How to Make it Through the Candiest of Holidays

Pearl One

Before I had kids, I thought I was one slick-chick for managing to avoid Halloween candy entirely. I was all, “pshaw, what’s the big deal?”

Then I had kids.

I don’t have little guys anymore, but I have a dedicated scarfer under my roof who hauls home heavy boxes of full-size candy bars from Costco.

Every. Year.

He wasn’t raised with a ton of money and he remembers a time when he was trick-or-treating and someone passed out full-size candy bars. The kindness made a huge impression on him and he determined that one day he’d pass out full-size candy bars too.

My hope is that he’ll give them all out to the neighborhood kids, but he buys so much that we usually have leftovers. So to this day — 18 years into preservation — I ask him to hide the candy from me.

Here’s more of how I preserve my weight loss while living with a man who still eats like a kid:

• I’ve learned that hunger + grocery shopping equals a very scary scenario. If you haven’t yet developed the habit of always having your cold-tote with you, now is the time. Put an ice block into your cold-tote and add a yogurt, baggie of red grapes, petite carrots, sliced apple and so forth. Your brain needs to see you in action like packing a cold-tote with healthy snacks. Our brain is always watching what we do. We want our brain to see us spit a cookie into the trash that doesn’t taste that great. When our brain sees us spit out a cookie we’re telling our brain: I’m insanely serious about losing.
• Your cold-tote will save you calories and money otherwise spent on fast-food.
• When you shop stay entirely out of the candy/seasonal aisles. Don’t tempt yourself by even looking in that direction (that’s how the store gets us). And you’re already habituated to staying out of Costco’s bakery and candy aisles, right?
• If you love handing candy out on the evening of Halloween, buy it as late in the month as possible and only buy candy that you don’t much like. For example, I can hand out gum drops or any kind of sticky candy that I worry will hurt my dental work.
• What if you love all candy? What if you want to stop reading and eat candy right now? Wanting treats is merely a sign of hunger. You’re hungry. If you need something quick, have an apple or a small bowl of cereal. If you haven’t yet tried this tip, try it. It seems too simple to work. And yet it totally works.
• If you love the holiday itself, invest in other fun ways to have Halloween in your life, like putting a beautiful fall wreath on your front door. Or dressing in a costume to hand out candy. (One of my sons wears his dad’s old Darth Vader costume to answer the door. It’s hilarious!)

The most important thing: Halloween occurs on just one day of the year. Don’t stretch the holiday into weeks of eating candy. If you need a costume for this coming Halloween, go with Wonder Woman. Not only do you deserve it, but it’ll be a really fun memory for the coming years. We’ve so got this! ♥

Pearl Two

Listening to a podcast the other day, one of the featured guys said, “I used to be “coach-dad” guy,’ (he coached his kids’ teams) but now that the kids are grown I’ve decided that I’ll be “very round, but super friendly guy.”

He’s talking about identity and how we see ourselves. James Clear in Atomic Habits addresses this very thing when he writes:

“Once you’ve adopted an identity, it can be easy to let your allegiance to it impact your ability to change. Many people walk through life in a cognitive slumber, blindly following the norms attached to their identity” like:

• I just can’t get up early in the morning.
• I’m very impulsive (and rarely stop to think things through).
• I overeat. It’s just who I am and what I do.

Clear’s point is that we were saddled with labels by other or our even our own selves. These labels are stories that we tell our brain like “I’m bad at math” and if we hear the story long enough the negative thought becomes a part of who we are with ourselves and the world.

What we tell ourselves on the regular day-in and day-out veither erodes our sense of self-worth or it supports who we are as a person reaching for a higher level of living.

If I’m over 50 and I tell myself two or three times a day, “Women can’t lose weight after menopause. We get a little menopause-tummy, and everything goes downhill from there. My mom, my grandma, and my great-grandmother all ballooned after age 50. It’s just a fact of life.”

In your journal write about the regular thoughts that plague you. Deconstruct the story and see what it would be like to try on a new label. So instead of,“I’m a miserable failure at keeping my weight off” try practicing, “I’m human and am getting the gist of habits first, the scale will follow.” ♥

Pearl Three

Sequencing is taken directly from Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). The purpose of sequences is to help us move from reacting to circumstances to responding. I encourage you to do a sequence a day in your journal. Powerful stuff.

Default Sequence

• Situation (something concrete): I stopped working out.
• Thought: I’ve always hated exercise.
• Feeling: Irritated.
• Action: I overeat.
• Result: Back into the same old cycle.

New Sequence

• Situation (something concrete): I stopped working out.
• Chosen thought: I’ve stopped for two weeks. I’m just getting back on the bike as if the two-week blip didn’t impact anything. Second thought: just do the bare minimum.
• Feeling: Wary, wondering if just picking up where I left off will actually work.
• Action: I ride my indoor recumbent at levels six and seven for 40 minutes. I also do two planks and stretching.
• Result: I’ve been successfully riding my indoor recumbent six days out of seven for 16 weeks now! When I ride the bike I distract myself by scrolling Instagram. Very pleased with how life is coming along in the work out department. “Doing the bare minimum” really helped me to get back on the bike and then to raise the “bare minimum.”

The key piece that changed my entire trajectory was choosing my new thought: Get back on the bike. Let it go that you haven’t rode in two weeks. Just get back on the bike and do the bare minimum and you’ll flourish from there.

This is exactly how I feel about weight loss: just get back to it, no matter if you’ve overeaten for a month, just get back on the path. ♥

Pearl Four

Do you want to hear the most astounding story that happened in 1971? I was seven at the time, but hadn’t heard about the story likely because my parents didn’t want me to refuse to ever board a plane again. But decades later I can’t believe I’ve never heard Juliane’s story. The book is When I Fell From the Sky by Juliane Koepcke.

Juliane’s story of survival is astounding. You’ve got to read it. ♥

Pearl Five

Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off your goal.” ♥

Henry Ford

♥, Wendy

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