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Ep.154 (Transcript): Is Halloween a Fatphobic Holiday? 

October 29, 2024

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A Certified Eating Disorders Registered Dietitian (CEDRD) with a master's degree in dietetics & nutrition. My passion is helping you find peace with food - and within yourself.

Meet Katy

Welcome back to Rebuilding Trust With Your Body, it’s Katy here. It’s spooky season, Halloween is happening this week and you know what’s spooky to me? The ways that diet culture and fatphobia are running rampant right now.

What I’m finding is that a lot of what is happening has been so normalized, that it flies under your radar and keeps you stuck with one foot accidentally in diet culture, and the other in the world of intuitive eating. 

So you’re over here, trying to make peace with food, while you’re still receiving and subconsciously buying into these messages that are holding you back. You’re stuck thinking about food all the time, worrying that you’re eating too much sugar, eating impulsively just because you want it, stressing about weight gain, feeling ashamed of your body when you see yourself in photos or look in the mirror, and there’s that little nagging voice in the back of your head constantly telling you that you’re eating too much and that you’d feel better about yourself if you lost some weight. 

OF COURSE you’re having a hard time making peace with food when the world around us is constantly sending you these messages, and we’re going to break this down today using Halloween as our example. I think this is going to be pretty eye opening to you.

Before we dive into our main topic for today, you know what time it is…We’ve got some Wellness Woo to talk about. 

Wellness Woo is the stuff that diet and wellness culture tells us we should do in the name of health, but it’s really based on pseudoscience, exaggerated claims, or just nonsense. 

Today’s Wellness Woo is: The Switch Witch

In case you’re unfamiliar, the Switch Witch is kind of like the Tooth Fairy, but instead of taking your tooth and giving you money, the Switch Witch comes in and steals your Halloween candy in exchange for a toy or trinket of some sort.

Now, I can see where families with kids who have food allergies embrace this so that it doesn’t feel so icky when they have to take away their kid’s candy that they’re legitimately allergic to.

But the way that the Switch Witch is mostly used is simply to get rid of candy because parents are worried about their kids’ sugar intake.

And let’s just pause and think about this for a moment – how would you have felt as a kid if someone came in and took your Halloween candy? Would you have felt happy about getting a book or a toy in place of it? I wouldn’t have. I would have been pissed. One of the best parts of Halloween for most kids is the candy and getting to see how much of it they can get during trick-or-treating, and then sorting and counting and trading it when they get home. And then of course eating and enjoying it. 

So here we come as adults who have been beat over the head with this messaging about how sugar is toxic, and it’s like cocaine, and it’s going to make your kid fat and give them diabetes, and how you can’t trust yourself to stay away from it if it’s in the house. 

(Side note – a child is 242 times more likely to develop an ED than type 2 diabetes…explain)

Why then is our public health messaging all about obesity and diabetes, and not about EDs? Fatphobia. 

Back to the Switch Witch…what’s the origin story on it? Where does it come from, and why has it become so popular in recent years? Because it wasn’t a thing when I was a kid. 

The Switch Witch originated back in 2015 from a children’s book written by author Audrey Kinsman. It ended up winning a National Parenting Product Award in 2016. Here’s the accolades they give it on their website:

Working mom, Audrey Kinsman, created this product to solve struggles around food restrictions and sugar consumption particularly during the Fall and Halloween Season. Switch Witches need candy to run their Witchy World! This book/toy set helps promote good behavior and healthy choices while solving sugar and allergy problems. On Halloween night unwanted or extra candy is “Switchcrafted” for a special surprise! 

When I was researching this, I also stumbled across a whole slew of mommy blogs praising this for how it is “saving their kids from Halloween candy” and I think this really reflects this era of parenting where we are afraid to let our kids enjoy the simple pleasures in life.

This is a perfect example of how we end up setting kids up to sneak candy, hide it, binge on it when given the opportunity, and for them to then grow up to be adults who don’t trust themselves to keep a package of PB M&Ms or Milk Duds in their house. 

Rather than teaching our kids to be afraid of candy or sugar, we need to help them have a positive relationship with it.

So the verdict is in, the switch witch is wellness woo, and I’m not a fan.

If you have an example of Wellness Woo that you want to share, send it to me at rebuildingtrustwithyourbody@gmail.com. 

Ok, that’s enough of that. Moving on to today’s main topic…Is Halloween a fatphobic holiday?

“Sexy” Halloween Costumes

One of the less obvious ways that fatphobia shows up with Halloween is with the adult costumes. One of the Halloween cliches is the way that you can take anything and make it “sexy” and it’s now a costume. You can be a sexy ghost, or a sexy cat, or a sexy witch. In fact, I’d argue that there’s a lot of pressure and expectation on women, especially young women ( I’m thinking back to college and how all the girls went out in sexy costumes), to dress sexy for Halloween. 

