Don’t put too much emphasis or build up on a pending social event. If you count down the days to a big eating event like a prisoner counting down days to being released, I can almost guarantee that you will end up eating way more than you planned. When people do this and the final day arrives, they can’t contain themselves, go bonkers, eat a bunch of crap, undo a ton of progress and then go back to dieting in a feeble attempt to make up for it.

Take it nice and slow – don’t do anything stupid in the days before. No need to train your butt off and crash diet, no need to up your cardio to two hours a day. You’ll just end up eating more junk if you do. This is due to a combination of psychology and physiology (i.e. plummeting leptin.)

When you’re at your social eating occasion, you probably won’t know the calories in your meals, or at best, you will only be able to estimate or guess. For example, eating at restaurants, eating at friends’ homes, or even eating home-cooked meals when the recipe is cooked in big batches.

Use intuition (“Get Fit Forever” Program): Choose healthily, low-density, satisfying foods (avoiding the obvious calorie bombs) and be smart about eating smaller portions (use a small plate). Pay attention to your feelings of fullness (with the fullness scale) and stop eating when your hunger becomes neutral.

Research the restaurant website: Look at menus and calorie information online in advance and make specific choices of what to eat before you arrive.

Use a calorie counter app: Simply look up the combination meal, whether that’s chicken tacos, spaghetti and meatballs, or stew. Chances are, those types of meals are in a good calorie database, right along with the individual foods. It may not be identical to the meal you’re eating, but at least it will be in the ballpark if the serving size is matched. Heres a link to the MyFitnessPal app in iTunes.

If you do your own cooking, the calories and macros in your home-cooked foods and recipes can still be very easily counted in most cases, even when it’s a big pot of stew or a recipe with multiple ingredients.

Like most parties, the foods available during your social event are probably going to be higher in carbs and fats, and lower in protein. With that in mind, the best way to allow for that is to stick to high protein, low carb, low fat foods at all other times during that day.

For example, if you have an lunch work buffet tomorrow, you could allow for that by planning to have a protein shake for breakfast before the buffet, and then some lean chicken breast and fibrous veggies for dinner afterwards. This leaves you ample carbs and fats in your macro targets to enjoy during lunchtime. Want a great high protein, low carb, low fat meal that fills me right up? Check out this “Protein Fluff” recipe (only 260 calories)

Try to fill up more with protein and veggies in your early meals and save the more calorie-dense stuff for later on (i.e. treats, cakes and alcohol), after you’re hunger has reduced from the main meal.

During your social eating event, you can choose to allocate your food however you wish. But to ensure minimal fat storage and maximum satisfaction (feeling fuller on less calories), I suggest firstly going for foods containing protein (i.e. lean meats, fish, eggs) and foods high in volume (i.e. veggies).

Eating protein during the event will fill you up more and leave you feeling more satisfied, which reduces the chances of you going over your remaining calorie budget. You can then use your remaining hunger to enjoy some carbs to finish (i.e. desserts). Protein also has a higher thermic effect (requires more calories to digest), which will help with any required “damage control”.

People eat out twice as much now as they did 20 years ago with the average person eating out 4.2 times per week. During that time obesity has tripled! What’s the problem with buffets and restaurants? Firstly it’s down to the big food portions and the high calorie meals. Many typical restaurant meals can contain over 1000 calories in the main course alone! If you add an appetiser and a dessert you could add another 1000 calories easily. One slice of cheesecake alone has over 700 calories in it, cheese nachos or mozzarella sticks have 800 calories and a typical steak with fries has 1200 calories. That’s half your daily calories for the day just to maintain your weight gone right there.

Do what lean people do and keep restaurant foods to once or twice a week, and make smart choices with quantity and quality while eating out. Here are some tips:

If you have chosen to use my carb cycling technique, here is your chance to make the day a “refeed”. During the other days of the week, maintain your normal calorie deficit and continue to “take steps forward” in your fat loss progress. Then during the day of your social event, you can increase your calorie intake all the way up to maintenance, or a slight surplus.

By treating the day as a planned refeed instead of a “cheat day”, you are setting a controlled caloric target of how much you can eat (tracking calories just like any other day), before going back to your regular deficit calories. This way, it’s like you’re taking six steps forwards, and one day standing still, during the week of your event, which is way better than taking six steps forwards and then falling 6 steps backward from an out-of-control cheat day.

The additional calories for the day should come mainly in the form of carbohydrates. This actually provides numerous benefits to your metabolism, glycogen stores, energy, hunger levels and diet adherence. I’ve written an entire section on the benefits of carb cycling, including a guide on how to implement it. Click the button below to check it out.

Now that you’ve given yourself more calories to play with (refeed day instead of deficit day), it’s time to decide how much of those day’s calories you want to allocate to your social eating event itself. Just like not knowing exactly how much you’ll spend on an overseas holiday trip, you can simply allocate a calorie budget to work from, and go from there. For instance, if you have 2500 calories available for the day, you can allocate anywhere from 30 – 80% of those calories for a social dinner in the evening.

If you choose to select the higher proportion of calories (in this case 2000), just remember that only leaves 20% (e.g. 500 calories) for the majority of the day. For someone who does intermittent fasting (details here), then you may find this easy, but if you predict that arriving at the event too hungry will cause you to go off the rails at eat everything in sight, then it may not be the best choice.

If you choose to select the lower proportion of calories (say 750 calories), you won’t be as hungry when you arrive for dinner. The only downside here is that you are more restricted in how much you can eat for the evening.