How to Avoid Unhealthy Eating at Workplace

Yielding to temptations of munching candies and cookies or drinking coffee, tea and soft drinks at workplace depends on lots of factors including the quality and quantity of your breakfast, the visitors you entertain, the meetings you attend and the extent of company you give to your colleagues in visiting the canteen. Tension at workplace is also another cause to tempt you to drink coffee or tea unnecessarily.

But if you want to trace one single major cause that paves the way for uncontrolled munching at office, it could be your eating poorly at breakfast.

The Importance of a Sumptuous Breakfast

Research has confirmed the age old wisdom that eating a sumptuous and nutritious breakfast in the morning in reality helps one in maintaining weight and even in losing it. How does it work and in what way does it prevent you from eating something unnecessarily at the office?


The stomach that remains empty over night is biologically programmed to receive more food to supply the increased need of energy for the day. Your metabolism is revved up, and levels of cortisol and adrenaline are at their highest. As the body needs the energy for its efficient functioning for the whole day, a healthy breakfast supplies the needs which can be burnt up efficiently.

Your breakfast should ideally provide almost half the calorie needs for the entire day and a "Big breakfast" consisting of milk, lean meat, two slices of cheese, whole grain cereals, some little fats and milk chocolate or candy is recommended by some researchers.

But what prevents or discourages you from taking a sumptuous breakfast? It is your sleeping habit! If you are a late riser, your levels of a brain chemical known as "serotonin" are highest as you wake up, which tones down your craving levels in the morning and you may not feel much like eating as long as you become fully awake and alert. That's why people who have to hurry to their jobs early or those who tend to wake up late do not adequately feel hungry and they tend to skip their breakfast or eat too little.

The Munching Tendency Increases at Workplace If Your Breakfast is Poor

But as the morning progresses in your workplace, you become alert and active by the demands of the work; the serotonin level in your brain now dips and consequently your craving for food increases. Your blood sugar drops too - you have less energy to spend. As a consequence, you become hungry and this triggers you to impulsively to go and gobble up snacks - often on high-fat sweets, chocolates and cookies at your workplace; these delicacies are naturally more tempting for the tongue and they mostly end up supplying more calories than what you actually need!

If you are unable to feed your stomach's cravings correctly in the morning, the body's emergency system pulls energy from muscle, destroying muscle tissue in the process. In order to compensate, the craving for more food increases as the day progresses and it triggers an urge to over-eat at lunch; you would also continue to eat snacks at odd times. Excessively consumed carbohydrates get deposited in the body as fat and that's how body weight increases.

So the foremost thing you do is to eat a healthy breakfast before coming to the workplace.

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