December can be a hard time for people. There’s the stress of the holiday season. The cumulative exhaustion of the year weighing down on you. Retail fatigue getting everyone down. Personally, even while continuing to eat intuitively and getting some exercise, I find it hard to feel healthy during this time of year because this is the “end” of the year and I kind of just feel done.

So I understand that need to want to hit the reboot button at the beginning of the new year. To strive to feel better, eat better, be fitter. Maybe even liking ourselves better. And frankly, there’s nothing wrong with that desire.

And you’re not on a diet now. Of course you’re not; it’s December, it’s the holiday season, there’s yummy food everywhere, you’re enjoying it, it’s the end of the year and not the time to start something new, etc. etc. etc.

But over the year, some unfruitful seeds have been planted. An ad mentioned getting a “beach body.” A workplace had a “Biggest Loser” contest and someone won $500 for losing the most weight. Oprah made a shitload of money from investing in Weight Watchers, and also, she lost a few pounds.

So while most people probably aren’t thinking about starting a diet for weight loss right now…they are planning it for January. In their heads, they are already starting the diet now.

The diet industry counts on this. They are laying low right now, saving their pennies for the weight loss ads that will pour forth from our TVs, radios, streaming services, and social media platforms come the new year. They will make a lot of money by selling a product that doesn’t work and then blaming the buyer for its lack of success. Even though the probability of 95% of people being to blame for a product not working has to be somewhere around zero. They make $60 billion a year and they barely even bother to advertise in December!

There are a million ways to improve your health and none of them have to involve intentional weight loss diets that don’t work in the long term. In fact, probably the unhealthiest thing anyone can do is try to diet for weight loss, because the most reliable long-term outcome of dieting for weight loss is weight re-gain. Is this really what you want? I didn’t think so.

Those things you can do if pursuing better health is your goal for the new year? Here are a few suggestions: You can eat nourishing foods; you can aim for more fruits and vegetables in your diet; you can learn to savor the foods you eat; you can learn to expand your palette to accept new foods. You can heal your relationship to food and your body if it needs healing. You can move more, maybe learn to love physical activity for the first time. You can discover that exercise isn’t just in a gym, sometimes it’s dancing in your living room or walking down the street or cleaning your home. You can broaden your network of social support. You can give yourself a break when you need it. You can realize that you’re already great, just as you are, without having to change your shape and size.

The diet doesn’t have to begin now, or ever. You can do all those healthy things without handing over one cent to the diet industry, who won’t give you a refund if they fail to help you achieve your goal in becoming thin forever. Don’t let those diet seeds leave you with unsavory fruit. Grow something real for yourself instead.

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In Episode 3, Aaron and I talk about the relationship between Oprah (no last name needed) and Weight Watchers. Is Oprah just in it for the money? Is she really going to diet yet again after so many failed attempts at weight loss? Is dieting, with its well-known failure rate, compatible with self-actualization, something Oprah has championed throughout the years? Listen to what we have to say on these questions and more!

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Hey everybody! ‘Tis the season for people to start thinking about their upcoming January diets, so I thought I’d re-post this diet story for your reading pleasure (or horror, you pick). Here’s to a new year of not dieting!

It starts out with a simple declaration: “I really need to eat better. And I could shed a few pounds. It’s for my health.” So you join a weight loss group. You don’t really think of it as a diet because diets don’t work, everybody knows this. You’re just going to eat healthier and lose weight.

You measure and weigh out portions with the fancy food scale you bought and the measuring spoons that tell you exactly what one portion of everything is. At first this is easy and kind of fun, like a game. You’re a little bit hungry, but it tells you that your new diet eating plan is working, or at least that’s what someone in your weight loss group told you. You do frequently think about cookies and cupcakes, a lot more than you used to, but you’re not going to have any because this is for your health. Also, they don’t fit into your eating plan.

You love walking, so that becomes your main source of exercise. You walk almost every day and you love it.

You lose a few pounds pretty quickly and you think that all the weighing and measuring and avoiding of butter was worth it. People constantly tell you how great you look now that you’ve lost weight. That feels pretty good! Luckily, you barely hear the insult in the compliment.

