I remember when I first attempted transitioning to a healthier way of eating. I experimented with all kinds of crazy things, but no matter what I tried it always felt like the candy aisle was out to get me. There were constantly new shiny candies tempting me to stray from the path and old familiar ones who offered me comfort on difficult days. No matter what mood I was in, the candy aisle was always calling to me, throwing me off balance, and sending me into a spiral of self-judgment and often self-sabotage.

For my fellow sugar lovers out there, you know how easy it is to map out the course of the year by the candies stocked in stores during each season. If I were to create a yearly calendar in the language of candy, October would be month #1. Halloween starts it all with a bang - a sacred ritual dedicated solely to the consumption of candy. Yeah, the costumes are fun and all, but these days plenty of kids come to my door dressed in their regular school attire and holding out their backpacks. They don’t even need to say “trick or treat” anymore. Just hold bag out and wait for the candy to drop in. And it’s not just for kids! Plenty mature adults tell me that there is no possible way they could avoid sugar during the month of October (no, let’s be honest: October through December!). Make no mistake, this holiday is about candy.

Halloween begins our candy calendar year, but that’s just the start of it all. After Halloween comes Christmas. “Wait, you skipped Thanksgiving” I hear you saying. Forget that silly quaint tradition! Thanksgiving with its turkey and pie and actual vegetables is way too wholesome for the candy calendar year. Just chuck something pumpkin-spice flavored at it, and bring out the marshmallow Santas!!!!

After Christmas is over we all think that we’ll be able to have a nice little break from candy and get back to those wholesome Thanksgiving ways of eating. But oh, did you forget about Valentines Day? Candy hearts and heart-shaped boxes of chocolates time! Okay, after Valentines Day we’ll… Oh wait, is it Easter season already?! Must have jelly beans and peanut butter eggs!!!

You see where I’m going here. For every time of year there is a beloved candy or treat. Before we know it, it’s Halloween again, and the cycle repeats itself until it seems like the normal way that life should be. Then we wonder why we have so much trouble making healthier choices.

Let me pause here to say that I don’t think candy is evil. I am not writing this to shame anyone for loving candy or consuming sugar. I personally still consume some sugar and candy, and when Halloween comes in a few days I might eat a few treats if I feel like it.

But here’s what has changed for me since those days when a mere walk down the candy aisle could send me into a spiral of anxiety and shame:

I trust myself and my body.

Let me explain what I mean by that.

Picture someone who you trust more than anyone else. Perhaps it’s a family member, perhaps a friend, perhaps your partner. Now think about why it is that you trust that person. How did that trust develop over time? When you go to that person with a dilemma, do they judge you harshly and say mean things to you? Or do they listen with an open heart, making sure they understand you, and letting you know that you are not alone? When you ask them for feedback, are they honest with you? Or do they tell you stories that play on your fears about yourself?

When I lived my life according to the candy calendar year, any and all healthy choices felt like an uphill battle because I was trapped in a cycle of self-mistrust. I could stay away from the sweet stuff for a little while, but walking through the candy aisle was like an experience in torture, the torture of self-deprivation. Eventually the allure of the candy would be so strong that I would give in. I told myself that by giving into the gravitational pull of the candy, I was doing the kind thing. But it actually wasn’t the kind thing because it required ignoring the many signals my body was giving me that candy wasn’t helping me. I couldn’t trust myself because I wasn’t being honest with myself.

Pretty much all nutritional theories and systems will tell you some pretty scary stories about candy and sugar. But I found that turning candy into the bad-guy did absolutely nothing to lessen candy’s appeal. In fact, it only strengthened it! Then when I inevitably gave in to the allure of that forbidden, delicious candy, I would beat myself up relentlessly. In those moments too, I behaved not as a trusted friend to myself but instead as a judgmental bully. “Why did you do that? You total failure. You always repeat the same mistake over and over again. I guess you’ll just never change.” I don’t have to tell you how NOT helpful those kinds of statements were, and yet I know I’m not the only one who has fallen into a pattern of self-bullying when it comes to food!

