6 ways work is making you fat

With coffee breaks, morning tea and office birthdays, full-time workers are consuming at least 70% of a week’s calories on the job.

Failing to adapt can result in a series of small slips adding up to a very big deal.

The flip side, however, is that it gives you between 10 and 30 opportunities a week – depending on whether you’re a square meal or grazing girl – to reconcile your goals with your work environment and schedule. Here are our tips to beat the cravings .

Problem no.1: Take-away lunches at your desk

Solution: “Take-away food is higher in fat, salt, sugar and kilojoules but usually much lower in vitamins and fibre,” says Aloysa Hourigan, head nutritionist with Nutrition Australia. “Just because it’s only one meal a day, don’t think it doesn’t matter. Most take-away food supersizes your portion – which means that a huge bread roll or sandwich that is packed with three fillings or huge serve of chicken coconut curry and rice will pack a huge kilojoule punch, which, over years, may substantially add to your waistline. This is also true when your whole office posse hits a restaurant for lunch. Meanwhile, if you gobble the food down while sitting in front of your computer, you will inhale it and then may still feel hungry.

Waist protection:

• Bring a healthy lunch from home such as soup or salad, rye bread roll and fruit – this will save you money as well as shaving kilojoules off your daily intake.

• Keep healthy staples in your drawer: That way if you can’t get out for lunch you can improvise with some brown rice cakes and pull-top tuna followed by a piece of fruit.

• Make dinner smaller: If you’ve had a big restaurant lunch with colleagues or a client, make sure you eat a smaller dinner to ensure your kilojoule intake for the day has not blown out by day’s end.

• Eat mindfully. Get away from your desk and savour every mouthful of lunch and you will feel

Problem no.2: Sitting on the job

Solution: As technology makes us more and more sendentary at work, sitting is now regarded as being as harmful to health as smoking. While parked on a chair in front of your computer, your body switches off production of an enzyme called lipase, which is critical for burning fat.

“When we sit, we have muscle ‘dis-use’ – our muscles are essentially ‘sleeping’,” says Associate Professor David Dunstan, who conducted research into sitting for Baker IDI Heart and Diabetes Institute. “When we’re up and moving, we’re contracting muscles and it appears that these frequent contractions throughout the day are beneficial for helping to regulate the body’s metabolic processes.” When Dunstan had office workers interrupt their sitting with regular activity breaks, they experienced a 30 per cent improvement in their body’s response and sensitivity to a meal containing glucose – which means the movement was helping to reduce risks of diabetes type 2.

Waist protection:

•    Try using a Swiss ball at your desk – this will keep you moving muscles in your legs, butt and belly (just make sure you also maintain good posture).

•    Request a walking meeting with your boss.

•    Use afternoon or morning tea as an activity break by walking – anywhere: around the block, up some stairs or up to the corner shop for a coffee run.

•    Move your memo tray and envelopes further away so that you have to stand up to access them.

•    Stand up when you read a report or make phone calls.

•    Set your watch or mobile phone to remind you every half an hour to stand up and move – whether you walk around the corridors, get a glass of water or do some star jumps.

Problem: Celebratory morning teas

Just when you’d sworn off sugar all day after a sweets blowout last night, there’s another cake being served for someone’s birthday. In between, there are sweet slices and cheese platters for other special occasions like Melbourne Cup Day and Secretary’s Day or Halloween (complete with trick or treating from office to office). Little wonder you find it hard to stick to your healthy food plans!

Waist protection:

• Eat something: Tuck into half of your wholemeal sandwich or a piece of fruit so that people don’t think you’re judging them by standing there with no food in your hands.

• Say ‘I’m going to pop a piece on my desk and have it after lunch,’ then bin the piece later when no-one is looking.

• Go halves in a piece of cake with a co-worker.

• Bake some mini low-fat wholegrain blueberry muffins and bring them in so you can join in the celebration guilt free. Your other weight-conscious colleagues will love you for giving them a healthier option.

