I am at a big company meeting and our group is over 1000 people. We’re at a European resort location that can handle such a group (although we have little free time to sightsee, it’s nice to eat lunch sitting outdoors in sunshine in January).

I have been pretty good about my eating goals (drinking lots of water & leaving food leftover).

It helps that the food is not good. It’s apparently pretty typical for big vacation resorts with all-inclusive food plans (like Club Med etc) but from the several meals I’ve had basically the bottom line is that everything is edible but nothing is Good.

One of the first lessons I really followed from Dr Hope was paying attention to the pleasure while eating, I’ve found that after several weeks of really paying attention to pleasure while you eat you can find it — whether the pleasure be from a 5-star gourmet restaurant, or an apple, or a quick snack on the road. But I’ve been pretty surprised to see that once you’re used to finding pleasure in food, that when you eat something that is DEVOID of pleasure, you don’t want to eat as much.

So tasteless salad veggies, fish in yucky sauces, bad bread, sweet and gross lasagne, mealy melon and lots of other things have sat barely touched on my plate in the past few days. Even the fruit is a crapshoot, never great, sometimes okay, frequently yucky. So I don’t worry so much about taking an extra sliver of cheese (the fat! the calories!) because I know I won’t be overeating anything.

I did find myself back in stress eating for half an hour yesterday, when some organizational problems in the meeting occured at the same time as the coffee break. The cookies (a bit stale, too sweet, chemically-enhanced mass produced pseudo-shortbread) were on platters all around as we tried to work out a problem. I ate half of one early on and ditched the second half because it wasn’t good. But I ate 3 more just because they were there and I was distracted and stressed. Today : no more bad cookies. And I grabbed an extra apple at breakfast to eat during the coffee break - it will be much more satisfying.