CW: eating disorders, suggestions for disordered eating practices, food shaming, weight-/body-shaming

Welcome to Workplace Hellness, a blog that calls out terrible workplace wellness messaging and initiatives and praises the occasionally well-done program. Alas, there is little to praise in the realm of workplace wellness, since most initiatives boil down to, “We’ve confused weight with health, so we think that making you lose weight will save us money on employee health insurance.”

And why not begin this journey into workplace wellness hell with a truly terrible email sent to college employees before Halloween? The email advocates for disordered eating practices, so if you have or have had an eating disorder or a disordered relationship with food, proceed with caution.

First, we have this delightful image at the top of the email:

I have a few questions. First, what are the strings attached to? Second, who went and suspended a bunch of candy over a spooky hill and then put “no” symbols over the candies? Points for preposition-based wordplay, I guess, but the image manages to food-shame readers and also personify Halloween candy as trying to force you to eat it. I prefer non-anthropomorphic Halloween candy.

And now for the text of the email:

Halloween is scary. But forget the ghouls and goblins: we’re most freaked out at the prospect of overdosing on all our kids’ candy (and, let’s be honest: we have all snuck a piece or three out of their bags when they weren’t looking).

Hyperbole: CANDY IS A DRUG THAT YOU CAN OVERDOSE ON! The parenthetical message is attempting to create a “we’re all friends here” vibe for readers. But, let’s be honest: we all know this is from a template.

This year will be different. Why? Because we pulled together eight of our favorite tricks to help you skip (most of) the treats.

#NotAllWellnessEmails: I’ll give it to the authors of this that they don’t outright tell you to skip all treats. But they are still shaming you for eating candy. Also, the “tricks” that follow are so horrifying that I’m not giving them the benefit of the doubt.

1. Be lazy

If you plan to give out treats to trick-or-treaters, wait until the last minute to buy candy so you aren’t tempted with it in the days and weeks prior.

Reading between the lines: Talking about food in terms of temptation is a weirdly Christian lens to use. This language strikes me as a particularly pietist/Puritan approach to food: food that is pleasurable to eat is sinful because bodily pleasure is base and corrupted. I don’t endorse that worldview. (Also, the Bible has ZERO passages dedicated to candy.)

2. Skip your favorites

Choose treats you don’t like to reduce temptation. If you’re a chocolate lover, consider offering hard candy or licorice.

Check in with yourself: This is a disordered eating practice, and I don’t recommend it. Sure, you might eat less (and be unhappy doing it), but you also might eat just as much and not enjoy it at all. Skip the shame and weird mind games and get the candy that you like; if not many trick-or-treaters show up you’ll enjoy eating the leftovers.

3. Store it out of sight

In the days leading up to Halloween, store candy out of sight (read: not in the kitchen!) so it’s not easily reachable.

Argumentum ad absurdum: Store the candy in your bat-infested attic! Shoot it into space! Have Danny Ocean heist it from your house in an unbelievably elaborate way! Burn your house down with the candy inside!

4. Don’t skip meals

Plan a nutritious dinner with protein and fiber before trick or treating so you are less tempted to snack on candy along the route.

So close to good advice: Yeah, skipping meals is a bad idea—you should eat throughout the day to keep your energy levels up and to avoid things like fainting. But again with the temptation language. Truth: candy isn’t a demon sent by Satan to torment you.

5. Be active

Exercise releases feel-good hormones and helps you de-stress, so you [sic] less likely to dip into the candy jar when needing a boost.

Your mileage may vary: Again, moving your body is great! They were doing really well with that one until they went back to “this will help you not eat candy.” I don’t know about you, but exercising makes me hungry, and candy is delicious, so…you do the math?

6. At parties, stick to one plate

Enjoy what you take, but when you’re done, be done.

One weird trick alert: This entry gives you a weird trick (don’t eat bananas and live forever!). Beware the weird trick, because when you start thinking about it, you discover the logic is faulty. First of all, how big is the plate? Second, how hungry are you? Third, what are you putting on the plate? If I fill up a plate with lettuce, I know I’m going to be a hangry mess in 20 minutes. These weird tricks are garbage because they create a blanket rule for situations in which there are too many variables. It’s better to check in with your hunger level, take food that appeals to you, eat what you want, check in with your hunger level, and decide if you want more. I guess that wasn’t a weird enough trick to include in this email?

7. Focus on the fun

Enjoy Halloween functions for the costumes, decorations, and friends. Arrange activities that shift the focus from food to fun.

Actually OK advice: This is advice I got from the dietitian and counselor I worked with when I was getting outpatient treatment for anorexia nervosa (remind me to talk about that diagnostic term sometime!). Focusing on food can make people anxious, especially when they have a lot of shame/fear around food.

8. Indulge in moderation

If you do decide to indulge on something decadent, practice the “three bite rule” for rich, high calorie sweets.

Maximum headdesk: Again with the morally loaded language. “Indulge” is a word we associate with morally suspect or culturally questionable things (“she indulged in a Hallmark Christmas movie marathon”—is it just me, or does this word mostly get used with women?), and “decadent” is also associated with morally suspect things or actions (and, in fact, the word originates from the Latin verb “to fall” or “to decay”). Also, what is this “three bite rule” and who instituted it? Is it in the Code of Hammurabi? I’m tempted to go to a work party, loudly announce that I’m following the “three bite rule” and then proceed to shove an entire piece of cake in my mouth, shouting around the crumbs, “THAT’S ONE BITE! TWO MORE TO GO!” This is nonsense.

So there you have it! If you made it this far, congratulations. There is so much horror to come.