After a few weeks, you have your first trip out to a restaurant with friends. You’ve been avoiding this for a while but you miss your friends and eating out. You scan the menu for something you can eat without breaking your diet new way of eating, but there is nothing. You heard about how restaurants will prepare food to your specifications if you ask. “Can I have a plain, skinless grilled chicken breast and steamed vegetables without any butter or oil?” The meal arrives and you are elated at how easy it was to ask and get what you wanted requested. Then you eye your friends’ meals and your mouth starts to water a little bit. However, you are also proud of how good you are being, and you revel in a mild sense of moral superiority at your eating austerity. You don’t even have a bite of the dessert your friends split. It looks delicious.

Soon you have lost several pounds. Somewhere along the way you decide on a number. What you have lost is great but you have not yet reached the number. You have reliably lost a little bit each week with your diet sensible eating that you think getting to the number will be easy. But then a funny thing happens. The number on the scale stops going down. For weeks. “You’re just on a plateau,” says the kindly weight loss counselor. “It happens to everyone. Just keep at it.”

Clearly things must change. You cut your portions down a bit more. Walking for exercise, you decide, is just not cutting it, so you join a gym and start moving very fast on cardio machines. You don’t like being inside instead of outside and you dread the sweaty, exhaustive pace, but hey, this is for your health.

A few weeks after you’ve made these restrictions changes, the scale breaks free and drops a pound. “Congratulations!” the lady says as she takes your weekly payment.

Even more diet changes: you switch to a very high fiber cereal that tastes like gravel and gives you painful gas cramps every afternoon. You eat massive quantities of low fat microwave popcorn (the kind you heard gives people who produce it “popcorn lung”) throughout the day to keep the now-constant gnawing hunger at bay. You make large quantities of steamed vegetables and low-fat, low-carb vegetable soup that you don’t want to eat after it’s made – but you do. Even with all those vegetables to fill you up, you are still hungry before you go to bed. You suck on a sugar free candy to fool the pangs away.

You lose a few more pounds but the scale stalls again. You have stopped eating out altogether – you can’t stand looking at others’ meals, can’t deal with the wonderful aromas of the foods you are afraid to eat. You’ve bought new clothes for your slimmer body but have nowhere to wear them because social outings usually involve food or drink, and right now you can’t have too much of either of those. It’s just not worth messing up all that work you’ve done on your weight health.

One day, you get tired of eating the same 10 safe foods and go out with friends. “What the hell!” you think, and order steak and mashed potatoes and sautéed vegetables. You think you deserve this because you’ve been good, but the fact is that you cannot stop yourself from eating the entire plate, well past your point of fullness. Even though your stomach hurts, you order dessert and eat it all yourself. You are not sure what came over you to make you eat that much.

You feel ashamed of your binge and determine to get back on the wagon. You do at first, but that meal opened the flood gates. You think of food 24 hours a day. You simultaneously lust for and fear your next meal. You double down on your exercise and diet (yes, yes, it’s a diet, you know it and can no longer deny this to yourself), but the number on the scale starts to move up a little anyway.

You hate everything you are doing to maintain this weight loss. You hate the gym and feeling like you have to go. You are so bored of your monotonous diet and also the lack of taste, and you are so so hungry. You dream of cheesecake one night and wake up in despair. You are not sure this is for your health anymore.

You keep gaining weight, even though you never really stopped dieting and exercising. So you start eating everything and anything you want. You know this is worse than how you ate before you dieted but you need to fill yourself, fill up the hollow feeling. You quit exercising, including walking, you haven’t done that in forever anyway and all the joy has gone out of it for you. Nobody compliments you on your weight gain.

When all is said and done, you have gained back all your weight plus a few more pounds. You don’t know that this is your body’s way of saving your life from another famine like the one it thinks you just went through. You also don’t know, yet, that you will go through this many more times, trying a different diet (Zone, Atkins, South Beach, Paleo, Volumetrics, Jenny Craig, Nutrisystem) each time, all with the same results. And in the end you’ll have gained an extra 40 (or 50, or 60, or 100) pounds and you will think it is all your fault.

