Hello everybody, it’s Brian O’hAongusa here, nutritionist and coach at Triage Method. Today, I’m going to be talking to you about strategies that you can implement when it comes to balancing healthy eating and socialising, so you can better manage your nutrition around things like social occasions and potentially even unplanned events. Maybe you didn’t know about it ahead of time but find yourself unexpectedly invited out to a meal on a weekday after work. These events are spontaneous, and I want to go through all these scenarios to show you what we do with our clients. This way, you can manage situations for yourself without derailing your overall health, body composition, performance goals, or whatever they may be. This is something I help my clients with all the time, so I know it is possible to do and there are better and worse ways to do this. However, it is generally against the backdrop of having the diet fundamentals squarely in place first and foremost.
Balancing Healthy Eating & Socialising
So, what is the main issue with balancing healthy eating and socialising? Why do we even need to think about dealing with social events and unplanned events that pop up? Well, the challenge is that they can predispose people to consuming more calories. There’s often more energy available or more calories in the foods that are at some of these events. Also, there might be higher intakes of alcohol consumed at some of these events or social occasions. This, of course, contributes to the total energy content and calorie count. If there are consistent excesses of calories consumed over weeks and months, then that could lead to weight gain or fat gain over time, which may not be in line with your goals.
Therefore, it’s worth having strategies to manage these situations. Realistically, our clients live in the real world. They’re not going to give up their social lives or decline every single event invitation because they’re focused on body composition goals. We need to come up with strategies to help people. At Triage Method, we pride ourselves on building the coaching strategy and plan around the individual and their lifestyle. We help them manage these challenges. If I were to tell someone, “We can get you fantastic results in 12 weeks, but you have to avoid all social events,” it wouldn’t be realistic. I don’t want to be that kind of coach. Instead, I aim to help people find solutions to these problems. I want them to understand how to manage their nutrition long term.
Another potential issue could be feelings of shame that might arise after events like these. If people feel like their actions concerning food or alcohol consumption were not in line with their goals, they might feel guilt. Thoughts like, “I ate so much at the wedding,” or “I consumed so many calories during dinner and drinks” can weigh heavily on one’s mind. This guilt can negatively influence future behaviours, perhaps leading to neglecting nutrition or skipping exercises. We don’t want that.
Strategies For Balancing Healthy Eating & Socialising
Now, let’s start looking at some of the strategies we use with our clients. For most social events, you can plan for them in advance. It’s unlikely that all social events will spring up unexpectedly. Therefore, we can try to plan for them. I often do a visualisation exercise with many of my clients for these scenarios. I tell them to try to actually visualise going to this event. How do you want to act when you’re there? What food choices do you want to make? How do you want to feel afterwards? This visualization provides a guide for making choices. Instead of being overwhelmed at the event, the client has a plan in mind. Many people might attend an event feeling nervous or panicked, unsure of what to do. They might give in to temptation, leading to regrettable decisions and triggering feelings of shame, as I mentioned earlier.
Visualise and Plan
So, I like for people to think ahead, and visualise, “what would a really good effort at one of these events look like for me?” So it could be to do with the food choices that you make. It could be doing things like honouring your fullness levels when you’re eating. Or it could be something like, “okay, I’m going to have my main meal, but then I’m going to have no dessert” or something like that. There are a lot of ways you can go about this, and this will be different from person to person.
But the point here is to go in with some sort of plan in mind of how you want this to go. And what I want to make really clear here is that you have to be realistic about these plans that you’re making, okay? Because if I ask someone to go through this exercise with me and they say to me, ‘Okay, Brian, perfect would look like I’m going to this barbecue, I’m going to prepare all my own food, I’m going to bring that with me, I’m not going to touch anything that’s there,’ you could do that, but I don’t think that’s necessary for the vast majority of people. Unless you are potentially a physique competitor and you’re close to a competition or you’re some sort of competitive athlete where it warrants that you are this tight and rigid and strict with your nutrition, it’s not necessary to be that restrictive about it.
Review
Similarly, if we haven’t done the planning for an event like this, and the client goes to it anyway, we can do sort of a review of how that actually went. So, for example, you could go on a stag weekend. Okay, and we’ll discuss that, we’ll discuss how it went in terms of food and potentially alcohol consumption. And I can say to you, ‘Okay, well, if this was going to happen again next week, what would you do differently, if anything?’ And that can give you a lot of good guidelines in terms of, ‘All right, I know I went to that stag last weekend, didn’t really go the way I planned it to, or I wasn’t really happy with it in retrospect, so I know for next time, I’ll make certain adjustments to what I’m doing with my nutrition, what I’m doing with my alcohol consumption, and therefore, I can make better choices next time.’ So, you learn from each experience, right? And that’s important because, in a lot of cases, people will, if it doesn’t go the way they had planned, they just try and forget about it, kind of stick their head in the sand, they don’t want to review it because they feel potentially ashamed of how it went, which I discussed already is part of a problem here, and they don’t actually learn anything from it, so next time it comes around, they potentially just make all the same mistakes again, which is a big waste because we can learn a lot from the mistakes that we make.
