Have you ever noticed that you are exposed to more food temptations at your job than at your mom’s house? It’s amazing! Everybody EATS at work. Sometimes food almost seems to be the central theme of any office. A birthday cake with ice cream appears for every birthday — even the janitor gets a birthday cake. Every holiday demands a feast, sometimes catered and sometimes provided by the employees themselves. And then there are the daily lunch food choices. Yikes! Fast food? Good grief! How are you supposed to stay on your weight loss diet with all of that temptation day in and day out?

I’ve come up with a few ideas. They might not work for every single office pig-out, but they will work at least most of the time.

1. Take your lunch with you from home. If there’s a kitchen at work with a microwave, you’ll have hundreds of choices for diet lunches that can be heated quickly in a microwave. You’ll find them in the frozen food section of your local grocery store. If there’s no kitchen, make a sandwich using diet bread and low-cal sandwich meats. There are hundreds of choices.

2. Be sure to take bottled water with you to work. Bottled water doesn’t have to be kept cold. No opener is required. You can stick it in your bottom desk drawer. Water is great stuff; there are no calories, no fat, no nothing. You can drink all the water you can hold no matter what kind of weight loss diet you are following.

3. When you know food is going to be at work, cut back on calories, fat, and carbs at home for a day or so before you face the major temptation at work.