Trick or Treat for your Health

A few Halloweens ago, I picked up a barrel of “Halloween Pretzels” from Costco–mini-pretzels in orange and black bags in a big plastic container. About the ONLY one happy about that choice was our dog who got into the “treats” when the untouched bowl was left on the floor inadvertently. I believe we finally choked down the last remnant sometime in the following spring. Having learned my lesson, I am happy to see a giant bag full of candy in the kitchen now awaiting Saturday night.

Thousands of empty calories await as we prepare to march our children around the neighborhood in this annual ritual of excess. Given the explosion of childhood obesity in America, am I worried? Not really.

I’ve been following a number of stories in the past few weeks connecting the obesity crisis in America to health care. CBS’s Sunday Morning devoted an entire show to “Size Matters.” A radio program on NPR last week devoted an hour to a discussion of Overweight America. The radio show considered, in particular the question of how we advocate for weight loss without “blaming” overweight people.

We focus far too much on symptoms of a problem that has much deeper roots than can be addressed directly. For solutions, we leap to radical and drastic methods like surgery or the search for medications that will fix us. We guilt each other into diets or pursuing unpleasant exercise routines we hate…and then we watch the food we eat selectively–seizing on the most minute reports of the bad or goodness of a particular food, while oblivious to a landscape of excess that surrounds us.

But I digress. The folks at Zillow, where you can look up the value of your neighbor’s house, have created a Trick or Treat Housing Index for Seattle (their company location) neighborhoods. It’s basically a list of affluent, walkable neighborhoods–big surprise–but what I find interesting is the walkable connection.

A 30-minute walk once a year with your kids is not going to compensate for eating thousands of calories in a glorious choco-fest of indulgence this weekend, but perhaps living in a place where this traditional activity is easy will. 20-minutes of walking to a train and from the station to work everyday does make a difference. Deciding, several times per week, that it would be enjoyable to go for a walk around the neighborhood adds up to many miles of exercise. Hopping on a bike with a kid in the bike seat to go to the library occasionally…it all adds up to an active lifestyle that is foreign to many Americans who have become isolated in car-dependent housing developments.

So I look forward to enjoying Halloween and the “fruits of our labor,” so to speak, with no guilt or worry. We will eat crap and be happy. We will join our neighbors in this annual tradition that fills our side streets with parents and children walking from door to door, meeting each other, and collecting candy. It’s a great American tradition, but what is great about it is not just getting the candy but the whole experience that is fundamentally-rooted in an active, community-engaged lifestyle that reminds us of how simple, safe–and relatively healthy–our lives were before we over-thought and over-did everthing.