“Cheat Foods” on Holidays
Halloween has always been one of my favorite days of the year. I love seeing the costumes everyone comes up with and I am always a fan of receiving free food.
As a kid, I got so excited about being able to pack a few candies in my lunchbox the weeks following trick or treating.
In middle and high school, I only allowed myself to eat the Halloween candy I received for a few days. When it was a week after Halloween, I needed to somehow get rid of the rest since it was “bad” to keep around.
This is when I started categorizing foods as “good” or “bad”. And this is also when my eating disorder began to develop.
I believed I needed the “willpower” to fight off these cravings. And when I did “indulge”, I had to limit how much of these “bad” foods I consumed.
But the thing with restricting, both physically and mentally, is that it’s usually followed by binging behaviors.
And when you do get to the point where you binge, you get super angry with yourself and feel guilty and shameful and disgusted and embarrassed.
And then you start up the entire cycle all over again, adopting an even more acute and harsh mentality and promising you’ll “do better this time”, only for the binging habits to eventually return.
It’s actually a really f*cked and twisted mindset that diet culture has convinced us is normal to believe, even if it makes us miserable.
So this year when my professors have been giving out leftover Halloween candies in class, I audaciously said yes and enjoyed my kitkats and m&ms when I wanted them without any guilt or shame attached.
You deserve to have a gentle, uncomplicated, and intuitive relationship with food. One where you honor your cravings and say yes to fear foods, because there’s so much more to life than making your every thought and action about food and your body. And one where you’re allowed to eat and enjoy Halloween candy even when it’s not Halloween anymore!
x Emma