Don't Let The Candy Katrina Drown Your Diet!

What do you do to keep the Candy Katrina from drowning your diet! More importantly, don't let it become a problem for the health of your children. 


Ration the spoils: Limit the number of homes or flats your children visit while trick or treating to cut down on the amount of sweets they get.


Prioritise the loot: After your child goes trick or treating, go through his or her bag of sweets together. Get rid of all the sweets your child doesn't like, then divide the rest into three piles: foods that will spoil in a few days (fruit, etc.); sugary sweets and chocolate; and a miscellaneous pile for chewing gum, money, etc. Let your child eat the treats that will spoil first, as those are likely to be healthiest, and save the others for later.

Alternatives To Candy

Here are some healthy alternatives to giving out bite-sized diabetes nuggets.

Just to reiterate, you even let them go out, make sure your kids eat something so they won’t graze through their candy (too much!) before they get back home.

To think outside the candy bag, you might offer:

Cheese sticks

Juice box packages

Small packages of nuts or raisins

Peanuts in the shell, or put into a baggie

Popcorn

Peanut butter crackers

Sliced apples, bananas, and not-too-sweet cookies.

 

You can also substitute candy with non-food treats such as:

      Plastic rings

      Pencils

      Stickers

      Lose change

      Balloons

      Crayons

      Colored chalk

      Erasers

      Whistles

      Baseball cards

      Rubber toys

Bathing in Sugar

We, like our kids, bathe in sugar.

It’s in the drinks we drink, the snacks we eat, and the desserts we consume afterwards. It’s even in foods not normally associated with sugar (sliced breads, hot dogs, ketchup).

The role of sugar in health is only recently being understood, and now we’ve discovered that the sugars in low fat food products can lead to weight problems, and even the insulin instabilities that become diabetes.

And the worst time of all, in respect to sugar consumption, is the “sweetened storm surge” that happens at Halloween.

Many people may take issue with my apparent assault on sugar. True, sugar is not unhealthy per se. True, it really can be incorporated into a healthy diet – just like bacon, wine, chocolate, or any other real food. And the sugar industry position downplays Halloween's sugar bolus, calling it the happy exception to the rule – sweets as a treat, nothing more.

That might be true if we were not inundated by sugar every day, making Halloween a punctuation mark on the end of a long candy road.

But what can you do? We live in this culture. Kids come to your house expecting neon syrup wads, and our kids go to houses that produce handfuls of orange candy corn (what IS that, anyway?), fireballs, gummy things, and the Barney-purple sugar in a straw called Pixie Stix.

With so much candy afoot, we run into a common cultural dilemma. “Everyone else is doing it.” Although you cannot change the world, you can change your self. One good starting spot is to buy treats for your house, and for the passing kids, other than a bag of candy. 

Preparation For Success At Halloween

Feed them first: Make sure your kids eat a nutritious dinner before trick or treating so they won't be ravenous while they’re out and when they get home. This will help naturally limit how many sweets they eat. If they’re really excited about the night’s festivities, they may not be in the mood to sit down for a super nutritious meal like fish and broccoli, so think about treating them to one of their favourites instead.

Set guidelines: Decide before trick or treating how many goodies your kids will eat that evening and each day after. Try to make sure your kids consume no more than two sweets or chocolates a day, and check that they are eaten with meals to reduce the risk of tooth decay. Eating sweets with meals will also help regulate your children’s blood sugar, therefore limiting the ‘buzz’ associated with the typical sugar high. Also, if your kids are full after a meal they’ll want fewer sweets than if they are hungry.

Set a precedent: If you know children will be coming around to your house, consider giving them a combination of sweets, dried fruits or nuts. 

Welcome to the Not One Ounce Program

Welcome to the Not One Ounce Program! We will work with you from November to New Years ... from the Halloween flood of candy through Thanksgiving, the stresses of the holiday season, and right up through the end of the year. 

Dr Clower, At Home

The point of this program is to give you the practical tools you need to make it through this difficult dietary time without gaining weight -- in fact, most of our participants actually lose weight!