Someday you will find out that there is another way. It’s a way to learn how to be healthy but without worrying about your weight. A way to live without fighting your body. You will find that revolutionary. Will you choose it?

*This is a composite of many different diet experiences…including mine.

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In one of the most colossal failures to interpret Intuitive Eating to the masses, Gretchen Reynolds reported in The New York Times magazine on this study which concluded that intuitive eating was not any better than calorie restriction for shedding pounds.

Are you effing kidding me?! There really is nothing that will put me in a rage more than someone trying to take one of the few, weight-loss-mentality free, diet-free philosophies on earth and trying to turn it into a weight loss diet.

In case you don’t want to read the article or the study – though if you do, please come back here for a complete breakdown of how this is just so wrong from top to bottom – I’ll sum it up here. Researchers took 16 men and women and put half on a diet, and gave the other half “instructions” in intuitive eating and after 6 weeks the dieters lost around 5 pounds and the intuitive eaters, while initially losing weight, did not show nearly as much weight loss as the calorie restriction group. Neither the article nor the abstract mention average weight change for the IE group, but I suspect it was insignificant and I’ll explain why just as soon as I finish banging my head against the wall over here.

There are three huge problems that I can see with this study. The first is the fact that intuitive eating was not designed with the intention to produce weight loss. Straight from IntuitiveEating.org, it is “an approach that teaches you how to create a healthy relationship with your food, mind, and body.” Nowhere on the website is weight loss promised. It’s simply not about that – it’s about becoming a no-drama eater, unlike how most people eat while on diets (total drama). In the process, a person’s weight may stabilize as a result of eating according to inner hunger/fullness cues, but that doesn’t necessarily mean weight loss, and in some cases it might even mean some weight gain if a person has been maintaining below their natural set point. And yes, some people may lose weight, although this is not a scientifically proven outcome. Which is why the end point of intuitive eating is a relaxed, healthy relationship to food and eating – not weight loss.

So comparing intuitive eating to dieting to produce weight loss is like comparing apples and…watermelons, it’s just that different. Other than being about eating, they are not at all the same thing. But that didn’t stop the study authors from making the comparison.

The second big problem is how intuitive eating was executed (with all the accurate imagery that word evokes) in this study. All participants, including the intuitive eaters, were all weighed.  So while one of the principles of intuitive eating is not “throw out your scale,” rejecting the diet mentality is the first principle, and weighing is an integral part of weight loss dieting. Many intuitive eating practitioners I know won’t weight their clients because it is counterproductive to becoming reacquainted with their internal eating regulation. Why? Because stepping on the scale may trigger the expectation of weight loss, and that expectation, whether met or not, can mess with developing true body trust. It becomes about reliance on external outcomes, not internal cues.

But these study participants were indeed weighed. How effective, then, do you think their practice of intuitive eating during the study was? Do you think they were truly able to trust their internal signals of hunger and fullness when they stepped on a scale and were reminded of the expectations around weight change? I doubt it. I call that a big study flaw.

And the third problem is this: the participants were instructed in intuitive eating at the beginning of the study and then at the midpoint. The study was a randomized controlled trial so I’m going to assume most of the participants were new to this non-diet philosophy. Were they dieters before? Had they ever tried to lose weight? Were they chronic over- or under-eaters? Because here’s the deal: just getting some basic instruction in intuitive eating once or twice, especially if someone has been a chronic dieter, does not necessarily an intuitive eater make. For many of us, the journey from anguished eater to intuitive eater is a process – sometimes long, sometimes complicated. It can take weeks, months or years. In my personal experience, the first few weeks of non-diet eating does not feel intuitive at all. As Carly from the blog Snack Therapy writes, intuitive eating initially

“…involves a whole lot of thinking about food.   And this is true… at first.  It’s kind of like when you break up with a partner; you have bitch and moan to your friends/therapist/mom/other therapist/person handing out free samples at Whole Foods/cat in order to get over him or her and forget about your dysfunctional relationship.  It’s the same thing with food.  You have to analyze why you’re eating what, and when, and why, and how, and with whom.  You think about how you feel after certain meals.  You might spend a lot of time dreaming about what you’re going to eat tomorrow, because you’re finally allowing yourself to eat good food.  So it’s true: if you decide to start eating intuitively, it probably won’t be very intuitive at the beginning.  It’ll be a lot of checking in with yourself: (‘Carly, why did you eat that bowl of ice cream?  Was it because you were hungry?  Was it because you needed comfort? Was it because you saw a commercial for some and you had a craving?  Was it because the moon is in the 7th house?  Was it because you read that article about how some people develop lactose intolerance later in life, and so you should probably eat the ice cream now just in case you wake up tomorrow with a crippling dairy allergy?’).  It’ll be a lot of thinking.  A whole lot of thinking.”

