It’s that time of year again! 

Kids can’t sleep this week due to the anticipation of Halloween trick or treating (and the candy!). And parents…well, parents are bracing themselves for a long evening of dealing with their kids’ Halloween-fueled excitement.  And the candy.  Oh, the candy! Truly, it can seem like every parent’s worse nightmare as your kiddos return home with a pillowcase stuffed with sugary confections, begging to eat everything NOW.  What’s a parent to do?  

As a Registered Dietitian, I bet you think that my advice will be to limit candy to a few pieces and give them apples and carrots instead and then deal with the meltdowns and tantrums that ensue.  However, you may be surprised that my advice is actually quite the opposite:  Let your kids (and you!!) eat candy, I say!

There are so many apps these days to track everything you do: calorie counting apps, sleeping apps, meditating apps, and even pooping apps (I’ll be getting to that one later, it’s seriously one of my fave!).  Yet Intuitive Eating as a practice doesn’t require you to track your calories or even the foods you eat like most diets do.  In fact I have seen so many people get obsessed with the tracking their foods, calories and exercise that it can lead to unhealthy behaviors.

There are so many things wrong with our worship of tracking our intake.

I’d like to talk today about my Non-Diet Approach.

Non-diet approach? What the heck is that? Quite simply, it means that when we work together to attain your health goals we do so without a focus on what the scale tells you.

Do you ever go to the Farmers market, or the regular supermarket, buy a bunch of produce because it looks so good and then get home and totally not know what to even do with it?