Energy Balance
So then, another thing we can look at is how can we actually manage energy intake overall because that is part of the main concern here. As I said, people overconsume calories at events like these, potentially derailing them from their goals. So we can do things like calorie budgeting, for example, which is where, if you have an event coming up that you’re aware of and you have advanced notice, let’s say you have a wedding or something to go to on a Saturday, you can do a bit of calorie budgeting. If you’re tracking your calories, and if not, we can look at portion control, but say if you’re tracking your calories, you can shave off, say, 100, 200, 300 calories per day leading up to that in the week, for example. So, if the wedding’s on Saturday, and you shave off 200 calories a day Monday to Friday, that’s a thousand calories extra that you can have spare for the week. And as we know, as we talk about all the time, average calories are what drive overall changes in body composition, right? Whether you’re in a surplus, whether you’re at maintenance, whether you’re in a fat loss phase or in a deficit, if the average calories at the end of the week are where you need them to be, in most cases, there is some nuance to this, but in most cases, you will get the results that you want.
Calorie banking and calorie budgeting can work quite well. Now, there are limitations to this, of course. I wouldn’t want people trying to conserve excessive amounts of calories and then save up for a massive blowout over a weekend, right? It’s not really a healthy or sustainable dietary practice to have. It really just looks like a kind of restrict-binge behaviour, which we absolutely do not want to support. So, generally, I suggest to people that they don’t try and bank more than, say, 10% of their calories per day leading up to an event like that.
And as I alluded to earlier, you can also manage your portions overall. So maybe you’re not tracking your food, but you can try and reduce the portions of, say, the carbohydrates in the meals across the week or the fats in meals across the week, and that will allow for this kind of budgeting that I’m talking about. A lot of people find it useful to use intermittent fasting on the day of an event, as this allows them to save some calories for later in the day. So, for example, if you’re going out in the evening time to this event, then there’s going to be more calories consumed at it, or it’s more likely that there will be, the you potentially skip breakfast, you have lunch, and maybe a snack before you go to the event, and therefore you’ve saved quite a lot of calories or energy to then go towards that event. And that’s something you can use in conjunction with something like the calorie banking or the calorie budgeting. And again, there are limitations to this. I wouldn’t really want people trying to fast all day before going out for a meal because really it just increases the likelihood that you end up overeating at the meal because you’re so hungry. So, I would prefer to see people still eating some nice, wholesome, nutritious meals in the build-up to whatever the event is on the day. We want people to make quite filling choices in those cases. So, a lot of emphasis on high-protein foods, a lot of emphasis on plant foods like fruits and vegetables. They’re going to be quite filling, quite low in calories, quite nutrient-dense. So, the best things to be structuring your diet around if you’re trying to save some degree of carbohydrates or fat for the energy that they provide for the event later on.
Overall Diet Set Up
Another thing we can do is actually try and build this into the plan, actually try and facilitate events at the weekends or just being able to go out for meals or being able to get a takeaway, things like that. That’s something that we can actually plan for for our clients, and it just comes back to how you set up someone’s energy intake across the week and those targets. So, for example, if somebody is eating on average 2,000 calories a day for their goals, well, that 2,000 calories per day is actually the same as 1,800 calories for five days of the week and then 2,500 calories for two days of the weekend. So, that actually works out just the exact same, and that’s essentially what you’re going to see when someone is trying to do that calorie banking approach. But this is just something that we might set up well in advance. Say, ‘Okay, look, based on your lifestyle, based on what you want to do here with your goals, this could be the right setup for you.’ And a lot of people really find it easier to stay on track and stick to what their targets are when they have it set up like that.
Now, there are some disadvantages to that, of course, because if you’re someone who really cares about their training performance and getting a lot of training output, or you’re an athlete, it probably doesn’t make a lot of sense to squeeze a large degree of your calorie intake into something like the weekend because you’re going to be somewhat under-fueled the rest of the week, which is not going to be good for training sessions during that time. Similar to that five-day, two-day approach, you can also have a six-day, one-day approach, for example. So, to use the same example that I used earlier, if the average goal is 2,000 calories per day, and you do six days at 1,800 calories, that gives you 3,200 calories to actually play with for one day of the week. So that can be another way to go about this. And again, there are some limitations to this, and we have to look exactly how this is structured because, you know, if 2,000 calories a day is your goal and eating nothing on one day so that you can eat 4000 calories another day and then it averages out at 2000 calories, that’s obviously not good dietary practice. That is just super restrictive behavior potentially in conjunction with just intentional overeating or binge eating. We don’t want that. Don’t get into that as we properly said, oh, ask me within reason and there are some limitations on it, but it definitely can work if it’s structured properly.
