Why I Threw Away My Kids Halloween Candy, A Manifesto To Feeding Kids Right

It's National Eat Crap week here in America (otherwise known as the week after Halloween) and the question on so many parents' minds is "How do I raise kids to make healthy food choices in the face of all this crap?" So I thought I'd start off by showing you an image of all of the Halloween candy I threw out. No, this wasn't the candy from this year. This was last year's candy! I discovered a little ant trail going across our basement wall and followed it to a cupboard where I found several pounds of last year's candy just hanging out. The kids had forgotten about it. Yep, you read that right. So I threw it out. I'll probably do the same with this year's hoard at some point (hopefully before the sugar ants discover it).

See, I'm of the mind that if you raise your kids to eat right 99% of the time, then a few days of candy overload really won't kill them. And chances are, if they know what it feels like to feel healthy, they won't like how they feel when they eat too much candy, and they might just forget about that stash after awhile.

Wouldn't it be nice if kids came with an instruction manual, and maybe some of those little packets of food like those Sea Monkeys I ordered from the back of a comic book when I was 10? Just sprinkle some in, and they're good to go. And wouldn't it be great if there wasn't a little Sea Monkey 7-11 around every corner just brimming with crap, not to mention all the TV ads for crap food, the crap aisle in the store and the crap dispensers right next to the cash register so your kids can pester the crap out of you begging for crap when you're trying to pay for groceries (aka Real Food)?

So what's a health conscious adult to do when it comes to feeding their kids?

The two key things I've discovered about raising healthy kids are:

1) Be a Role Model. You can't expect your kids to do it if you don't. If you eat like crap and don't exercise, chances are they will too.

2) Cook real food. That means meals, cooked from scratch. I know that's anathema to a lot of folks, and far too many of us have forgotten what an actual homecooked meal looks like. But it doesn't take near as much time as you think it might once you get in the groove.

So that's all fine and dandy, but what do you actually feed the little sea monkeys? Trimama Laurel sent me an email earlier this week asking what types of paleo foods my kids like to eat. Now my kids aren't 100% on the paleo bandwagon, but they do eat gluten free, and only local raw goat's milk for dairy. And since I eat paleo, that's what they eat by default most of the time, unless they talk me into cooking something special for them.

A lot of our meals are very simple and look like this:

Some form of meat, a lot of veggies, and a piece of fruit. The meat might be roasted chicken, a hamburger, some steak done up fajita-style, or some tuna fish. The veggies might be salad or carrot sticks or some kale chips. And this time of year the fruit is likely to be an apple or pear apple off of one of our trees. In the winter, the kids like frozen berries that we picked in the summer for a snack.

Other meals might involve a few more combined ingredients. Some of my kids' favorites:


Omelettes or scrambled eggs
Sloppy Joes without the buns
Veggie/Chicken Shisk-A-Bobs
Taco salad night
Chicken Curry (I usually throw in zucchini, onions, carrots, and any other veggies I have lying around)
Smoothies of many varieties
Teriyaki Chicken
Bacon, bacon, and bacon
Cauliflower "pasta" with meat sauce
Chili
Soup

Special things I will cook for my kids are: "Paleo-ized" waffles, pancakes, or crepes. I basically take the ol' Betty Crocker recipe and substitute my own mix of almond meal, coconut flour, ground flax seeds, chia seeds, and tapioca flour, throw in a couple of extra eggs and some coconut milk, and these make up some tasty and protein-dense waffles (or pancakes). Often, the kids use these as snacks through the day, and I like them for pre-workout snacks.

The most non-paleo meal I will cook for the kids would be gluten-free macaroni and cheese. I use rice pasta and I make up a white sauce myself using tapioca flour, grass-fed butter, and raw milk. I mix in some sheep's milk Romano cheese and some raw goat's cheddar. Voila, a rainy-day comfort food.

But really, most of the time it just comes down to meats, eggs, veggies, and some fruits. Keep it simple, eat and model healthy behavior (including when it comes to chowing on that Halloween candy), and that's all there is to it!

Our War With Sugar: Notes From the Trenches

The battle lines are clearly drawn. I walk through the front doors of my local grocery store and this is what confronts me: a towering wall of sugar.

Sugar in caramels, sugar in cookies, in chocolates pressed to look like Lego pieces, or Band-Aids, or even more horribly, in chocolates pressed to look like vegetables! To the left is a wall of sugary juices, and straight past the main Wall O' Sugar is the bakery section with donuts displayed prominently in front. To my right is the mocha stand with its drinkable forms of sugar, surrounded by more stacks of scones, cookies, and jars of biscotti.

Clearly, I have to walk through the encampment of the enemy just to get to allies: the meats, the vegetables and fruits. Is it any wonder that good health is so hard to achieve? We are not just having to employ our will power to eat healthily, but that will power is being actively sabotaged at every turn. And it's not just the grocery store. A trip into my daughter's favorite clothing store, Justice (don't even get me started on my clothes-made-in-sweatshops rant, it's her money that takes her in there, not mine), reveals yet another wall of sugar at the checkout. This more of the Gummy Worms and Sour Patch Kids variety, yet its purpose is quite clear: make money for the store and addict our children to not just garden variety sugar (bad enough) but a chemical goo of food coloring and high fructose corn syrup. In case we somehow overlooked its glaring neon-boxed display, the sales clerk drew our attention to the fact that all candy was on sale, two boxes of crap for the price of one.

