This Is How Many Calories You’ll End Up Consuming at the Work Christmas Party

Ah, the work Christmas party. The annual event that sees social awkwardness, free-flowing booze, and morning-after embarrassment collide with the inevitability of a bad cracker joke. In the final working days before Christmas, employees up and down Britain will be piling into tinselled function rooms to eat their body weight in sausage rolls and try desperately not to spill mulled wine over the boss' trousers.

But alongside the banging headaches and red faces the morning-after (the wine thing was an accident, OK?), nutritionists may have found another reason for you to feel gross AF post-Christmas work bash.

A study of 1,200 Brits carried out by market research company Censuswide and gym chain Fitness First found that the average office party attendee will consume 4,941 calories in one go—nearly double the daily recommended allowance for men. (And that's on top of the Christmas selection box you and your co-workers have been working your way through all day to calm the pre-party nerves.)

A third of those calories come from alcohol. The findings show that workers rack up on average three glasses of wine, three and a half pints, one and a half glasses of mulled wine, two glasses of Prosecco, and one Baileys while shuffle-dancing to Slade with Tim from Accounts.

Add to that a small pig's worth of pork-based canapés, a turkey dinner with all the trimmings (because you must eat at least five roasts at various social occasions before December 25), and Christmas pudding. Before you know it, you've basically consumed two day's calories in the space of five small talk-filled hours.

Ah well. If you can't let that top button loose at Christmas, when can you?