I think overall and broadly, we need to consider, like, is this actually going to throw you off if you go to an event like this? Because that’s something that people might run into when they might have an unplanned event. In this case, I’ve talked a lot about pre-planned events, events that you have notice for, but let’s say you do go out for dinner on an evening, and you weren’t planning on it, but you got the invitation, you wanted to go. Okay, like, if you consume more calories on that day of the week, does it actually have a massive impact on your overall week, which is really what’s important? Then I could argue multiple weeks are what’s important. You can just keep extending these timelines longer and longer and longer because basically when it comes to diet and nutrition, it’s what you’re doing most of the time for the long term that actually matters. So, is going out for one meal, even if it wasn’t planned, is that going to throw you off massively? Not really. We’ll see how it ends up at the end of the week, do you end up at maintenance calories. It might end up just in a small deficit where you might not see much fat loss, but you’re still in the deficit. That’s often what happens, to be honest. It’s very unlikely that it’s going to throw everything off for you. And what we often find is, it’s about how people respond to situations like that because if you go in and you have the meal and maybe you start to panic and you get into this sort of all-or-nothing thinking and you’re saying, ‘Well, screw it, I’ve screwed up now, I’ll just have whatever,’ and that will potentially lead to worse outcomes for you, worse behaviours overall that might actually bleed into the following days, which we don’t want, of course. And it’s all just because of how you responded to that, based on what you believed to be true about it. Thinking that, it was just completely derailing your diet. But the reality is, it hasn’t. We just have to see how it fits in with the rest of the week, and then adjust from there.
If you’re tracking body weight and you experience a spike in body weight as a result of this, you may again think, ‘Oh crap, I’ve ruined everything. Why did I do that? I’m such an idiot,’ etc., etc. Again with the negative self-talk. When the reality is, we have to see what that looks like on average across the course of the week. Weight spikes for a lot of different reasons, and it’s rarely a case that it’s because you ate too much and gained a lot of body fat. Very, very, very, very, very, very rarely is that the reality. And honestly, it takes a lot of overeating to gain a significant amount of body fat in a short space of time.
Step Back And Think
If you go to something like say a barbecue that’s unplanned and you’re showing up, you know you have choices that you can make in that situation. So take a breath, relax, and think about, ‘what choices are going to be better for me here?’ If there are offerings like hot dogs and sausages, etc., then these are often very high in calories, versus things like maybe chicken or turkey burgers. So, you could say, ‘Oh, I know those are the lower fat options, therefore, they’re lower in calories. Still a good source of protein. It’s going to be nice and filling.’ You know, maybe you have something like a turkey burger in a bun, maybe you get some vegetables, things like that. So, you just stop for a moment to actually think, ‘Okay, I’m in this situation. Maybe it wasn’t planned that I was going to be here, but let’s consider how I can actually do the best that I can in this situation based on what I’ve got to work with.’
If you can do that most of the time, it is very unlikely that you’re going to fail when it comes to managing your nutrition. You can also think about what trade-offs you’re willing to make in these situations depending on what your goals are. So you may say, ‘You know, okay, well, I’m going to keep it to two drinks, not have any more than that, or I’m going to have a nice big main meal, and then I’m going to check with myself later on if I want dessert. And if I’m not that hungry, maybe I’ll just leave it.’ Okay, so you always have a lot of choices that you can make. And if you just don’t panic, don’t fall into this all-or-nothing thinking, thinking you’ve ruined everything by going to this event, you’ll probably make better choices and you’re better off.
And something that I coach a lot of people on is to implement a slow and mindful eating approach to meals in these situations, especially meals out, especially meals that you haven’t prepared yourself. Such a good place to implement slow, mindful eating because you can take your time with it. You can check in with yourself, see how full you’re feeling across the meal, and it takes the sort of anxiety away from this. So you just relax and say, ‘Okay, look, I may not have planned to be here, but I’m here now. I’m going to try and make good choices. I’m going to eat slowly. I’m going to enjoy the food,’ and just not getting yourself into that panicked and anxious state about the food decisions will actually facilitate you making better food decisions.
Balancing Healthy Eating & Socialising Conclusion
There are a lot of options available to help you to stick to a healthy diet pattern overall, while still being able to socialise like a normal human. It is unlikely that you are going to stick to a diet long term, if you aren’t actually able to engage in eating with other people and actually enjoy your diet. So learning the skills need to balance healthy eating and socialising will dramatically increase the likelihood of your long term success.
If this content is something that you definitely resonate with, that you definitely struggle with, as it is for a lot of our clients, then consider how we might be able to help you on a one-to-one basis through our online coaching services. They will be really tailored to you, and we can look at the exact situations you’re coming up against and see how we can actually figure out how to solve those for you, help you manage your nutrition long term overall.
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Brian OhAonghusa
Hey I’m Brian O'hAonghusa, nutrition coach at Triage.
I have a bachelors degree in Human Nutrition & I’m currently doing a masters degree in Counselling & Psychotherapy (cognitive behavioural modalities). I have coached a wide variety of clients since 2017 and in particular I love to help people to transform their health & their relationship with food for the better.
I enjoy lifting weights, BJJ, basketball, reading, eating and spending time in nature with my dog, Kodi.