Building up trust in myself and my body to make wiser choices with candy didn’t happen overnight. It involved a lot of small, gradual changes that over time added up to overall healthier eating habits and a healthier relationship with food. It wasn’t easy. I needed support, both from professionals and from loved ones. I needed to learn to be gentler with myself and bring my attention & awareness back home to my body.

Now, when I walk through the candy aisle, it’s not the gravitational appeal of the candy or my beliefs about the candy that are determining my decisions. I don’t actively view anything as “bad” or “off limits.” Instead I’m much more in touch with my own inner needs and desires. I know how to say no to the candy if that feels like the right decision for me, and I know how to say yes in a way that doesn’t send me into a spiral of judgment and self-sabotage. No matter what holiday is coming up, no matter how yummy and enticing the candy looks, I’m still tuning into my own body and its needs and trusting myself to make the choice that is best for me in that moment.

How did I get from my past tortured state to where I am now? How did I build enough trust in myself that I can walk down the candy aisle without fear? I’ve been thinking about it, and here are a few things that I believe helped me along the way:

#1 I learned to cook, and I practiced regular home-cooking.

My friends in college used to make fun of my complete lack of cooking skills. I literally had to ask a friend how to boil water. The fact that I now know how to cook my way through each week is proof enough that change is possible!

When I didn’t know how to cook I was entrusting my health and body to packaged and processed foods, rather than to my own skill and wisdom in preparing food. I was stuck wading through the confusing labels on packaging and eating foods that are engineered to be convenient, highly palatable, and shelf-stable (and keep people coming back for more and more) rather than healthful. Learning to cook took a long time - a lot of watching Rachel Ray and Barefoot Contessa on Foodnetwork (a great way to learn I might add), a lot of practice, and a lot of trial and error!

Now that I know how to cook I trust that when I invest in wholesome foods at the market or grocery, I will be able to cook those foods for myself without wasting them (at least most of the time).

#2 I learned about seasonal produce

When my year revolved around which candy was “in season,” it gave candy a huge amount of control over how I saw the year and how I made decisions about food throughout the year. While candy companies are very good at making it seem like you have tons of new and different and exciting candy options and choices throughout the year (and that you’ll be depriving yourself if you don’t indulge right NOW!!), I’ve actually learned that the opposite is true. When our food choices revolve around candy and sweets, we actually narrow our options and our tastes, to the exclusion of a whole abundance of food choices that exist in the world outside of the candy aisle.

Foods do change seasonally, not as determined by manufacturers but as determined by nature. Now that I have regularly taken notice of what is in season at different times of the year, I can honestly say I’m actually excited when the parsnips come back in season again. Back in my candy days I didn’t even know what a parsnip was, let alone that it is my favorite vegetable. How much I was missing by keeping myself stuck orbiting around the candy aisle!

#3 I changed my tastes

This is a hard one, but if you’ve ever tried to go without sugar for an extended period of time (minimum of 3 weeks) you’ve probably noticed that the taste of food actually changed. If you’ve gone without sugar even longer (say a month-a year) you might have noticed that when you tried candy again it was unbearably sweet and you didn’t even like it anymore. Strange how that happens! And yet… not so strange.

Our taste buds can and do change, and interestingly our taste buds acclimate to what we feed them on a regular basis. Oddly this seems to indicate that our personal taste preferences are less determined by us and more by what we choose to feed ourselves, though that’s a hard truth to swallow (literally) if you dearly love sugar.

Food companies have for a long time been capitalizing on this. This isn’t some conspiracy theory. This has been openly studied, spoken about, and written about. Expanding on the topic is beyond the scope of this blog post, but if you’re interested in learning more about this, I highly recommend Michael Moss’s book Salt, Sugar, Fat. It’s frustrating and discouraging that food companies have engineered their food to essentially hack our taste buds. But this means the answer does not lie in the next “low fat” “low sugar” “free of this or that” food but rather in re-acclimating our taste buds to the foods that have always been food, the foods directly sourced from nature. Changing our tastes simply means eating more and more of these foods and less of the sugary processed stuff.

