Food Day at work

Can you have just one piece? Or do you fear one will lead to another and then another and so on?

If these are trigger foods for you, then it is hard when they are staring you in the face. But you are stronger than that food and if you don't want to eat it then don't. You CAN do it.

Best advice I have is to not let yourself get hungry. Drink plenty of fluids and snack on options that fit your plan and won't trigger you to over eat. Show those treats who is boss!!

or just dont do it, have some willpower. You're gonna need it.

I just don't have any of it. It's always not as good as expected, and 99% of the time not worth the calories.

Finding the willpower the first time is the hardest, but, as with anything, it becomes MUCH easier every time. Now, it's just automatic.

You might get questions and prompted by colleagues, but I just say "no, thank you". They stop pestering you eventually and they don't need to know why you don't want any.

You can avoid it. My co-workers bring in crap like that all the time. Just don't look at or think about the goodies.

I am one of those people who if I eat just one brownie I'm completely derailed, so I avoid food days all together. I just don't participate. You can choose not to participate, it's just a matter of choosing.

PRMinx wrote: »

If I have the calories available, I have a brownie and move on.

This.

Or I stay the heck away from it and continue on.

I have the same problem when there is food at work. It is so distracting! I try to reason with myself on a couple of points. First, a lot of the time there is no nutritional information available and I have no clue how many calories to log. I figure if I can't log it accurately, I shouldn't be eating it. Second, something like a cookie or a brownie can be bought any day if I just walk down the street from my office. I never go buy them though. It's not the money, it's the calories I don't want to spend. I figure I shouldn't eat it unless I would have gone out to buy it if it wasn't there. Most of the time the answer is no. Also, as someone else pointed out already, a lot of the time the thing isn't half as good as I'd expected anyway and then I'll feel cheated and like I wasted calories on crap. I try to keep in mind the worst version of whatever it is I've ever had and how disappointed I was. That's all if I'm being really strict on myself. Sometimes I'll just eat it, maybe try to log something similar, maybe just pretend it never happened, and move on.

PRMinx wrote: »

If I have the calories available, I have a brownie and move on.

This. Eat, enjoy, continue on. Life is to be lived, not deprived of the things you enjoy.

Those are the hardest days for me too. I usually give in to a few sweets that I actually would like to try.. Before I would just try it all for the sake of eating it.. but think about it before you take a piece... do you really want it? Try just taking on dessert and enjoying it longer.. talk to co-workers between bites and drink lots of water with it

If your end goal is more important than all that food, then you won't eat it. It's okay to indulge once in a while but work food just makes me angry - it's never worth it to me. Never tastes as good.

I went all of December without eating anything anyone brought into work. Nothing. That was my mini-goal. Now I don't even want it. Go a month without baked goods. Trust me, they just won't look appealing. Now I'd rather have nuts or beef jerky or cheese.

We had scrumptious cupcakes in my office yesterday and I used willpower (it was hard) and a text to a friend for motivation, and I didn't have any. I told myself it will take 30 seconds to eat that sucker and how long to work it off? Later I looked at the calorie content on the package and was so glad I didn't. 380 cal, 21 g fat, 33g sugar! Made it all worthwhile because that is a lot of treadmill time.

Need2Exerc1se wrote: »

abbystewart319 wrote: »

ahhhh Willpower! Something so foreign to me in all my years! What do they say? “Willpower is a muscle you use. The more you use it the stronger it gets!”  These are very much trigger foods. My favorite things to eat are junk foods and snacks. Super Bowl Sunday is like a holiday because of the plethora of dips and snacks. Thank you all for your advice! Even just reading these and writing back is a great distraction! Hey, there’s an idea! Working as a distracting (being that I am actually at work and all!) 

Thank you!!

I have not heard that quote - “Willpower is a muscle you use. The more you use it the stronger it gets!” - before. I love it!!

It is a great and very true quote.

I would say that the ultimate willpower is being able to have one thing, or one bit, without bingeing. I think that's something to work towards.

I can't 'eat just one'.. so I feel your pain. when I make this complaint, my husband reminds me that you have no idea 'who just sneezed on the food'.. it makes it not so enticing!

This is the one thing I'm excellent at giving advice on lol.

I work in a building that brings in catered food for our customers daily. We have catered breakfast and lunch and after the customers eat, we're free to eat whatever we want. My god...thing bring in cakes every day. We also have free snacks (chips and cookies) and a giant fridge full of soda for free. This is what made me gain of course lol.

For the snacks and desserts, I went cold turkey. It took several weeks and I literally almost shed a tear every time I walked past cheesecake lmao, but if you can just make it past a few weeks, you'll lose that urge to indulge. It was a self control issue with me. I had to prove I could leave it alone before I could have it in moderation.

One of the biggest things that helps me is I literally bring groceries into work. I'm sure I look crazy having an entire overhead storage cabinet at my desk with various foods and I keep refrigerated and frozen foods on the community fridge. I make sure my snacks are things that are both healthy and tasty. For example- I keep Special K chips at my desk rather than grabbing 3 bags of regular chips for the snack basket. I keep frozen blueberries for something sweet. I have various lunch meat and tuna. And a number of other snacks.

I still enjoy some of the food, I just make sure I plan out my day and try to avoid the things that don't fit it. One day, the delicious Mac and cheese as a side can work. Another day, I just stick to some edamame. It's all a balancing act.

But the first step was just getting self control to not grab a couple red velvet cake pieces.