I posted in the other thread earlier, and I'll post along the same lines again.

We shouldn't look as food as a reward. I know I do it too often. Instead, though, we need to see food as a survival mechanism. Eat to live, don't live to eat. When we reward ourselves with food we're only reinforcing our bad behavior.

I see no problem with someone occasionally having a treat of something they really enjoy. I do it once in a great while myself, and it's perfectly fine. I have found, though, that if I over-indulge (like more than two or three bites) I'll get so sick to my stomach it's not worth it.

One thing I see a lot of here is 'it's only once a year.' Sure, it's once a year. I have a birthday once a year, my husband once a year, my children once a year each, then Easter comes once a year, Independence Day once a year......and can you see where I'm going with this? Pretty soon Sunday only comes once a week, so on and so forth.

The best thing, I think, to do is to realize there are many foods we may never eat again, even though we really love them. Or if we do eat them it may only be once in a couple of years, if that. But again, this goes with eating to live. If we do that we tend to detach ourselves from food and it's no longer such a big issue.

I'm not saying we can't occasionally celebrate with food (the entire world would have to be brainwashed to get away from that one, LOL).

On my last birthday, I bought a new outfit to wear for Christmas. That was so much better than splurging on some food, because it was the first time I could shop the regular women's clothing without going 2X! Oh, what a feeling!

And I really like the advice here on finding legal foods that fit within your idea of holidays. We do LC birthday cheesecakes now. The 6-year-old is the only one who misses the cake, and we have a bagful of cupcakes in the deep freeze so he can have one once in a while.