Live For Food

If you work in an office it can be difficult to control your food intake at times.  When I worked in a large office I spent a lot of time sitting down all day and I always used the lift, never the stairs.  There was an office biscuit box for everyone, and it was someone’s birthday or other occasion requiring cake about once a fortnight. The office was situated on the high street surrounded by shops where it was easy to buy snacks, and the person sitting at the desk opposite me was a six foot gentleman with a propensity for croissants and crisps.

At the time I wasn’t even trying to keep an eye on my weight, but even so I eventually began to despair of the abundance of cake.  At one stage I was putting on about a pound a week.  It was of course my own fault, but being put in situations like the above, which let’s face it are considered normal in many, many offices, do not help at all.

Things are easier for me now.  I work in a much smaller office, there is a lot less cake, and no regular biscuits, and my office is on the top floor with no elevator.

Looking back, what could I have done to improve the situation I was originally in?  How could I have coped better with the constant food temptations?

I should have taken the opportunity to use the stairs instead of the lift as that did me a world of good when I moved jobs (after the first couple of weeks that is – they nearly killed me to start with!)

We would buy individual cakes for the people in our department when someone had a birthday – I should have sometimes said NO to a piece of cake on someone’s birthday and done as one other girl did and asked for a piece of fruit instead.

I still find it very difficult to resist an open tin of cake or biscuits in the kitchen.  In retrospect my best option here would have been to have a tiny piece of cake or a maximum of one biscuit per day.  That would have limited the damage.  Could I have stuck to that?  I don’t know – sometimes just having one can lead to another.

I kept buying one particular chocolate bar at lunchtime because on the front of the packet it said it was low fat.  Silly me didn’t click that is was still full of sugar and calories!  I forgot that it isn’t only fat that makes us fat.

I had a habit of bringing packed lunch to work and supplementing it with the above chocolate bar and a vegetable samosa from the bakery next door.  I should have not done this, but just had say one samosa a week for lunch instead of my sandwiches, not as well as my sandwiches.

As they say, hindsight is a wonderful thing.  Luckily when I changed jobs it was a fresh start in all respects and I ended up addressing my bad habits the easy way, simply by not starting my bad lunch habits again, and because there wasn’t the same amount of snacks around.  I didn’t realise how bad my habits were until I took a step back to think about it.

Don’t forget, it takes time to develop new habits, and you shouldn’t let one slip up get you down, because tomorrow is always a new day.  I am well aware that it is easier said than done though.  What are your top tips for avoiding the office biscuit tin?