Do you think the participants of this study, in the first 6 weeks after their introduction to IE, were really accomplished intuitive eaters? Maybe, and also maybe not. Not that it matters much to the bottom line of weight loss – because again, that’s not what we’re expecting here in the real world. But if you’re gonna call it intuitive eating, you maybe want to start with a bit more than two quickie info sessions.

So…argh.

This is irresponsible science. It’s also irresponsible reporting. The investigation in this article was pretty damn piss-poor. All Ms. Reynolds had to do was toodle on over to IntuitiveEating.org – which she referenced in her article – to see that nowhere on the website is there a promise for weight loss. Where you can see that it doesn’t even mention weight loss as an outcome. That it is obvious it isn’t another fad diet craze that is to be used as a substitute for dieting in order to get your dream body. Nope nope and nope.

While intuitive eating might not produce weight loss it can give us so much more: peace of mind, a healthy relationship to food and eating and our bodies, a weight that is right and sustainable for each one of us. Putting it in the same category as weight loss dieting? Epic fail.

Podcast!

Have you checked out the Dietitian’s Unplugged Podcast yet? No? Check out Episodes 1 and 2 here:

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As a dietitian who believes in non-diet, non-weight focused nutrition, I often find myself explaining my position on intentional weight loss to casual acquaintances who always want to talk to me about weight loss. It usually starts out with someone else bringing up the topic after they have discovered I am a dietitian (there is a reason I don’t volunteer this information easily). They say something like, “Well of course diets don’t work. Permanent lifestyle changes are what lead to lasting weight loss,” or, “Eating less doesn’t work, you have to do interval training in order to lose weight and keep it off,” or, “The only way to maintain long lasting weight loss is to do resistance training.” As though fat people have never tried any of these things ever, and if they just would, they’d have their fatness cured, stat.  *Eye roll*

To which I have to answer: “Actually, no one has figured out a way to create long-term weight loss for more than a tiny fraction of people…and neither have you.” (In reality, I try to be nice about this. But for the purposes of this blog, I get to have a Snark-o-rama, ʼkay?) And then I clarify that I’m talking about basically all the weight loss science that exists out there and how it pretty much shows that long-term weight loss is pretty much a unicorn (as in, it doesn’t exist) for all but a few people. And then, of course, perhaps because I’m a dietitian and why trust someone with an actual degree in nutrition*, or perhaps because I’m a chubby woman who’s clearly just given up on herself*, they don’t believe me.

My favorite person (okay, not really) to argue with on this subject insists that the key to weight loss (even long-term!) is interval training weight weights (despite complete lack of evidence) . When I say that I lift weights and I’m still fat, the answer is invariably, “Well, you’re just not doing it enough.” When I ask how much and how often I should lift weights, the answer is, “More than you’re doing now.” Which is asinine, because he doesn’t know jack about what I’m doing now. When I say that I lifted weights very regularly when I was much thinner and dieting and that I couldn’t build any muscle to save my life AND my weight eventually returned even as I adhered to my regimen, he says it was because I was dieting. When I say I stopped dieting, still lifted weights and gained a lot of weight, it is because I’m not lifting enough. Basically, I’m a fatty who can’t win. Oh, and it’s all my fault.

This seems to be the prevailing attitude among people who all profess to have THE answer to the weight loss “problem.” What it really boils down to is, “Do this thing you might not even like to do, do it a lot, focus your entire life on this, forsake all the other things you might be interested in doing because they won’t produce weight loss, and you’ll be CURED of your fat forever!” Except that, oh yeah, there is zero proof that any of this will work LONG TERM for more than a tiny – like 5% tiny – fraction of people, even if you manage to keep at it.