Is there any good news in the war trenches? Well, I'm happy to say that there is. You might recall some of my previous posts about what a terrible sugar addict I have been. So you might think that walking past this barrage of sugar-soaked gluten-engorged substances would be darned near impossible for me. My trembling hands would simply reach out and start filling my cart while my brain looked helplessly on. But the truth is that after going cold turkey, and buckling down to a solid few months of Paleo, it's just not even that appealing to me. After all, when you stop eating the stuff, then you get a total sugar hangover when you do indulge, it's loses a lot of its luster.

I can stand there and look at this enormous pile of macaroons, cookies, cakes, donuts, gelato, mochas with whipped cream, and then turn and walk away. I can turn and walk away! Without buying a darned thing. This is the kid who used to fill her pockets with cookies at the Methodist bake sale, take them into the church bathroom and stuff her face with sugar until she puked. This is the girl who had such raging yeast infections that she had thrush as a teenager, stumping her family doctor who'd never seen it outside of infants. I mean, I've been a sugar addict my whole life. This is huge.

And yet, I try really hard not to be like those converted evangelists. I try to resist the temptation to tell everyone I know who struggles with the same thing how simple the answer turns out to be. When people say things like "I could never give up bread." or "I couldn't live without my mocha and scone", I try to just be sympathetic. When someone says to me "I can't give up my sugar, so I can't give up my 90 minutes a day of cardio, I nod my head because I know what that's like. Totally know what it's like. But now I also know it doesn't have to be that way.

The Ironmom Extra Mile: 

First Read This: The Definitive Guide to Insulin, Blood Sugar, and Type 2 Diabetes from Mark's Daily Apple

Then Do This: The Whole30 Challenge

That's It. You won't regret it.

Trying to break the sugar addiction... again

How is it that a person can be in amazing shape, be eating so darned healthy, have just done a half-Ironman, take a week off afterwards (I deserve it, right?) to just slack off of training and maybe even have a piece of cake at my daughter's birthday party and BLAMMO! Within days I'm back to being addicted to sugar.

You know those freaky meth ads?

This would be me on sugar if I let it go on for a couple more weeks. My kids would find me passed out on the floor after crawling desperately toward the laundry cupboard where I've been hiding the Lindt white chocolate coconut bars... This stuff is Addictive with a capital A. No wonder we have health problems as a nation. It's everywhere, and never more so than this time of year. Just try to walk into a store without being overwhelmed by the Halloween Candy aisle. At least I don't work in an office anymore where people bring in their leftover 83 tons of the stuff and leave it in the lunchroom for other people to feed their addictions. But one of the moms of our kids' robotics team brought in caramel corn for a snack last week, and let's just say I'm glad that six teenage boys were clustered around the bowl because I seriously might've eaten the whole thing.

I'm posting this for accountability. It's been a month since the race and I need to get myself back with the right eating habits. I feel just yucky and I know if it continues it will be a downward spiral. I'd like to say I'm throwing away the rest of the Lindt white chocolate bars, but the truth is I ate them. So I guess now's as good a time as any to not buy any more, right? Right?

The Sugar Hangover

Wow, stop eating almost anything sweet other than fruit and all of a sudden you can taste the sweetness in ordinary things. Who knew that almonds were so sweet, and that a carrot could taste like an apple?? Then if you actually eat what would be an ordinary amount of sugar for most folks (a small slice of cake), you can FEEL what it's doing to your body. Last night at my writer's group I ate some fantastic gluten-free chocolate cake made with coconut flour and coconut oil in the frosting. The hostess also went out of her way to make it low glycemic since we have diabetic members, so it probably wasn't even nearly as sugary as a regular cake. To me though, after over a month of eating paleo, it tasted immensely sweet. Of course, that didn't stop me from eating a slice. You see, I have basically no willpower. As long as I keep stuff like that out of the house, I'm fine. But confront me with a piece of chocolate cake with chocolate ganache filling and maple-pecan icing? Fugeddaboudit.

Today however, I paid the price with a walloping sugar hangover. Seriously, it feels like I went on a complete bender last night. It's weird how your body can become so accustomed to ingesting this much sugar that you don't feel it at all, but now that I've gone cold turkey it's like I can feel the toxic effects crawling through my veins. I'd like to think that this sensation will help me avoid eating the next piece of chocolate ganache that stares me in the face. I can't imagine wanting to feel this way again anytime soon.

In the meantime, my latest body fat measurement was 17.8%, the lowest I've been since training for the Ironman, so the paleo eating plan must be doing something right!

If you are interested in an excellent, concise, and very understandable summation of sugar, insulin, fat storage, etc. check out Mark's article The Definitive Guide to Insulin, Blood Sugar & Type 2 Diabetes (and you’ll understand it)