Starling Fitness: Daily writings on Fitness, Diet, and Health

Here are the easy and pat answers that you will find everywhere:

• Don’t buy it until the day of Halloween and give the rest of your bowl to the last kid.

• Buy Halloween candy that you don’t like.

• Don’t buy it period and give out small toys or Halloween pencils instead of treats. The kids don’t need the extra sugar anyway.

• Buy Halloween candy that is really low in calories so that if you DO binge, it won’t hurt you that much.

If you wanted easy and pat answers, you wouldn’t have cancelled your emails from Hungry Girl.

The truth of the matter is that you WANT to eat all that Halloween candy. If you didn’t, you wouldn’t be worried about bingeing on it. You need to answer the question, “Why do I want to eat all that Halloween candy?” It’s a hard question to answer and not one that I can answer for you, that’s why most advice sticks with the easy and pat answers.

I CAN talk about my past, though. There were times when I was trying to eat healthy and Halloween seemed like a big temptation to me. I remember when Mike bought a bunch of Halloween candy, but I thought that the kids HAD to have chocolate because that was the “good” candy, so I bought a bag of Twix bars “for the kids.”

If I had sat down with a piece of paper and got real with myself I might not have eaten that bag that was supposed to be just for the kids. I might have realized that I had been limiting my calories too strictly and didn’t allow for any of my favorite treats. Maybe I could have given myself one Twix bar at lunch every day for a week and that would have been enough to prevent me eating the entire bag over the span of a couple of days.

If I had sat down and seriously written down the answer to the question, “Why do I want to eat all that Halloween candy?” I might have been able to realize that I was limiting my calories too strictly. Or maybe I would have realized that candy represented protection to me. Or maybe I would have realized that I was a little scared of being thin.

I can’t look into your mind and even start to imagine all the things that could make you want to eat that candy, but I DO know that if you give yourself an hour of alone time and a never-ending supply of paper, you will eventually figure it out on your own, and that’s better than all the pat answers in the world.

See Losing Motivation for more information about writing yourself out of a binge.