Well, my daily planning sheets pulled a success story today. I knew tonight could be challenging as I’d invited a few of my employees over to coach them on a huge presentation they have next week (they are very junior, it’s their first presentation of this kind, to my boss’s boss). They were so grateful I offered them my evening that they insisted on bringing dinner - pizza. When planning my day I realized that I had better get in a decent-sized healthy snack, because a hungry girl around pizza is not usually a diet success.

I wasn’t even that hungry for a snack but had a bunch of cherry tomatoes while working on something and then ate the yogurt anyway to be stronger for later.

What I didn’t expect was to eat McDonald’s in France. I have not eaten at McDonald’s in 4 years - well, even more, because I didn’t even eat at McDonalds when I lived in the US. It’s probably been 7 or 8 years since I’ve eaten under the golden arches.

I was with a different employee today and we were looking for a place we could work in peace and quiet (we usually pick hotels or sometimes restaurants) and he said “oh, we should go to McDonald’s”. …okay. He was right - free wifi, plugs for the computers, lots of space, very few people in the morning. We worked really well there, but of course the lunch rush started and we were getting hungry but still had another 2 hours of work to do… what were we going to do, go somewhere else for lunch? No, we ate McDonald’s. He of course “supersized” it and knew the menu pretty well (he’s 25 and has no weight issues, no problem). I however took 15 minutes to decide finally choosing a burger that looked like it was a “high quality” one on a good bun etc. No sauce on the thing (although one slice of cheese) and I added some ketchup. No fries, I had the salad, and Perrier. I just looked up on the website and I was duped - the burger I chose was one of the highest calorie ones on the menu even though it looked really plain (although I wonder if the calorie count is w the sauce that I didn’t have?). I did leave 3/4 of one of the buns, and overall the calories are fine (especially since I’m not officially counting them!) but still… McDonald’s is not the best diet choice. I would have been better off w 6 pieces of McNuggets if I could have stomached the processed-particle taste. Back in my McDonald’s days I did like those things.

All in all, I did well at McDonald’s and also saw no reason to go back.

And the pizza? No problem there either - I put out a HUGE platter of raw veggies (since we were all girls) and some chips that I don’t like. I ate more than my share of the veggies but restrained myself on the pizza, having 2 plain cheese slices. I was smart enough to put the remaining pizza directly in the outside trash bin, because half an hour after they left I found myself opening cupboards and the fridge looking around. I just brushed my teeth and went to bed, but if that leftover pizza had been lurking I might not have resisted.

So, two challenging situations handled with flying colors!