I have a Chinese buffet just down the road and I usually go there on a Sunday night after weigh-in with my fiancé. My strategy is:
* keep as many daily propoints as I can for dinner. Normally this involves not having anything to eat from brunch (roughly 11.30 am) because I've got my weigh-in at 7 pm and I want to have an empty stomach. I don't even drink at all for a good few hours because of that. Sunday is also my weigh-in day as I said, so I have all of my weeklies available, which I consider gone after the Chinese buffet
* on arrival, have a bowl of soup. This fills me up and I look at the food less hungrily
* fill up my plate with vegetables. Steamed broccoli, cauliflower, carrots, onions, mushrooms in oyster sauce, you say it, I'll fill my plate
* choose prawns rather than fried food. My buffer has prawns with vegetables which I happily keep on filling my dish with.
* only a spoon of rice and a couple of chicken tandoori (which I LURVE) otherwise the dish would burst
* after dinner, fill my dessert bowl with fruit and only top it up with a tiny bit of ice cream
This strategy has always worked really well, my fiancé always wonders how I can eat "that much" at the Chinese and then lose weight LOL.
the following day I keep myself very low in points, most of the time trying not to have my full 29 on Monday, to compensate (maybe 27 or 28, but not often most of the time I stay within the 29!). Then I have my 29 all week until the following Sunday
When I was on VP I kept on doing this but on the Monday I would have the bare minimum of my points, like 14, or sometimes even less than that even if I knew it wasn't allowed