#4 I focused on what I could eat, rather than what I couldn’t

Deprivation does not feel good. While some of us thrive when we have clear rules around food, others of us find those rules restricting and maddening. When you love ALL foods as intensely as I do, putting anything off limits is a pretty major challenge, even if it’s a challenge that needs to be done for the sake of your health. Focusing on what I could eat rather than what I couldn’t required both action and a substantial mental shift.

Over time, focusing on including more healthful foods in my life helped me discover more foods that I loved or had simply forgotten about because candy had such a strong hold on me. For us sweet lovers this can be an opportunity to actively seek out the naturally sweet tasting foods, like fruits and sweet starchy vegetables (sweet potatoes, root veggies, winter squashes, and parsnips! my fave!) that satisfy us. I’ve learned that when I’m including more naturally sweet foods in my life, the pull of candy lessens, and I’m more able to appreciate the wide variety of sweet tastes that actually exist in nature.

Making this small mental shift also helped me move away from viewing healthier eating habits as a kind of punishment for sinfulness and instead as a food adventure. Reducing my candy consumption opened me up to new possibilities and enabled me to discover foods and tastes that I otherwise would not have experienced, with my food habits so crowded with candy and treats.

#5 I tuned into my body’s signals

This might be the most important step of all. Long before I started trying to eat and live more healthfully, my body was giving me some signals that candy wasn’t helping me. I became very skilled at not only ignoring my body’s signals of distress but also ignoring its basic signals of hunger, fullness, fatigue, overwhelm, and the list could go on forever. In short I viewed my body as a mysterious machine that “should” just keep on running no matter what I did to it. (I still have a slight tendency to do this by the way). Then I became frustrated and mistrustful with my body when it resisted me.

Too many of the nutritional frameworks I experimented with actually amplified these fears and suspicions of my body and further disconnected me from my body’s signals. There is some wisdom in all nutritional theories, but I’ve found that incorporating these theories into my life only helps when those theories also encourage me to connect with my body’s inner wisdom and approach my body with a sense of curiosity rather than judgment.

To reconnect with my body’s signals I had to slow way way down with food. I needed to actually feel what hunger and fullness felt like, and I had to be willing to eat when I felt that sense of hunger and stop eating when I felt the sense of fullness. I learned to recognize signs that I hadn’t eaten enough or had enough water to drink, and I gradually made connections between my symptoms and various foods that I was eating. Again, most importantly, I learned to approach my body and its signals with a sense of curiosity rather than fear.

Over time, the practice of listening to my body and treating it with kindness rather than punishment and self-judgment gave me a sense of deeper trust in my body and myself. When I walk down the candy aisle now I’m not fearful of the signals my body might give me. I know how to listen. I know how to act as that trusted friend to my body. I know how to be honest with my body and say “You know what, you actually don’t need that peanut butter cup right now, you’re actually just hungry.” I also know how to say, “sure, body, you can have some candy today. I’ll be here with you to make sure you enjoy every single bite.”

None of this is to say that I’m now “perfect” and “fixed.” I certainly have days when I come home from the store and realize I bought much more (organic) candy than I really need or even want. And I have days when I check out, lose connection with my body, and realize that I’ve zoned out and overeaten something that I didn’t really need or even want. Sugar still has a strong pull for me, and I still love it when I eat it. But the level of trust I’ve built with myself has brought me to a sense of peace with sugar and with myself. I’ve escaped the spiral of fear and judgement and arrived instead to a place of trust and kindness. I’m very glad to be in this place.

What about you, friend?
How does this resonate or not resonate with you?
Do you find yourself cowering in fear when you walk down the candy aisle?
Do you feel a sense of anxiety when the holidays start approaching?
What’s one small step you can take today to regain your self-trust with candy?
Maybe it’s not something I’ve listed here. What works for you might be totally different than the 5 steps I’ve listed that helped me. This path is not set in stone. When I work with clients I try to help them find their own path. I know that you can find yours.

Whatever you find works for you, I’d love to know about it! Share it with me in the comments or send me an email at lisa@lisabarksdale.com