If you haven't gone off the rails once since you started and have no idea how you'll react, then I would suggest you not test your reaction with this event. Unless you're a "go big or go home" kinda guy. Still, I'd suggest testing with a smaller dose.

Also, you don't need to defend anything. You can give to a good cause in other ways.

Do you have any input over the veggie dogs used? The organisers might make an exception for someone with food intolerances. Gluten and soy free mycoprotein hot dogs (e.g mushroom protein used by brands like Quorn) might be a safer bet, although gluten free real meat hotdogs would be best.

I went off the reservation about a week ago in the worst way, a wheat beer tasting with crackers. 8 different beers.

Complete misery that night and the following day. Didn't sleep more than a couple hours and felt like a bomb went off in my gut. Constipation, bloating and abdominal pain. I was pretty strict paleo for a few months before this but like you said, have cheated here and there. This was bad. Could just be my n=1 though, never gonna know unless you try.

After not drinking since last September, I got reeled into one of my girlfriend's "last-night-in-town" celebration (since HK is so transient, last nights are a BIG DEAL), and had 2 glasses of wine, champagne, 2 beers, a couple vodka shots and a tequila shot. Needless to say I was DONE. Never the f**k again. The next morning was disgusting.

Get ready for some quality toilet time!

Best of luck, though. Just remember, If you're not first, you're last.

Sometimes you just need to live.

Does that mean you need to eat crap food? Of course not, but this sounds much more like a social bonding thing, than a binge because of cravings. And we're very social creatures.

If you don't have any serious intolerance or allergies to the food you'll be eating, and it's something you really want to do, which is sounds like it is, then I'd say go for it. Just don't stress about it. If you're going to over think it, or get all guilty and beat yourself up, then I'd skip it, the emotional self inflicting turmoil could be worse than some possible minor GI discomfort (assuming you don't have a major intolerance).

Humans can survive of that type of food, sub-optimally, but survive nonetheless.

And as others have mentioned, it can be a good n=1 experiment to see how you react to crap food :)

After the trail of tears, I went off the reservation to score some firewater and got shot by some cavalry from F-Troop.

How bad was it when you went outside the confines of the country club, paleface? Did you run into any other minorities to casually disparage?

Sorry for the snark, but racist phrases like this (off the rez, cotton pickin hands, etc) really get my goat. /rant

i fell off the wagon BIGTIME this July 4th. Tons of cheap beer, good tequila and bourbon, and worst of all pizza and even multiple pieces of frosted cake. it was disgusting. i felt like a junkie after the first slice of pizza...i wanted to eat the whole pie!

i felt "icky" for a few days and had minor GI distress. but it wasn't the end of the world, a few days of paleo and I'm feeling better. maybe it helped that I was getting tons of exercise and sun courtesy of surfing?

It depends on you. I believe I have a gluten sensitivity, and when I ate gluten all the time I was pretty sick. But I go 'off the wagon' very moderately - we're talking a serving of pasta, one beer, a piece of cake, or two slices of pizza here - every so often and my body seems to handle it okay. I just get bloated almost instantly, and it affects my pooping habits a bit (gluten sends my large intestine into overdrive). The symptoms from one day's transgressions clears up within a couple days. It would take regular ingestion of larger amounts of gluten to give me the full-blown IBS I used to have.

I find now that, after having been Primal/Paleo for about two years, that eating anything with grains in it makes me not only sick to my stomach as the other posters above are describing, but that I get some mental fog about the whole thing. I blogged about it here.

The other thing I've noticed is that for about a week after, I'm more susceptible to bugs like the common cold, flu, etc. Every time I've gotten sick over the past couple years has come when I went off the wagon. Seems the inflammation of the higher carbs and gluten is weakening my immune system. So be ready.

Stack of breaded chicken wings at Winghouse washed down with several beers (a buddy of mine just got deployed and we were having a going-away party).

I was sick for two days. Fetal position, semi-crying, farting Satanic breathmints sick.