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Let's face it, working from home can be a blessing and a curse, especially regarding eating habits. On the one hand, you can prepare your meals and snacks whenever you want. On the other hand, you can prepare your meals and snacks whenever you want, leading to overconsumption and unhealthy choices. If you're a hard-working professional who wants to learn how to eat healthier while working from home, here are three simple tips that will make a difference instantly.
1. Plan your break times to eat healthier.
One of the biggest challenges of working from home is no rules about start, break, lunchtime, or end times. This versatility can easily lead to turning on your laptop before breakfast and nibbling at your desk all day long instead of stepping away for a dedicated lunch break. You may be putting in more hours, but you risk consuming lots over the day or getting so hungry that you eat more in later meals. Does this apply to you?
TIP: Take a moment to schedule your eating times, just like you would if you were in the office, and then let people know you won't be available at those times.
2. Arrange healthy options in your surroundings.
One of the most significant blind spots people have when it comes to eating is their diminishment of how powerfully their surroundings affect their food choices. We feel like we have zero willpower, but the sweets sat at arm's reach for 8 hours while we stressed out over a deadline. We didn't lack self-control. We just had our environment set up to overpower our self-control. Almost every person I know thinks the solution is to get more self-control. In other words, push back harder against the urge. However, there is another solution, which is more manageable: change your surroundings to make healthy eating easier. How to eat healthier does not need to be a battle between your environment and your willpower. Instead, engineer your food surroundings to make eating healthier more straightforward. For example, you could put all packaged foods out of sight in the cabinets, leave fruit in open view, or pack a lunch (even if you're at home).
TIP: Set aside five minutes to remove the food you want to limit from your diet and add more foods you want to include.
3. Plan for eating healthier to go wrong.
Let's face it, your plans will fail at some point, and you will skip a meal. Perhaps your boss won't end the call, or you feel like you're on a roll, so you work longer, skip a meal, and get hungry. How would you respond to a circumstance like this? If you don't know, you must develop a backup plan for when the first fails.
TIP: Ask yourself, "What will I do when I've skipped a meal and become hungry?" Write out three actions you can take to get yourself on track.
Working from home can be a significant challenge to eating healthier. Planning your break times, engineering your surroundings to make healthy eating more straightforward, and having a backup plan for when you fail are three key tips to help you learn how to eat healthier. No matter where you are on a healthy eating journey, you can create a healthier, more productive work-from-home lifestyle with sufficient foresight, planning, and effort.
Do you want to learn how to promote healthy eating habits and break free from the same patterns? Reach out to me and let's talk more.