And by the way, guess who’s tried these “foolproof,” “long-term” weight loss “methods”? (imagine me air quoting vigorously here). Only every fat person that’s ever tried to diet ever. Yeah, that’s right. We’ve tried it. It didn’t work and also, it sucked. If it was something most people could sustain long-term AND they enjoyed it, they’d do it. But we’re not talking about enjoying life here, are we? No, the idea seems to be that we do stuff we don’t like just to chase a body that isn’t really ours. Essentially, we are being punished for our fat. You only get one life on earth, so why don’t you do stuff you don’t enjoy to make sure everyone else is okay with the way you look?*

Let’s take weight lifting, for instance (something I actually happen to enjoy). Even if it did work to induce long-term weight loss for most people, what if someone hates lifting weights? Resistance training isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. But in order to lose weight and maintain the loss, someone is supposed to sacrifice their interests and pretty much all their spare time just to make sure they have time for adequate amounts of weight-loss inducing resistance training (assuming one doesn’t make a living lifting weights, which most of us don’t)? Pfffft, thanks but no thanks.

There is a reason the weight loss industry is hauling in $60 billion a year – it keeps selling the same shoddy product over and over again to the same people (like, all of us) without ever actually working. If there was a way to produce sustainable weight loss that worked for most people, we’d have all figured it out, done it, and eventually the weight loss industry would cease to exist because we’d have all lost weight and kept it off. But we didn’t. And it keeps existing. And this weight-loss mentality is actually doing more harm than good by contributing to body shame, disordered eating and exercising, weight cycling, and even more weight gain for a lot of people.

So then I hear, “Permanent weight loss is hard work and people are just lazy.” First of all, short-term weight loss is no piece of cake either, but most of us who have tried it have lost at least some weight initially. And you know who works hard? Just about everyone. Yep, turns out the world is not full of lazy people. In a world of ever-increasing working hours and people with multiple jobs, we live in a society that is well-acquainted with hard work. Sometimes it’s hard work we don’t even like, but we do it anyway. But somehow we’re just lazy about losing weight permanently even though we’re willing to pay $60 billion a year for it? This is some serious non-logic.

So, no big surprise here, but nope, no one has “cured” fatness yet. Sorrrreeeeee!

The good news is, that doesn’t mean we need to give up on our health. Although they won’t necessarily cause most people to lose weight (yes, they may cause some people to lose weight, just not a statistically significant proportion of people), actual, doable lifestyle changes that support health are much easier to make and sustain compared to what you have to do to induce and sustain weight loss. So why not do the things that are achievable and sustainable, like listening to internal hunger and satiety cues to prevent overeating, adding more fruits or vegetables to our diet to boost our nutrient intake, or finding more ways to move enjoyably?

These things are easy to do in the absence of hunger and deprivation, or misery of doing stuff that you hate that often accompanies weight loss efforts. And while they might not “cure” our fatness (just as nothing has been shown to do), they will make us healthier. And maybe even happier.

*Sarcasm is a sweet, sweet balm.

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With (U.S.) Thanksgiving here and Christmas/Hanukkah/Kwanzaa/Pancha Ganapati/ Dies Natalis Solis Invicti/Saturnalia/Festivus (apologies if I missed yours) right around the corner, we’re about to face a lot of eating events. Start panicking now! Wait, we’re not on diets here. Alright everyone, as you were.

If you are a diet survivor, though, you might still suffer some residual anxiety around holiday season eating. If you’ve been learning to eat intuitively, this will help enormously in taking off the pressure of what can sometimes feel like a two-month-long eat-a-thon. I’ll get to that in a minute.

First, some holiday season dieting reminiscences…

Weight Watchers used to spend a lot of time giving us strategies (for those who bothered to attend during this time; so many dieters recognized the futility of trying to restrict food over the holidays) for dealing with all the delicious food we’d be about to encounter. The underlying message always seemed to be, “Don’t eat the delicious food.” It was all about filling up on “healthy” (aka low cal) food (popcorn, pretzels, apples, carrot sticks) before a party or dinner so you didn’t eat the tantalizing food (as though this could stem the tide of diet-hunger  and food lust that would hit me at parties). Strategies for turning down dessert at Thanksgiving (HUH?!?!), strategies for not taking seconds even if you want them. Strategies like filling your hands with a glass of water and a napkin so you can become a juggler can’t pick up hors d’oeuvres. Basically, strategies to deny yourself what you really want, when you really want it.

