Haunted by your Halloween Candy?

Regardless of whether your kids brought it home, or you have left-overs from shelling out, now that Halloween is over, are you panicking about having all that candy in the house? If so, here are some great suggestions to help you stay on track!

1. Go through the candy and pick out all the pieces that are not your favourites. Get rid of them immediately. That means throw them out, or get in the car and drop them off at collection places for food banks.

2. Now that you’ve narrowed down the stash to just your faves, put what you are keeping in the freezer. Better yet, put them in your neighbour’s freezer, they’ll be much harder to get at there!

3. Attach a picture of yourself at a weight you like to the freezer door. Look at this picture everytime you go for a candy. Remind yourself that the candy is not going to help you look like you look in the picture.

4. Everything in life has a cost, so wen you do decide to go ahead and have a candy, make yourself pay a fee. Make that fee either an extra workout, or add 30 minutes to your regular workout.

5. Go into your stash no more than once per day, or even less, like only 2-3 times per week. When you do choose to have any of your candy, really enjoy it. If you’re going to eat it, allow yourself to really enjoy it. Savour it, tasting every bite. This will allow you to get more out of the candy you’re eating, rather than eating more candy. You’ll find that you are way more satisfied with a lot less candy when you eat mindfully.

6. Watch how you speak to yourself as you are reaching for the candy. Are you thinking “I shouldn’t be doing this” or “I should just have an apple instead”? If so, remove the word “should” and instead use “I am choosing to….”. You always have a choice, remember that. So thinking “I am choosing to have the candy” is a better representation of what’s really going, and puts the power back into your hands.

7. If/When you do choose to have the candy, don’t feel guilty about having it. Even if you go completely overboard and eat way too much, you can’t go back and change what you did. And feeling guilty about it will cause an increase in cortisol in your body. Cortisol is a stress hormone, which contributes to the accumulation of abdominal fat and makes it very difficult to get rid of it.

Use these tips, and just watch as you find yourself eating less candy this year!

After all, you’re already sweet enough!

Tags: diet, fat, halloween, obese, overweight, weight loss

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 29th, 2009 at 11:19 pm and is filed under The Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.