Not only are we sexualizing the costumes, but we’re blatantly objectifying women, and the way that our society defines female beauty and sexiness is through a really narrow lens. It’s all about being thin, having curves in certain places, a small waist, a big butt is ok to a certain extent, big boobs. Cue the shame for the vast majority of women who don’t look like this impossible standard. This entire idea of what’s considered “sexy” for Halloween (and any time of the year) is rooted in fatphobia.

Then there’s the reality that most Halloween costumes that you can buy pre-made aren’t size inclusive. That’s fatphobia right there. And we of course see it all the time with regular clothing too, but I want to call out how this also happens at Halloween. I saw an ad on FB recently for plus sized Halloween costumes and I didn’t look into it to even see what size they go up to (because sometimes when companies are advertising to be “size inclusive” they really aren’t), but I did find it refreshing that there are companies out there making costumes that specifically are made to fit fat bodies. 

Demonizing Sugar

The next example of fatphobia at Halloween is the demonizing of sugar. We all associate Halloween with candy, and therefore sugar. Our society has lost its mind over sugar. The amount of fear mongering and ridiculous claims that we repeatedly hear is overwhelming. And it’s hard to know what to believe. It’s so bad that some of you listening are afraid to eat a banana because you were told it’s too high in sugar, or another thing I’ve heard multiple times recently from clients or people in my community is that they’re afraid they’re going to get Alzheimer’s disease if they eat sugar. This is a complete distortion of scientific research, and it shows how the clickbait headlines can wreak havoc on us because we’re walking around shaking in our boots over what we allegedly should or shouldn’t put in our bodies. 

The demonizing of sugar is always veiled in a concern about “health.” They’ll say that it leads to diabetes, Alzheimer’s, inflammation, joint pain, even cancer. 

But if we’re being honest, the real concern is fatness. The fear that eating sugar is going to cause weight gain. (And of course, then weight gain gets wrapped up in all these concerns about health – but if we peel back enough layers, it’s usually rooted in the fear of fatness. Sure, health is still an understandable concern, but the fear of fatness runs deep, and the reason we fear fatness is because of our own internalized fatpbobia.)

Internalized fatphobia means that you feel that you are less worthy and less attractive if you gain weight. It means that you deeply fear becoming fat or gaining weight. You might even be thinking to yourself that you don’t feel that way towards others. You think other people are worthy and beautiful at all sizes, however their body is meant to be. But for YOU personally, you don’t want to be fat. That’s internalized fatphobia. Most of us have it, at least to some degree, and we have to be willing to acknowledge it and work on it. Myself included. That’s been a big part of the learning and growing that I’ve done in recent years. I’ve spent a lot of time listening and learning from people with the lived experience of existing in a fat body, and it’s an ongoing process to dismantle our own internalized fatphobia. 

If you’re curious to understand your own level of fatphobia or internalized fatphobia, I encourage you to take the Harvard Implicit Bias Test on weight stigma. It’s an evidence-based validated assessment tool to determine the degree of weight bias that you currently have. It’s free to take, I’ll link it in the show notes. Let’s approach this with curiosity and compassion towards ourselves as we explore this uncomfortable topic and our own biases – which, again, we all have. So after you’re done with this episode go take the test to get a feel for where you’re at and some things you can work on challenging within your thoughts and beliefs.

The “Earn and Burn” Mentality is Dangerous

Another way that I keep seeing fatphobia, weight stigma and anti-fat bias (these terms are all pretty much interchangeable) showing up right now around Halloween is the way that we talk about burning off the calories in candy through exercise.

I remember being in a spin class once years ago where we had just done this awesome and really fun workout, with really energizing music, and at the end the instructor told us that we had earned a piece of candy because of the calories we just burned, and she gave us a fun sized candy bar on the way out.

I’ve also seen all sorts of memes on social media where it shows the calories in different types of Halloween candy, and how much exercise you’d have to do to burn it off.

This “earn and burn” is a dangerous and fatphobic way of thinking. You don’t have to earn your right to eat candy, or any food for that matter, through exercise. And you don’t have to burn off the candy you eat afterwards. It’s ok to just eat candy and enjoy it. It’s ok to exercise too. But the exercise doesn’t have to be linked to the candy in any way. There are a lot of wonderful reasons to move your body that have nothing to do with burning calories or controlling your weight. (In fact, if this is something you’re struggling with in terms of finding those other reasons to exercise, I encourage you to go back and listen to the episode right before this one, episode 153, The 10k Steps Per Day Myth (And Overcoming Your Blocks Against Exercise).

