Social vs Special Occasions

I often talk to clients about the importance of differentiating between social occasions and special occasions.

Social occasions happen frequently. Probably twice per week on average, where you're with friends or colleagues in an environment where food and drink are abundant - at restaurants, bars, your friend's home, your home, etc.

Let's say you have 100 social events per year.

Special occasions, on the other hand, happen far less frequently. I believe we all have somewhere around 6-12 genuine special occasions per year.

Your birthday, your anniversary, Thanksgiving (if you celebrate it), Christmas Day (if you celebrate it), and any other important cultural or religious holidays you celebrate with food.

Let's say you have 10 special occasions per year.

On special occasions, it's completely reasonable to not think about tracking, to enjoy the food and drink, and basically consume more calories than you usually would.

10 special occasions like this is just 2.7% of the year.

That's nowhere near enough to have a noticeable impact on your rate of progress, even if you go completely all-out on those days.

Now let's think about those social occasions...

They can happen, conservatively, 100 times each year.

That's 27% of the year.

And this is the issue: if you treat normal social occasions the same as special occasions, you can't expect to get results.

Adding social events and special occasions together, that's essentially 30% of the year you're off track.

This is also assuming you're able to successfully get back on track with your regular habits the day after. If this is an issue for you, we can probably bump that 30% up to 40%…

You’re potentially off-track for 40% of the year.

Here's what I'd love to see you do instead:

First, continue to enjoy those special occasions.

Second, recognize that social occasions happen frequently and therefore it's important to be able to navigate them while achieving your goals.

Third, be honest with yourself about whether something is a social occasion ora special occasion. If your friend got a promotion at work and they're celebrating by taking you and your group of friends out to dinner, recognize it's a special occasion for them but probably a social occasion for you - after all, they got promoted, not you.

Fourth, plan for social occasions. Choose to go up to maintenance for the day (google "TDEE Calculator" and choose one of the calculators to estimate your calorie requirements for maintenance) and plan: for example, if you're going to a restaurant you can look up the menu ahead of time, choose what you're going to eat, and pre-track that dish in MyFitnessPal. Pre-track any drinks ordessert you want to have too. Saving the extra calories that day for the restaurant is probably going to be the best idea, simply because restaurant food tends to be very calorie-dense.

Seriously, learning the difference between social events and special occasions might just be the gamechanger you didn’t know you needed.