Trick or treat, smell my feet, give me some high-fructose candy.
Halloween is beginning to smell more like fat children sweating skittles in banana costumes and witch hats.
The prospect of gaining weight haunts me ever since I slowly ditched my baby fat in middle school. I was a fairly fat child. My older cousin lovingly nicknamed me ‘Lunch’ all throughout elementary school, and I distinctly remember one year she gifted me with a t-shirt that read “Lunch is My Best Subject.” To this day I joke that I will bill her for future therapy sessions because of the long-term effects of constantly being called fat.
In second grade I was cast in a local theater presentation of Snow White and the Twelve Dwarfs- there were too many children to cast only seven dwarfs and the ‘everyone gets a trophy’ method applied. My husky body-type perfectly fit the role of dwarf number eight, Hungry.
Needless to say, Halloween serves as a dreaded opportunity to stay inside and eat carrots while watching reruns of American Horror Story until all the Snickers in a hundred-mile radius are consumed. I try to stay away from the high calorie treats so fondly sought after by trick-or-treaters on Oct. 31.
Not to say that I’ve been a health nut every year. Last year I went trick-or-treating as an escaped mental patient with pale makeup, which wasn’t exactly necessary considering my already pasty complexion, and a bloody nose. Like a deranged, recovering sugar addict scouring for a Kit-Kat, I knocked on doors at around 11 p.m., disturbing slumbering, elderly neighbors with a “Happy Halloween,” and then getting to the point quite zealously, “Do you have any more candy?” They weren’t thrilled.
This year I plan on snacking exclusively on celery sticks and water. Of course, I make the same promise to myself on a daily basis. Tomorrow I’ll start a diet, and I’ll stick to it. I’ll download the Calorie Count app and live exclusively on tomato juice or green tea or whatever. But the plan rarely works out.
While my peers with through-the-roof metabolisms scarf down their collected Halloween candy, I’ll be counting the calories in my pumpkin spice latte.
