, there is nothing wrong with you, you don’t lack willpower, and cravings can be an indication of something else that is happening that is worth you exploring.
Why limiting your candy intake doesn’t decrease candy cravings
As mentioned, most advice out there will offer tips and tricks around how to decrease your (Halloween) candy cravings or tell you to limit your intake. But this usually does the exact opposite and causes more candy consumption and episodes of eating candy sometimes to the point of discomfort.
This is partly due to something called “habituation.” Habituation is a word that is used to describe the experience of you getting used to something and feeling less excited by it. For example, take broccoli. Most people who are on diets eat a lot of broccoli. Broccoli is abundant and there is unconditional permission to have as much broccoli as desired. And guess what happens over time? People habituate to broccoli and get very tired of it. It’s not special anymore and can even sometimes be gross because it’s eaten so often. But the opposite happens when you restrict foods, such as with Halloween candy.
When you restrict your candy intake, you can never experience habituation to candy. By not allowing yourself to consistently have candy, it means that every time you eat candy, whether you are aware of it or not, it’s going to feel like the last time you’re going to eat it. This is what some call the “last supper mentality”.
The last supper mentality is the feeling of needing to eat all of the foods that you can (in this case Halloween candy) because it’s going to be the last time you will even have it. Common phrases that contribute to having a last supper mentality are things like “I shouldn’t be eating this”, “I am going to eat two and be done”, “I shouldn’t eat too much”, “this is bad for me”, “this is the last time I am going to have sugar”, “I am going to eat healthy tomorrow”, “this is an occasional thing”, “I’ll work this off at the gym”, etc.
All of this, in addition to messages about you needing to control your Halloween candy intake, cause increased cravings for Halloween candy, not decreased cravings.
How To Control Your Candy Cravings
It may sound counterintuitive based on the cultural messaging around needing to control your sweets intake, but the best solution to decreasing your Halloween candy cravings is to eat candy more often. Part of the way habituation (as mentioned above) works is that your brain and body need to know that something is not scarce and it’s abundant, like the broccoli. But knowing how to do this can be hard, so here are some ways to limit your candy cravings:
Buy candy more often and make sure to eat it:
Part of what makes people feel so out of control around candy is the fact that it’s not around often. Not only this, it tastes yummy and is a quick source of energy. While it might seem counterintuitive, buying candy more often, having it around the house, and giving yourself unconditional permission to have candy is a necessary step to not feeling completely out of control around candy. You can add it to meals, have it with your snacks, or eat it separate from meals/snacks.
Watch your restrictive food thoughts
Restrictive food thoughts, i.e. “i can't have this”, “I shouldn’t have this”, “I’m being bad”, etc. create not only a lot of fear around candy, but they also create the grounds for wanting to rebel from those thoughts, even though they are coming from you internally. Restrictive thoughts alone can often lead to bingeing on food and eating beyond fullness. Be mindful of your thoughts when before you start eating candy. Pay attention to what you’re saying to yourself afterwards.
Challenge your relationship to sugar
There are a lot of myths about sugar in this culture that lead to fear around consuming sugar, such as that it causes weight gain, it’s toxic and it’s addictive. Additionally, you have most likely been taught that you cannot be trusted around halloween candy. This usually starts when you’re a kid with parents giving rules around Halloween candy. Trust that your body knows what to do with candy and the sugar that’s in it. Even if you have chronic conditions like diabetes, you can still enjoy candy.
Practice mindfulness
Mindfulness is simply the act of inviting intentional awareness into the present moment from a place of curiosity and non-judgement. It doesn’t have to be fancy or special. It can look like taking a deep breath before you begin eating, trying to notice the taste and texture of candy in your mouth, noticing how the candy flavors change over time and how it dissolves. Mindfulness can help you to enjoy the food instead of checking out from the experience which often happens when you are telling yourself you shouldn’t be eating the candy.
Watch out for “F-IT” eating
This is a common outcome of dieting or restricting your food intake. For example, you start eating a forbidden food, in this case Halloween candy, and you tell yourself you're “only going to have two pieces”. But, once you start, you find yourself continuing to eat and it feels like you can’t stop. In your head you’ve gone past your initial allotted amount and feel bad about it so you decide “F-it”, I’m going to eat this entire bag of Halloween candy. Afterwards, you feel guilty and shameful, and sometimes may even get an upset stomach. Notice what kind of limits you’re setting on candy before your start eating and how this may be impacting your experience with candy.
Fear of Weight Gain If You Eat Halloween Candy
You are most certainly not alone if you fear weight gain as a result of eating Halloween candy. After all, how could you not fear weight gain considering the (diet) culture that you exist within and how often thin bodies and weight loss is at the center of everything. And, exploring your relationship with your body and your fears around gaining weight are a foundation part of decreasing your candy cravings and feeling more in control around candy. But why?
It is inevitable that when you’re pursuing weight loss, you are also limiting what you eat, not giving yourself full permission to eat and engaging in punishing exercise. These behaviors unfortunately get in the way of you cultivating a peaceful and intuitive relationship with food and with candy because it limits your ability for you to consistently practice giving yourself permission to have candy by honoring your candy cravings.
The pursuit of weight loss also gets you stuck in cycles of feeling like you need to do something to “deserve” eating candy, such as eating “healthy” or working out for “x” amount of time. You’ve been told that you need to “work for” candy and sweets and that you need to “burn off” candy, both of which are not only harmful, but also are also not true.
You don’t need to do anything to “deserve” candy except be a human that enjoys candy. And feeling like you need to burn off the food that you eat can get you caught in cycles of disordered eating that for some can lead to things like exercise purging, a disordered eating behavior.
Practicing and learning how to separate your value and worth as a human from your body size is no small feat, but one that is often necessary not only feel better about your body image, but also to decrease your food cravings. It’s hard to separate the beliefs that you have about your body from your relationship to to food.
Another important way to decrease your candy cravings is to also challenge your beliefs around body size. You’ve been taught that body size is about a “simple equation” and that with the “right” diet and exercise, you can have the body that is praised in this culture. But what contributes to our body size is largely dependent on things like genetics, history of disordered eating/eating disorders, trauma, and medication use, not the amount of candy you eat.
How to decrease your Halloween candy cravings long-term
Remember that if you want to decrease your candy cravings by following the 5 ways to control your candy cravings, it will take some time for you to truly feel peace with and around candy. This means that it takes practice and a lot of intentional exposure to candy until you get to a point at which you could take or leave it. It also takes effort to challenge your own food beliefs and the diet mentality that says that you cannot give yourself permission to have candy and that if you eat candy you will gain weight.
So this year, if this is your first time giving yourself permission to have Halloween candy, to not hide the candy and to intentionally include it the days following Halloween, go easy on yourself. If you still feel out of control around it and have cravings, remind yourself that you’re learning a new skill. After years of restricting your candy intake, telling yourself you can’t have it and that you can’t be trusted around it, you should expect to eat more than you would ideally like to eat in one sitting and long-term. Don’t let this be a reason to stop working toward making peace with candy.
This work of creating peace with Halloween candy can often take time, but it gets better with practice! With time, you will feel less out of control around Halloween candy and be able to eat it without guilt, and with joy and pleasure at the center of your experience.
Happy Halloween!
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