All of these seemed silly even to me at the time. Because even on a diet, I knew I would want to eat, would eat, and would want to seem like other people who were eating without restriction or guilt or worry about their weight (because those people still existed at the time)…and on January 2, start all over again with renewed dieting efforts. So yes, I would eat, but not without a gravy boat of weight gain anxiety to carry me through the season.

And inevitably, I would frequently overeat to the point of unpleasantness. Being on a diet made me damn hungry! I was anxious, overate, felt guilty, restrict again, overeat again…you know where I’m going with this. And so I would end up not enjoying these meals half the time anyway. I’ve read enough and talked to enough people now to know this is not uncommon among dieters. Has this happened to you, too?

It’s not like this for me now. This is the time of year I can really hone my intuitive eating skills, listening to those internal body cues that tell me how I need to eat to feel good. Yes, there are more parties, potlucks and big dinners than normal, and yes, occasionally I’ll feel a bit stuffed, but this truly isn’t the mental crisis it used to be.

So what are actual useful strategies for eating during the holiday season? These are the ones that help me:

1. I can’t say this enough: don’t let yourself starve in preparation for a big meal. You want to have an appetite, yes, but arrive starving? No. If you get too hungry, it will be hard to focus on your stopping point, and chances are you’ll eat till you are uncomfortable. And that’s not fun. Snacks between meals, if you need them, are key to avoiding critical hunger level. I used to “save” my “points” for a week before a big deal meal – all us WW folks did, there was just no way to enjoy ourselves otherwise – and then unleash the hunger beast on the day of. Talk about a nasty food hangover…
2. Eat the foods you really want. If you know you’ve only got so much room and there are more foods to choose from than you could ever possibly eat, just zero in on whatever it is you want to try most. That might be your favorite foods, or some new things you’ve never tried (or some of both). I get full fast, so I skip fillers like bread or boring crudité that I can’t get excited about in favor foods I normally wouldn’t make at home. What helps with determining foods you really want to eat? Not being overly hungry (see #1).
3. Know that this isn’t your Last Supper. You’ll be able to eat again, whenever you want. The specter of going hungry later, when I was dieting, was a driving force in my overeating. Yes, I might not be able to have this particular meal later, but I’ll try to have something just as good. And if you can take some leftovers home to eat at a later time? Score! (Note, taking leftovers home might only work around people you know well, not so much at office parties. Though I have also been witness to this.)
4. Remember it isn’t just all about the food. Even I can admit that Weight Watchers got this one right when they told us that the focus of parties and dinners shouldn’t just be all about the food (hey, even a broken clock is right twice a day). The food really is just a medium through which we share experiences with others. We don’t need to use that to trick us out of eating food though – we just need to remember that connections with others and eating comfortably are both ways to nourish ourselves, physically and emotionally.

None of these tips is about how to avoid food you want to eat. And if you do get too full? Hey, that’s okay too. We’re not aiming for eating perfection. Your body, when it has found a comfortable equilibrium, can handle that once in a while. It might not feel good, but it’s also not the end of the world. You’re still gathering eating experiences to inform how you eat at your next meal so it’s all useful information.

Above all, tolerate no eating guilt! Happy Thanksgiving!

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Aaron Flores, RDN and I are back with Episode 2 of Dietitians Unplugged Podcast, in which we talk about why dieting and weight loss don’t work long-term, and the science that backs it up, courtesy of the excellent book Secrets From the Eating Lab: The Science of Weight Loss, the Myth of Willpower, and Why You Should Never Diet Again by Traci Mann, PhD.

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Hey guys! I’m a little late with the blog this week because I was in NYC this weekend, which, among many other awesome things, may be the official home of the street meat! And here I am, eating a hot dog on the steps of The Met. Sooo New Yorky!

