It’s October. Let the eating season begin!

Every year the Holiday Eating Season begins with Halloween and ends…after New Years?…after Valentine’s Day?…after Easter? (Does it ever really end?) October is also National Cookie Month and National Pizza Month. You celebrating? Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised, then, that October is also National Diabetes Month! (I swear. I’m not making this up.)

Don’t obsess about all the Halloween and other holiday sugar just yet. Hold off on your plans to get in touch with the switch witch. There’s plenty of time for all that. Here’s what you should do right now. Think about snacks.

The secret to getting through the Holiday Eating Season with your kids’ healthy eating habits intact is simple: Improve Snacks…Before the Eating Season is in Full Swing!

When kids have healthy snack habits, it almost doesn’t matter what else they eat during the Holiday Eating Season.

We like to think kids are nibbling on apples, carrots and celery sticks. Sorry, it just isn’t so. If you want to know how bad our national snacking problem really is, read this and this.

Eating healthy snacks frees up space in the diet for sweets so holiday treats don’t tip the scales in the wrong direction. It’s all about proportion—eating healthy food more frequently than everything else.  Proportion is one of the three habits that translates nutrition into behavior.

(Variety and moderation are the other two habits that translate nutrition into behavior.)

Improving snacks will improve your life too.

I’m not kidding.

  1. You won’t have to fight at mealtimes to get your kids to eat their veggies because they’ll have already eaten their veggies. A bite here and a bite there really adds up.
  2. The more your kids eat fruits and vegetables at snack time, the more likely they’ll be to eat them at dinner too! Eating is really a matter of math. What your kids get used to eating the most is what they’ll continue to eat the most.
  3. Eating fewer salty, crunchy, foods from day-to-day will make your kids crave those foods less frequently and less fiercely. You kids’ inclination to dive-bomb into the candy may just ease up. See David Kessler’s book, The End of Overeating, for more.

Looking for more ways in which improving your kids’ snacking will improve your life? Click here.

Most parents think of meals as their nutrition zone and snacking as extras. But snacks are where the habits action really is…especially during the Holiday Eating Season. The time to change things is NOW.

~Changing the conversation from nutrition to habits.~