This is not a good tip, more a 'what not to do' observation and cautionary tale.

My last former manager at work, a grifting insane harpy who was being abused by her husband and passed that abuse onto her hapless employees (mostly me), clearly had an out of control decades-long eating disorder to cope with whatever tragic weirdness was going on in her life. As long as I knew her--and apparently this had been her habit for many years--she would chainsmoke all day instead of eating daytime meals, and stick to a strict lemon-water/herbal tea and birdseed diet where people could see her. She was very petite and fragile-looking, had been an aspiring but failed dancer and 1980s London set aspirant in her youth, so maybe it was habit held over from those days.

The noticeable exception to this rule was whenever she'd had a bad day (like her husband had backhanded her or chewed her out, or one of her daughters had called), and then she'd come into work and go straight in back of our store without speaking to anybody, right out to where the dirty storeroom and bathroom were, and 'binge'. Though it wouldn't really count as bingeing to anyone who actually ate food. The weird thing was that she would specifically only ever binge on namebrand KitKat bars (the small classic/kids' size) and warm mini Diet Coke cans. You'd go in back to get stock for the shelves or change to refill the till, and you'd see her hunched in the dingy dark and zoned out to everything, flipping through glossy magazines, nibbling at one or two KitKats--guess she'd looked it up and they were the lowest calorie easily-available chocolate, or something?--and taking a few tiny sips of thesame tepid rancid Coke through her wrinkled lips, not even using a glass or adding ice and getting lipstick all over the can. At the time it just pissed me off, because I felt she was being way too weak and passive, plus she wasn't doing any work to help her staff let alone act an example of professional retail conduct.

She was also a snob who sucked up to local councillors and celebrities, bougie af for no merit, and had a compulsive buying/shopping habit. She frequently bought too much stock for the failing store, putting pressure on all of us employees to somehow move this overpriced and useless unsellable product after she was the one who fucked up buying too much. Guess she was so scared and traumatised by her home life and her past that she couldn't see her behaviours for what they were, and her limited diet had starved her brain to the point that she couldn't rationalise or make better choices to help herself or her daughters or her workers.

That said, I could see that underneath all that, she was actually a vulnerable and even sweet lady who deserved compassion and better treatment. A few times I met her daughters, only a few years older than me, and they struck me as being similar in nature. Suppose their patriarch just did a number on all of them. I still felt sorry for my manager, even after she tried to steal from me and use me as a human shield. She was an extremely sad, messed up shell of a woman, and being a bit of a soft-touch myself, one of the best and hardest things I ever did for myself was to leave her to her fate. Sometimes I think of her and hope she's left or killed her husband and sold their business, but I know that will never happen.

So yeah, eat your daily proteins and fats, don't be afraid of brunch, and stay away from brain-rotting sodas.