“That awkward moment when you’re wondering who at all the candy, and you realize…you did.”

Trick-or-treating and the loads of candy we all gathered may have seemed like a great idea in the moment..and it tastes amazing when we eat it!…But once we’ve downed handfuls of that sugary goodness it begins flowing through our digestive system and our pancreas starts releasing insulin to help control our blood glucose levels and we go from being all hyped up and happy from our sugar rush to crashing all the way back down again…

Often when we down a bunch of sugary candy our instinct is to swear off eating any other food with it, but actually we should be reaching for a handful of nuts or a spoonful of peanut butter right after eating candy – they will actually provide our body fat and protein and in turn slow digestion and help our bodies digest all that sugar we just ate. So you eat a handful of candy corn and then immediately a handful of nuts!  That will help us combat our sugar rush.

Another thing we need to do is get up and walk around. Resist the temptation to lie down and play “fat dog” on your couch – get up and walk around for at least 15 minutes to help your body deal with all that sugar in your system.

What we shouldn’t do is beat ourselves up too much for eating all that candy for Halloween. Research says we have to eat around 3500 calories to gain one pound of weight…and going off the calorie count of the fun size candy bars we were giving away to trick-or-treaters that means we would have to eat 44 of them to actually gain a pound…not saying that couldn’t be done…but hopefully most of stopped eating at 43 of them 🙂   so yeah…we are good!

One suggestion to help you step away from the remaining candy before you get to candy bar number 44 is to go watch the documentary “Fed Up”. It will definitely educate you on how sugar affects us, and it is a fascinating documentary (I saw it at Sundance Film Festival years ago and loved it).

Look, we can all just admit it…we all ate too much candy on Halloween…but now all we can do is chalk it up to a fun Halloween celebration night to remember, than we can take any remaining candy we have and hurry up and donate it to anywhere that will get it out of our houses so we won’t eat anymore of it! And so for this year, Halloween is once again over, and at this point it is probably a good idea to let our sugar rush come to an end and move forward eating a little bit healthier once again….at least until Thanksgiving gets here, and then it will be time to bust out that pumpkin pie baby!!!

Have a great day everyone!

~Amy Rees Anderson