Your employer might have already asked you to return to the office, where you probably have to spend at least eight hours a day sitting at your desk.
Maintaining a sedentary lifestyle isn’t doing your waistline any favours. In fact, most people focus entirely on the physical aspects of weight loss, like diet and exercise, but aren’t fully aware of how and what they eat.
Luckily, there are ways of reversing the effects of an office lifestyle while losing weight at the same time. Here are six tips.
1. Go green
Coffee might give you a caffeine jolt in the morning, but green tea can supply less jittery energy as well as plenty of fat-burning qualities.
Teas, especially green teas, contain catechins that boost fat oxidation. Taiwanese researchers found that 1,100 people they studied over 10 years who drank green tea had 20% less body fat than those who didn’t.
2. Bring your own lunch
Think you know how many calories are in that fast-food meal you grabbed during your lunch break? Think again: your everyday takeout meal contains an average of 836 calories.
Calorie counts on menus help, but studies show adults underestimate the number of calories by about 175 per meal. That can add up to a serious amount of weight over time.
Instead, spend part of your weekend meal-prepping for the week ahead. Opting for even a 500-calorie meal during your lunch break can save you more than 300 calories over the average grab-and-go purchase – a difference of 1,500 calories for a five-day workweek.
Work an average of 50 weeks annually and that’s 75,000 fewer calories consumed, or about 10kg a year!
3. Have healthy snacks handy
To make it easier to eat fewer calories and avoid stuffing your face when you’re starving, always keep your desk, car, and purse stashed with healthy munchies such as nuts, sunflower seeds, dried fruit without additional sugars, or natural seaweed snacks.
Whatever you do, do not hit up any vending machines.
4. Keep sweets out of sight
Out of sight, out of mouth? Simply reorganising your pantry’s “top hits” could translate into serious calorie savings, according to researchers.
They found that placing chocolate candies in opaque containers as opposed to glass ones, and giving healthier snacks more prominent shelf space, curbed consumption by 3.1 million calories in just seven weeks.
Another study found that people are more likely to overeat small treats from transparent packages than from opaque ones.
5. Always eat at mealtimes
Researchers found that obese women who ate their lunch after 3pm lost 25% less weight than those who ate earlier in the day. Even though both groups ate the same foods and the same amount of calories, the early diners lost 2.5kg more.
Scientists believe that waiting to eat until you’re starving sparks cravings for more food later in the day.
6. Keep comfort eating in check
Whether you stuff yourself when you get home because you hate your job, or you slip out for a sugar- and cream-laced coffee drink after being told off by your boss, be sure to take stock of how your job makes you respond with food.
In health surveys, only 10% of respondents listed psychological wellbeing as part of their weight-loss journey. There is an emotional component to food that the vast majority of people overlook and it can quickly sabotage efforts, which is why nearly 66% of people regain weight after losing it.
This article first appeared in jobstore.com.
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