How to avoid overeating at the company's quarterly update meeting

Before the meeting
There is a corporate update meeting tonight after work.


To be honest, I'm apprehensive about attending. The meeting extends the workday and to encourage employee attendance, there are serving a finger foods to enjoy. So, this is more than an update meeting, it is a minefield of potential eating triggers.

I'm going up against my three main triggers for overeating:

• Social eating;
• Anxiety from food itself: finger foods are laced with salt, sugar and fat that creates the maximum allure and strong short term cravings. This food that your mind (and my mind) wants to eat, but it is not food that my body wants as it is packed with fat and calories; 
• Deviating from my normal routine. 

At this moment, I'm considering my plan. A few options come to mind:

• go with the flow and eat whatever
• eat my small container of cut fruit at the meeting instead of the food that is offered
• eat my small container of cut fruit just before heading to the meeting
• decide on the number and type of finger foods I can eat and use visualization techniques to practice
• some sort of combination of the options above.

What am I going to do? What would you do?



After the meeting
The meeting is over. My plan for handling the food at town hall worked well. My plan was simple: eat my small container of cut fruit at the meeting and up to five finger foods. I spent a few minutes visualizing and thinking about my plan before heading to the meeting.

I'm slightly surprised that I wasn't anxious or feeling deprived. When the food stations opened, I looked to see what was available, and picked one of each of the following items:

• beef wellington ball
• coconut shrimp
• mushroom tartlet
• small macaroon
• apple/cinnamon spice tart thing

I enjoyed eating my plate of things, carefully considering the taste of each piece. Once I was done, I was satisfied. I didn't want or need more food. Heck, I'm a little surprised that I didn't eat my fruit. I believe it also helped that I ate two parts (toast with tuna and a bowl of roasted spaghetti squash) of my lunch at 2 pm.

Once I arrived home, I ate a bowl of pasta, before heading into the kids' night time routine.

Having a plan really worked. I'll make sure I have one in place for all events!