Whether or not your eating habits are the greatest, you want your children’s habits to be better. But considering that sweets are tied to celebrating almost every holiday throughout the year, from Easter chocolates to Thanksgiving desserts, it can get tough to maintain healthy eating habits for kids.
Oh yeah, and then there’s Halloween. That one day a year when we send our children out to get free candy from just about every house in the neighbourhood. There’s probably nothing worse for reinforcing healthy eating habits.
How to Use Halloween to Promote Healthy Eating
But, if you take the “turn the challenge into opportunity” approach to Halloween candy, you can actually transform it into a way to teach and develop healthy eating habits. Here are just a few of those habits.
- Mindful Eating – By encouraging kids to think about how much candy they should eat, from the minute that any talk of Halloween pops up, you introduce the idea of mindful eating. In fact, all of these points encourage mindfulness. And the biggest benefit of that is it reduces mindless eating.
- Avoid Overeating – If you ban Halloween candy altogether, you may just cause a revolt of epic proportions. Instead, talk to your children about the perils of binge eating and find a compromise. Perhaps limit Halloween-night consumption to just one piece of each of the different types of candy in their bag. Anything to avoid an all-out assault on sweets and get your child to eat more healthily with a wider variety of foods.
- Be a Good Role Model – If your children see you practicing what you preach, they will be more inclined to follow your lead and even set examples for each other.
After all that, it’s still not necessarily easy to control your kids’ candy consumption on Halloween. If the thought and the effort stresses you out, Herbal One’s Ultra B-Trim 100 can help.
If you enjoyed this post, check out our recent article about how to break a weight loss plateau.