Many people struggle to control their eating when working from home, and home-based work is becoming more common by the day. This article provides effective guidelines on how to reign in your eating if you’ve found it difficult to manage your work-from-home diet choices. It also points out common mistakes that make it difficult to control your eating, and how to
Many people struggle to control their eating when working from home, and home-based work is becoming more common by the day. This article provides effective guidelines on how to reign in your eating if you’ve found it difficult to manage your work-from-home diet choices. It also points out common mistakes that make it difficult to control your eating, and how to
Eating is fun. Everyone knows that. For people who work outside the home, though, that fun is limited: you can’t chow down on pretzel sticks and donuts all day if your boss is watching you or you’re helping clients all day. But people who work from home? That’s another story entirely. Here are four ways to avoid overeating while working from home.
Skip Ready-Made Meals
When you work outside the home, it’s typical to purchase food while you’re out. There’s no time and no ability to whip up homemade treats in the office, so you might grab a burrito from the place across the street. You might try to continue that while working from home, either by purchasing ready-made foods from the store or ordering takeout.
But if you struggle with overeating, it’s best to make your own meals. With a kitchen at your disposal and nobody breathing down your neck to work faster and harder, you have the opportunity to cook. A burrito you make is virtually guaranteed to have fewer calories than what you’d get from a restaurant.
Eat Meals, Not Snacks
Snacking is a primary contributor to overeating. After all, it’s easy to forget you even snacked in the first place. Unlike sitting down for a meal, snacking is not a singular event, and so it’s easy to lose track. People also tend to eat snacks straight from the container, which makes it impossible to accurately judge how much you’ve had. Most importantly, people often choose snacks with a lot of calories and very little nutrition.
If you just can’t resist a snack, choose something nutrient-dense, and portion it out before eating. Otherwise, wait until mealtime.
Food and Work Don’t Mix
Eating should be its own activity, not one of many tasks you perform simultaneously. If you eat while you work, you are not paying attention to how much you eat, the flavor of what you’re eating, or whether you’re full yet. Distraction makes overeating inevitable.
Log What You Eat
To avoid overeating, it’s important to keep track of what’s going in your mouth. A Harvard Medical School study showed that people routinely underestimate their caloric consumption, sometimes by as much as 40%.
Why does this happen? Two reasons, in particular, stand out. The first is that many people don’t even know what’s in their meals. You can avoid this trap by following one of the tips above: cook your own food. The second biggest hurdle is remembering to count snacks and calorific liquids when assessing how much you’ve eaten. People forget about the cookie they had here, the pretzel they had there, and the three big cups of soda.
If you want to know how much you ate in a day instead of guessing, write it down.
Though working from home presents unique challenges when it comes to overeating, you can overcome them. As someone who works at home, you’re already displaying impressive self-management skills. You can do this.
