Trick or Treat: Navigating Halloween & Food Autonomy
By Alex Harris, PhD
Halloween is an exciting holiday filled with fun costumes, spooky decorations, and of course delectable treats! For many, this holiday brings up ambivalence about how to enjoy while monitoring dietary preferences and how to help their children regulate choices. This blog post delves into mindful eating and how to navigate decisions about sweet treats this Halloween.
Food is Our Friend
Many people have a love/hate relationship with food. It seems like there’s a new diet trend on every algorithm and it can be so tricky to figure out what information is factual and helpful. How much is too much? Is dieting good or bad? Is restricting a bad thing? The questions are endless. In this post, we’d like to press pause on these questions and offer a different perspective on food and your relationship with it. This approach is called mindful eating. Mindful eating focuses on a few areas:
1. How we fuel our body
2. How we can provide a multisensory process for enjoying food
3. Food autonomy
What is Mindful Eating?
Mindful eating is defined as paying attention to what you’re eating, how you eat it, and the enjoyable experience of eating (Nelson, 2017). To break it down, mindful eating takes the “good” and “bad” out of food groups and frames the body as providing “hungry” or “full” signals. Different foods serve different purposes. For example, proteins help build our muscles and carbohydrates give us energy, fat can help us feel full and sweet treats can actually help with a sense of satisfaction, which in turn helps with overall food regulation. Too much of any food group is not beneficial to our working system. While eating treats in moderation is healthy for the soul, eating too much can lead to negative consequences including physical discomfort or negative thoughts. Here are some tricks for enjoying your Halloween treats!
Explain what mindful eating is to your family
Normalize the neutrality of foods. Shifting the focus from “good” and “bad” to how foods make you feel, both physically and mentally, allows one to “tune in '' to the body’s natural ability to regulate food choices. This mindful eating practice provides a healthy outlook on food intake, food choices, and helps promote overall physical and mental health.
Eat with openness and awareness
Setting strict limits around how many pieces of candy or what types of candy are allowed to be consumed can cause tension and make you want even more! Instead, approach the treat with acceptance, enjoy the candies that you eat and listen to the body signals that help you know when you’ve had enough. Listening to your body’s natural cues for hunger and satiation helps to build a healthy relationship with food and consumption autonomy in children and yourself. An easy way to think about this is “Eat when you’re hungry and stop when you feel content, not overly full.”
Enjoy the sensation of eating
Take the time to enjoy the treat you’ve chosen and engage all your senses! This focus, or “mindfulness” makes the experience more enjoyable. Focus on the texture, the aroma, or the taste to enhance the experience. Food is a gift and should be treated as such.
Make treats a family fun activity
Trading candy and treats can be such a fun way to relax after trick-or-treating! Model for your children the ability to enjoy special occasions and food traditions while demonstrating mindful eating behaviors (e.g., choosing treats you really enjoy, eating slowly, talking about the delicious taste, stopping food intake when your body feels satisfied). Make sure to also model positive body talk! No shaming food choices. Empower your children to not be afraid of food choices but embrace them!
Ultimately, Halloween should be a fun time to enjoy dressing up with your family and friends, attend gatherings, and focus less on restricting.
For more information on mindful eating, consider the following resources:
Mindful Eating: The Art of Presence While You Eat
References:
Nelson J. B. (2017). Mindful Eating: The Art of Presence While You Eat. Diabetes spectrum : a publication of the American Diabetes Association, 30(3), 171–174. https://doi.org/10.2337/ds17-0015