Mighty Oak Athletic Podcast S3:E106 - Sick season starts Saturday - The pillowcase is the problem
Key Takeaway
Halloween is the official kickoff to sick season. Every year the kids in our gym go from bright-eyed and healthy the week before Halloween to mopey, dull and coughing the week after, and they stay that way until spring break. The cause is a predictable four-month slide: clocks back, shorter days, more time indoors, less sunlight and movement, comfort food replacing real food, and a volume of sugar that starts with a pillowcase of candy and runs straight through New Year's. The fix is the Death Resistant framework (Recovery, Movement, Nutrition): protect sleep and morning light, get outside and keep training twice a week, eat protein-and-vegetable soups and stews, and put real guardrails on candy. That's not being the mean parent. That's parenting.
Why Your Kid Gets Sick the Week After Halloween (and Stays That Way Until March)
Every year I watch the same thing happen in the gym. The week before Halloween, the kids walking through the door are loud, bright-eyed and bouncing off the walls. They've spent a whole fall at outdoor practices, they're sleeping hard, and almost nobody is sick. The week after Halloween, something shifts. The energy drops. The sniffles start. By the middle of November I'm coaching a room full of kids who are mopey, dull, hacking and wheezing, and it stays that way until they perk back up sometime after spring break. I've seen it with thousands of kids over thirteen years. Halloween is the official kickoff to sick season, and it is not a coincidence.
Here's the chain of events. The clocks roll back this Sunday. The days get short. Everyone drifts indoors, which means less time moving in fresh air and less sunlight for vitamin D and for the circadian rhythms that run our sleep. The food changes too. Apples become apple cider donuts. Pumpkin seeds become pumpkin pie. And then the sugar arrives in a volume that would have been unimaginable a generation ago. Kids come home with pillowcases filled to the brim with king-size Hershey's bars and Kit Kats, and stacks of Reese's cups in every flavor imaginable (and I'll admit it, what these companies are doing with white chocolate right now is amazing). That pillowcase gets grazed on for two weeks.
Then we slide into Thanksgiving, which should be the best holiday of the year: great food, no gifts. Instead it has become a gluttonous affair where we eat well past the point of satisfied, and not even on the homemade pies our great-grandmothers baked. It's the chemical-laden, big-ag version cranked out by the millions, a cheap turkey raised on its own highly processed junk food, and vegetables smothered in cheese and heavy cream. From there it's weeks of holiday parties built around sugary drinks and calorie-dense beers, chased by heavy food and more processed sweets. Then we spend January, February and March rotating between colds, lethargy, the flu, and the "seasonal" depression that is surely connected to the lack of nutrition, sunlight, movement and quality sleep. Quality, not quantity, because we are definitely lying around more. Then spring break talk starts, we're twenty pounds heavier and feel terrible, and we say, I guess I'll start going to the gym and eat a salad.
This cycle has failed us and our kids for decades, and the numbers prove it. According to the CDC, adult obesity in the U.S. rose from 23% in the early 1990s to 40% today, and childhood obesity climbed from 5% in the early 1970s to a record 21%, with severe obesity in kids up seven-fold. We are the wealthiest nation in history. We spend more on health care than any country on earth, more than $4,000 per person above the next-highest spender, and we have the shortest life expectancy among large wealthy nations. The Commonwealth Fund's 2024 comparison of ten rich countries ranked the U.S. dead last overall and last in health outcomes. That isn't health care. That's sick care, and it is very good at treating what we could have prevented.
So let me say the uncomfortable part. Kids can absolutely enjoy candy. But a pillowcase full of it, grazed on for two weeks? That's poor parenting, and we're all guilty of it, myself included. Nobody wants to be the mean parent when every other kid brings a king-size Twix and a four-pack of Reese's cups to school for snack. But putting some guardrails around winter nutrition, movement and sleep, setting standards that build healthy boundaries, habits and expectations, is not mean. It's nice. It's what responsible adults do when they are actually parenting their children instead of running a child-centric home that bends to the whims and wants of an eight-year-old. I'm not writing this because I think I'm a better person or parent than you. I fail at parenting and life all the time. But this is one area where I have deep knowledge, passion and experience, and I'll tell you plainly: your kids are going to suffer for the next four months if you don't set them on a different path this fall.
The fix is simple, and it's the same framework we use at Mighty Oak Athletic every day: Recovery, Movement, Nutrition, the three pillars of Death Resistant. Recovery first. Protect bedtime like it matters, because it does, and get outside in the morning light, even for ten minutes, so the body knows what time it is. Movement next. Get out in the winter chill and hike the woods, have a snowball fight, walk the dog, shoot hoops in the driveway, and keep strength training twice a week with no game on the line. Nutrition last, because it's the easiest to overthink. Keep the summer spirit going with stews and soups chock-full of protein and vegetables, the way we lay it out in MOA Nutrition. Candy is for Halloween night and a couple of days after, then it goes away. And the rules in 13 Pounds in 30 Days work just as well for the adults in the house.
Let's be contrarian this year. Pull back from the candy, the cookies, the video games and the late-night movie marathons. And most importantly, let's find ways to celebrate and be with the people we love that aren't just excuses to eat too much, drink too much and want too much. [Insert the Dave Matthews Band "Too Much" line here.] [Insert closing song line here.] Welcome to the holiday season 2026. Cheers to finishing the year strong and healthy.
Be strong to be useful, Coach Mike
