It’s Okay For You (and your kids) To Eat Halloween Candy

Autumn marks the start of a very exciting time of year. The air gets cool and crisp, we get to pull out our favorite cozy sweaters, and leaves begin to change color. For many, it’s the start of the holiday season, beginning with Halloween. Halloween is one of my favorite holidays- the costumes, pumpkin carving, haunted houses, and last but not least- the candy.

We’re all too familiar with the large bags on grocery store shelves and the ones kids come home with after a night of trick or treating. If you had a history of an eating disorder, disordered eating, dieting, or just have a complicated relationship with food, Halloween can be a stressful time. If you’re a parent with young children, this may also be a stressful time for you as you navigate how to incorporate Halloween candy into your child’s eating. You may worry how that fits in, or fear your child is eating too many sweets and too few nutritious foods. And you may worry about controlling yourself around this sudden influx of candy.

You have permission to eat the Halloween candy.

One of the core principles of Intuitive Eating is unconditional permission to eat. That means that there are no food rules to follow, no off-limits foods, and you can eat whatever foods in whatever amounts feel good in your body. With unconditional permission to eat, we also take into consideration the other principles of Intuitive Eating, including Honor Your Hunger and Respect Your Fullness, so that our bodies get food that nourishes and satisfies us both mind and body.

Research in the field of eating behavior shows that labeling a food as “off-limits” only increases our desire and our drive to eat that food. Then when you do finally eat the food, you’re much more likely to overeat since you’ve been thinking about it and craving it, and you don’t know when you’ll be “allowed” to eat that food again. Breaking a food rule and eating an off-limits food also typically leads to feelings of guilt and shame afterwards, which interferes with our enjoyment and satisfaction in eating the food. These feelings also perpetuate the cycle of restricting foods and overeating.

I’m worried that if I start eating, I won’t stop.

The Oxford definition of habituation is “the diminishing of a physiological or emotional response to a frequently repeated stimulus”. To put that simply, we as human get used to things that we experience often. For example, when you first get dressed in the morning, you may note the feeling of clothing on your skin. But throughout the day, your brain tunes it out and you don’t notice the stimulus of the clothing touching our skin very much. With food habituation, the more we are exposed to a food, the less our brains care about it. As a result, the desire to eat that food lessens. People will tire of eating the same food. When the novelty of the forbidden food has worn off and you know you can truly have It any time you like, it isn’t so enticing. The goal is not to get so tired of a food you never want to see it again, but to neutralize it- so that eating candy is no more special a thing than eating an apple.

But Halloween candy is special.

Yes, Halloween candy does only come around once a year. But candy and other forbidden foods are foods we can practice with year-round. If you’ve been depriving yourself of sweets and finally allow yourself to indulge, rebound eating (or food deprivation backlash) can occur as a reaction to with the new, highly palatable food. It is often hard to stop eating in these situations. To quote the Intuitive Eating book, “The only way that you will come to believe that you will be able to stop eating is to go through the food experience, to actually eat…And the more you practice, the more confidence you will have.” Regularly incorporating sweets and other enjoyable foods into eating prevents you from swinging between the two extremes of not eating any and “being good” and overeating them and “being bad”.

Forbidden foods can create a "pendulum” effect of swinging between dieting and overeating “bad” foods.

Remember that there are no good and bad foods. All foods offer our bodies something beneficial, and it’s ok if that main benefit is pleasure and satisfaction. It may seem scary at first to remove the limits on the foods you allow yourself to eat, but when you have unconditional permission to eat, you can better tune into your own needs and preferences. You have the space to ask yourself honestly, “do I really want this food?”. You may even find there are some candies that aren’t as delicious as you thought, or that it doesn’t take as much candy at once to feel satisfied. 

Don’t compensate for treats eaten with exercise or plans to start a diet once the holiday is over, and don’t restrict eating earlier in the day to “save up” for candy. These types of behavior are still a type of restriction and fuel cravings and overeating. They keep you stuck in the restrict-binge cycle and interfere with making peace with food. Feeding your body consistently with enough food will help you approach sweets in a more regulated manner.

For Parents

There is a lot of pressure on parents to feed children perfectly nutritious food and a lot of information out there on how to do it. Most children are natural born intuitive eaters. They eat as much as they need and are usually really good at tuning into their hunger/fullness cues. One of the best things you can do as a parent is model a healthy relationship with food, including sweets. Halloween is a good opportunity to explore your own beliefs and feelings about sugar. Are there any underlying fears that cause rigidity or rules around candy? Awareness can help you challenge your own beliefs about candy and better support your child as they explore their own preferences with sweets.

Children have an innate ability to self-regulate, sweets included. Part of helping your child learn to manage their sugar intake is by giving them unconditional permission to eat the foods you’re including in their meals and snacks without micromanaging. Ellyn Satter’s Division of Responsibility in Feeding recommends that for toddlers and adolescents, the parent is responsible for what, when, and where in eating; the child is responsible for how much and whether. This can look like offering dessert alongside your child’s meal and allowing them to eat it as they choose, even if they didn’t eat their veggies or choose to eat the dessert first.

It’s still important to give kids healthy boundaries and structure in eating. A supportive eating environment for kids involves a predictable structure or routine with food. This helps children build trust that food is safe and reliable. Halloween candy can be offered repeatedly alongside a meal or as part of a snack schedule. When your child has the Halloween candy served alongside familiar foods, it helps normalize the candy for them. You might even notice that sometimes they go straight for the candy, and other times they only take a bite. 

When parents use restriction to control a child’s eating habits, it interferes with a child’s self-regulation. During Halloween, when candy is around more often and more available, intentionally incorporating it more often into your child’s meal/snack patterns decreases their obsession or preoccupation with it.

It’s just food, and food is meant to be enjoyed.

Halloween candy may feel extra special, but it’s just another food to be enjoyed. It can still be a part of a healthy eating pattern for both you and your child. It’s normal to have times in our lives where we consume more sweets than usual, like around the holidays. With unconditional permission to eat, flexibility is possible. It’s normal and ok to enjoy sweets and desserts, like Halloween candy.  Diet rules and forbidden foods only set you up to feel guilty, and there’s no room for guilt or failure in intuitive eating. You have permission to enjoy Halloween candy this year and every year.