There’s a work event with catered food: sandwiches, cookies, soda. How do you navigate it?
The Short Answer
Work events test your approach in a social-professional context. You want to be present and collegial without derailing your eating. Options: eat before arriving (so you’re not hungry), focus on any protein options, skip the obvious junk, hold a drink to have something in your hands, engage with people rather than food. The goal is fitting in socially while not pretending the cookies don’t count. Colleagues likely care much less about what you eat than you fear.
Something to Sit With
How do you typically eat at work events?
What would conscious navigation look like at your next one?
How much of your eating at these events is hunger versus social expectation?
Learn More
The Work Event Challenge.
Work events create specific pressures:
Professional social expectations. Being seen, being present, being collegial matters. Food is often the social lubricant.
Limited options. Catering tends toward cheap and easy: sandwiches, chips, cookies, soda. Rarely health-focused.
Extended exposure. Multi-hour events with food continuously available.
Eating as participation. Standing around with nothing while others eat can feel awkward.
Mental energy elsewhere. You’re thinking about work things, not food strategy.
The Pre-Event Strategy.
Eat before. Arrive not hungry. When you’re satisfied, the catering table is less tempting.
Know what’s coming. If you can find out what will be served, you can plan. Often it’s predictable.
Set your intention. Before arriving, decide: What will I eat, if anything? This removes in-the-moment decisions.
Identify your limit. “I’ll have one small plate” or “I’ll skip the food entirely.” Decide in advance.
This is the page’s strongest move and it has the numbers to match. A plan that fixes when and where you will act (an implementation intention) carries a medium-to-large effect across 94 studies, and it helps most precisely where initiation is the hard part.[1] A work event is that case exactly: the decision is easy at your desk and hard beside the table.
At the Event.
Survey first. Before grabbing food, see what’s available. Look for:
- Protein options (meat, cheese, shrimp if you’re lucky)
- Vegetables (often limited but sometimes present)
- Fruit (often available)
- What to skip (cookies, chips, soda)
Build a plate strategically. If eating, prioritize protein and any vegetables. Skip the bread, chips, cookies.
Hold something. A drink (water, coffee, sparkling water) gives you something to do with your hands. You look occupied without eating.
Position away from the food table. Stand where the food isn’t. Distance reduces mindless grazing: proximity is a measured lever rather than a figure of speech, and distance raises rated effort, possibly below deliberation.[2][3]
Engage with people. The event is about connection, not eating. Focus on conversations. When talking, you’re not eating.
The Sandwich Problem.
Work event sandwiches are often:
- White bread (refined carbs)
- Thin protein
- Lots of filler
- Built for volume and cost rather than for keeping you full
Options:
- Eat the filling, skip the bread
- Take one half instead of a whole
- Skip entirely if better options exist
- Eat it if it’s genuinely the best option and you’re hungry
No approach is wrong if it’s conscious.
The Cookie Table.
Catered cookies are hard to resist:
- Visible and accessible
- Unlimited quantity
- Sweet and hyperpalatable: sugar and fat together above the thresholds one paper uses to define it[4]
- “Just one” seems reasonable
The problem: “just one” often becomes two, three, more, especially over a multi-hour event.
Options:
- Skip entirely (cleanest)
- Have one, intentionally, then move away from the table
- Acknowledge the desire without acting (“I notice I want that cookie”); this is urge surfing[5], usually taught as letting an urge rise and pass without acting on it
Whatever you choose, choose it. Don’t sleepwalk through the cookie table.
The Social Navigation.
Your plate likely gets less attention than you fear. Your colleagues are probably focused on their own experience; how closely anyone watches is not something measured here. What they do influence is how much you eat: intake tracks the people around you, and in diary records meals eaten in company run longer.[6][7] The setting works as a cue too, not only the food.[8]
Participation doesn’t require eating. Being present, engaging in conversation, showing up: these are what matter professionally. Whether you eat the pasta salad is unlikely to factor into your reputation.
“I already ate” is sufficient. If questioned, this usually ends the conversation. Or: “I’m not very hungry.”
You can leave. You don’t have to stay for the entire event if staying means extended food temptation.
After the Event.
Don’t compensate. If you ate more than intended, the next meal continues normally. Don’t skip meals or restrict to “make up for it.” This is the failure the advice exists to prevent. On Polivy and Herman’s account, an argument rather than an experiment, once a limit is breached the reasoning flips from I am staying within it to the day is spent anyway, and the overshoot follows the abandonment rather than the food.[9]
Learn for next time. What worked? What didn’t? What will you do differently at the next work event?
Keep perspective. One work event doesn’t determine your trajectory. It’s data, not destiny.
Further reading:
- Herman CP et al., Social Influences on Eating[10] (2019)
- Higgs S & Thomas J, “Social influences on eating”[11] — Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, 2016
Written by AI, directed and approved by me. How this is made →