But obviously this hot dog is deadly! Why? Because, as we have all heard by now from the soon-to-be-published report by the World Health Organization (WHO), processed meat will give us cancer and kill us, KILL US DEAD! Everyone panic NOW!

If you haven’t guessed, I’m being a little facetious. The WHO report, while definitely interesting, is also an example of science reporting gone a little bad. The WHO has now categorized processed meats (anything salted, cured, or smoked) as “carcinogenic to humans.” While this is the same category that contains asbestos and smoking, the WHO was careful to point out that this did not mean processed meats are equally as dangerous as those other things. You know, just to make it really confusing.

So let’s break it down to see what kind of danger we’re looking at. First, the WHO estimates that deaths from diets high in processed meats contribute to 34,000 cancer deaths per year worldwide, out of 8.2 million total cancer deaths worldwide (2012 data). That’s 0.4% of cancer deaths attributed to diets high in processed meats (which obviously is different than diets that occasionally include processed meats). That’s less than 1 percent!

Secondly, the WHO estimates a diet high in processed meats (50 g of processed meat daily) can increase your risk of colon cancer by 18%. Yikes! But wait, the article said that our initial risk of that type of cancer is already pretty low. It didn’t say how low, so I looked it up on the CDC website and found some numbers. So, for example, if you are 50 years old, your 10 year risk of getting colon cancer is 0.68% (note, this goes up as age increases). An 18% increased risk would then give you a 0.8% risk — mind you, this is if you have a diet that is high in processed meats. Meaning at least two servings a day of processed meats (the article’s example was two slices of ham weighing 50 g or ~2 oz daily). So no matter what, your overall risk factor is pretty low (if you have a family history, I’m guessing your risk factor will increase).

I’m not saying all this to convince you that a diet high in processed meats is good for you and to start pounding SPAM on a daily basis. We’ve all known for years that large quantities of processed meats are probably not good for us – now we just have some useful data. What I’m saying is that there really doesn’t seem to be a need to panic and forego all your favorite “fun” foods forevermore.  I do think this is important information, but I have seen firsthand how some (many) people react to this kind of advice: by immediately restricting or eliminating foods, sometimes to the point where there is nothing left for them to enjoy. While we can always use good nutritional guidance, we really don’t need more food fear.

So while processed meats are not exactly “health foods” by any definition, like so many other past demonized foods (sugar, salt, read meat, white carbs, coffee, fat, fruit, everything), if you like it, eating it now and again within a balanced diet probably isn’t going to shorten your life significantly. Is eating a diet heavy in processed meats every day good for you? No, of course not, but that is not a diet in balance. If you find yourself eating a monotonous diet of the same foods every single day, you’re going to miss out on some important stuff (vitamins, minerals, phytochemicals we probably don’t even know the names of yet). Variety and balance are key. Joanne Arena MS, RD offers some wonderful advice here on how to balance your diet while still including your favorite processed meats.

Working in a hospital, I’ve met all sorts of eaters. Some have been very strict, “healthy” eaters. Others ate a lifetime diet high in overly refined foods and not enough fruits and vegetables (the things you learn about people as a dietitian!). Both types of eaters had something in common: they were sick with something in the hospital. Poor health can still happen to anyone regardless of how vigilant we are. Of course we want to reduce our risk of getting sick as much as we can, and that includes trying to eat a healthy balanced diet, but there is really no way to ensure complete elimination of disease risk. And we still need to enjoy our diets.

One of my patients early in my career had been a lovely lady who said she normally ate a diet of only whole, organic foods. I apologized that she was not going to get an organic diet during her hospital stay. It didn’t matter, she said, as she couldn’t hold any food down anyway. It turned out her small bowel obstruction was from a tumor in her colon that had metastasized and was, at this point, incurable. She had spent her life eating fresh, whole foods, but she got sick and was going to die anyway. I always hoped that she had enjoyed that diet while she was on it and had not only done it for disease prevention.

