Posted by:
Erick
(
)
Date: August 08, 2013 02:36PM
I suppose another suggestion is...don't drink at all. I've never had this problem in a business, and nobody questions my reasons. I like beer, but I don't drink it much...particularly with dinner, simply because it's usually a gut bomb. The big challenge you are going to have as you move more and more into this space of corporate dining, is not what to drink, but what to eat. As a generalization, most corporate dining tends to happen among people who are workaholics (and not uncommonly alcoholics), who work hard, eat well, drink well, sleep poorly, and exercise irregularly. It's the perfect recipe for packing on the pounds fast - and alcohol is an easy driver and facilitator of that reality.
Figure anywhere from 800 - 1200 calories for a main course, another 100 - 250 for an appetizer, and possibly another 350 - 700 for a desert. You're already at 1250 - 2150 calories just for dinner. Now throw drinks on top of that: 150 - 300 for a cocktail, 320 for two beers, and another 150 -300 for a cocktail or one more beer. Now you've added another 620 - 920 calories to this meal - realistically given all the variables, you can push dinner to a modest 1000 calories, to an extreme 3000 calories.
To continue painting a bad picture, a lot of the corporate dining that I've experienced starts anywhere from 7:00 to 9:00 at night, and frankly 7:00 is a bit early. This is when your metabolism slows down naturally, and alcohol exacerbates this situation further, and then contributes to sleeping difficulties, which makes getting up harder, etc, etc, etc.
In other words, there is nothing wrong with an occasional business dinner with some drinks, but if you are in the kind of business where this kind of thing becomes more regular...I would eat of lot dinners without alcohol.