The reason that this “earn and burn” mentality is dangerous is because it disconnects you from your body, and interferes with your ability to eat intuitively. When you’re thinking of this tit-for-tat thing with what you’re eating, and you’re assuming that you have to calculate and burn off the calories in your food, you are treating your body like a math equation or a robot. That’s not even how your body works.

You might not realize this, but research has shown that different humans will absorb and derive different amounts of calories from the same food. AND different humans burn different amounts of calories from doing the same exercise. 

Put another way (you may have heard this before), we could all eat and exercise the exact same, and we’d still weigh different amounts and have different body shapes. 

Another fun fact (and this one might even be a little unsettling to you) is that the calories listed on food wrappers or packages are approximations. They are legally allowed a margin of error in both directions, so what you think you’re eating calorically isn’t as precise as you’d probably like to think. Some people hear this and they think, “Well good grief, I’m going to stop reading labels and worrying so much about calories! How freeing!” 

And other people think, “Oh my gosh, this means that I might have been eating more calories than I think I was so I better overestimate what’s in all my food just to play it safe.” >> This is actually a disordered way of thinking, and we don’t want you going down that path. 

As a dietitian, how would I recommend you think about calories in your food, or the calories you’re burning with exercise? I recommend you don’t.

You can think about fueling your body appropriately, and matching your body’s nutrition needs without thinking about calories. In fact, I’d argue that for most people, thinking about calories ends up steering them away from adequate fueling and nutrition because the calories become the focus, and it creates all of this stress and drama with food, and you end up trying to eat in ways that hack the system, such as choosing a bunch of low-calorie, high volume foods like rice cakes, popcorn, veggies or salad because you can eat a lot of it for a little amount of calories. And all that does is jack with your ability to actually recognize and honor your hunger and fullness because you’re too busy trying to trick your body.

So you can see that this “earn and burn” mindset becomes a slippery slope, and that’s why I really want you to try and notice when it comes up for you, and to put a stop to it and reframe your way of thinking. 

And to bring this back full circle to where the fatphobia lies in the “earn and burn” mindset, the fear behind it is that if you don’t burn off the calories you’re eating from the candy that you’re going to gain weight, and the underlying assumption is that weight gain is bad. That’s fatphobia.

Am I suggesting that you should just eat as much candy as you want, without limits, and without even thinking about it? No, of course not. What I am suggesting is that you check in with your body before you eat Halloween candy, and you ask yourself if you’re hungry, and you pay attention to when you’re satisfied. I encourage you to eat the candy mindfully, and to enjoy it, rather than having a mindless free-for-all with it.

Wrapping Up

Now I know that this time of year starts to become stressful. Halloween is essentially the unofficial start to the holiday season. It’s just a few weeks after Halloween that we have Thanksgiving here in the US (I know our Canadian neighbors to the north already had their Thanksgiving), and then we roll into Hannakuh and Christmas. So we’ve got about 2.5 months of being bombarded with holiday foods, holiday diet culture messaging, and all sorts of challenging aspects of this as it relates to your relationship with food and your body. 

Because of that, I have put together an extra special free resource for you. It’s my guide called Intuitive Eating During the Holidays: 6 Tips to Stress Less About Food This Holiday Season.

In my experience, half the battle during the holiday season is solved by going into it prepared and in the right headspace. If you’re going into the holidays with the attitude that you need to be afraid of the food, that you need to be extra careful not to eat too much, that you need to keep a close eye on your weight, or that you need to be worried about how much weight you’re going to gain – it sets you up to have all sorts of struggles with food, and it’s stressful.

Instead, what if you could:

  • Enjoy Halloween candy, without it being charmed, and move on with your life
  • Eat your Thanksgiving dinner, with all the fixin’s, without a side of guilt and shame
  • Bake Christmas cookies with your kids without sneaking back into the kitchen late at night after they go to bed to binge on them
  • Feel confident and empowered that you can navigate the holidays using your intuitive eating skills, and that you can trust your body (and trust yourself) with food

That’s what this guide is designed for. It will show you how to maintain your progress with intuitive eating, and how to stay connected to your body, so that you can eat the holiday foods that you enjoy, without going overboard. 

Wouldn’t it be great if you could sail through this holiday season with ease, and then come January 1 you don’t even feel the slightest urge to go on a diet to make up for all the guilt you have about the holidays? That’s what intentionally sticking with your intuitive eating process can do for you this time of year. So go grab the free holiday intuitive eating guide at nondietacademy.com/holiday and I’ll send it right to your inbox. 

That is a wrap for this episode. Thank you SO MUCH for listening.In case nobody has told you today – you are worthy just as you are. We’ll talk again soon.

Resources Mentioned in Episode:

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