I’m not trying to dissuade you from eating as healthfully as you can, because we do have good data that a balanced diet high in a variety of fresh foods  and lots of fruits and vegetables can help us reduce our risk of many diseases (and tastes yummy!). What I am telling you is that we are not 100% in control of our health, that poor health can happen to anyone, none of us escapes death, and that if a hot dog or pepperoni on your pizza makes you happy, you shouldn’t be terrified to enjoy it once in a while. The key is balance and variety, not elimination!

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So, I just found out from this blog that The Switch Witch is actually a thing. It’s a Halloween thing, and it’s kind of a horrible thing, but not in the fun Halloween way.

What’s The Switch Witch? Apparently it’s the Halloween version of The Tooth Fairy, except in my opinion way weirder. After kids have finished collecting their Halloween candy, The Switch Witch (presumably a well-meaning parent) comes along, takes the candy and replaces it with toys, thus sparing the kiddos from being exposed to all that sugary, evil (sarcasm!) candy.

I can only imagine that this started sometime in the last 15 years during the meteoric rise of the obesiepipanic and subsequent food fear hysteria. All that sugar can’t be good for our little ones right? Not when there is so much obesity out there, just waiting to get them! Won’t someone please think of the children!?

I get it. It’s hard enough as a parent to get your kid to eat a regular meal with some vegetables without the specter of all that Halloween booty hanging around. I know that many parents are constantly worried that their kids are going to end up nutritionally deficient and it will be all their fault. It’s a big responsibility to be a parent and everyone is trying their best.

But this Switch Witch thing. At best, it’s misguided. At worst, it has the potential to kick off a lifetime disordered eating, especially around candy which – hello! – exists even after childhood ends. That’s right, your child is going to grow up and continue to live in a world where he or she is confronted with candy practically on a daily basis (especially if they work in an office). And you know what food tastes best? Forbidden foods. So when your adult child is eventually faced with that most forbidden of foods, candy, and there’s no fun toy being offered in its stead, what do you think is going to happen? They simply will not be prepared to deal with the barrage of sweets the modern world presents.

Kids know when foods are being restricted. They become experts at sneaking food. Some become little food hoarders. They go to school and find ways to get it. Research has shown that when highly palatable “fun” foods are restricted, kids eat more of them (and also end up larger than they might be otherwise). Your kids are smart – just like you are raising them to be! They won’t be fooled by this kind of restriction, and in fact it will end up doing exactly the opposite of what you hoped to do, which is to make them into healthy eaters.

My suggestion? Use Halloween candy as a way to teach kids that all foods can fit into a healthy diet. This takes away the power sugary foods (or any particularly desirable foods) might have and allows kids to explore all foods freely (because that, after all, is what learning to eat is all about).

Here are some ideas to try:

1. Give your kids some control over when they eat their candy. Use the Division of Responsibility and choose meals and snacks when your child can include some of their Halloween booty. It doesn’t have to be every meal, but it also doesn’t have be so infrequent as to feel the food is being restricted. When your kids are very young, you can limit their control and choose when to include the candy, and then gradually give them more responsibility as they get older.
2. Does your kiddo seem especially sugar-obsessed? When including candy (or any sweet) in a meal, consider serving it at the same time as the main meal, rather than saving it for after the meal. Saving certain foods for the “reward” after a meal teaches that the other foods are merely to be tolerated to get to the special reward food. If this is a new practice in your home, at first your kids will probably gobble up the candy before the rest of the meal. But over time, they will tire of that and start to explore the other foods available. If you choose to do this, just make sure they know there are no seconds on dessert (unlike the other foods served).
3. Don’t let your kids graze all day on candy – or any food, for that matter. Grazing will lead to children not being hungry at meal times, or may lead to overeating. Kids need structure around eating; generally three meals a day and three snack opportunities between meals works well.
4. Teach kids about the differences between foods without labeling them “good” or “bad.” Messages such as, “We get vitamins and minerals from fruits and vegetables that help our body to run,” and “Candy is a fun, tasty food that we can enjoy but we don’t need it for our body to grow” teach about nutrition without judgement.

Read more about incorporating “forbidden” foods from the guru of childhood nutrition, Ellyn Satter.

So while The Switch Witch is not nearly as mean as this:

…it does teach the wrong message about “forbidden” foods and eating. Happy Halloween!

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