The problem: Feeling stressed or overworked

Solution: Do you feel you have little control over your work flow? Or so busy you’re often overwhelmed with stress by 10am? In the English Whitehall Study, workers who reported chronic work stress were more likely to develop metabolic syndrome, a cluster of health issues such as an increase in belly circumference, high blood pressure and insulin resistance – a precursor to type 2 diabetes. Women are worse off than men; women with chronic work stress were more than five times more likely to be affected.

“When you’re stressed, your adrenal glands release more cortisol, which makes you store fat in case you have to go for a lengthy time without food,” explains Timothy Crowe, Associate Professor in Nutrition and Exercise Sciences at Deakin University, in Melbourne. “This build-up can occur rapidly in our most active fat cells in the abdomen – where it can predispose you to problems with insulin and diseases like type 2 diabetes. The release of cortisol can also affect hormones that increase appetite. This can lead to comfort eating and make it hard for some people to control their weight.”

Waist protection:

•    When you’re feeling overwhelmed, sit at your desk, close your eyes and take 10 minutes to slow breathe or relax all the muscles in your body from head to toe.

•    Get up 15 to 20 minutes earlier so you’re not racing the clock and arriving at work stressed.

•    Take a lunch break and hit the gym to release some of that tension. You will come back thinking clearer and working more productively.

•    Minimise interruptions so that you don’t waste time. Screen calls and hang a ‘do not disturb’ sign on your office door for an hour. If you have a busy day ahead, start phone calls by saying, “Sorry, this is just a quick call – I’m on my way to a meeting/appointment.”

•    Get the important stuff done first so you stress less.

•    Consider joining an organisation where the culture is less pressured.

The problem: Office noise

Solution:  If you waitress in a noisy cafe, listen to the workspeak of eight people all day in a partitioned office space or work in an environment such as a hairdressing salon, the noise exposure may make you more likely to reach for snacks between meals. Research from Penn State University shows that people exposed to more noise while solving problems eat more than those who solved problems in silence. And afterwards, the noise-stressed group craved unhealthy snacks like chips, chocolate and popcorn and overindulged in them. In short, constant noise on the job may be dictating your cravings and food choices.

Waist protection:

• Put your phone on silent for periods of the day so it’s not adding to the noise by constantly ringing.

• Make a request to your boss that your office implements some ‘quiet time’ periods during the morning and afternoon where all co-workers reduce talking to each other and switch off music.

• Turn down the speaker on your computer.

• Wear earplugs when doing tasks that involve great concentration to cut out chit-chat of colleagues, particularly if you are working in a partitioned office space.

The problem: Constant caffeine breaks

Solution: Do you use a few long blacks or cappuccinos combined with plenty of tea breaks to help keep you alert at the office? Your waistline may be picking up the tab – and not just if your drinks are loaded with sugars. Unfortunately, in some people caffeine can lead to hormonal changes that encourage fat storage. “When you consume caffeine, it sends a message to the pituitary gland in your brain to alert your adrenal glands to make adrenalin,” says Dr Libby Weaver, author of Rushing Woman’s Syndrome ($24.99, Little Green Frog Publishing). “Your body thinks it is in danger so this causes a ‘fight or flight’ response, which leads your blood sugar to rise to provide you with more energy and, in response, you make more insulin to deal with that elevation in blood sugar.”

Care factor? “As insulin is one of our primary fat storage hormones, it will firstly convert unused glucose from your blood into glycogen and store it in your muscles, but what is left over will be converted into body fat,” Weaver explains.

The fallout is higher if you drink five cups or more of coffee. At the Western Australian Institute for Medical Research, one study found that once mice were fed the equivalent of five or more cups of coffee a day, they quickly developed abnormal retention of fat in their cells and liver and showed greater resistance to insulin. In short, too much coffee ramped up their risk of weight gain and diabetes type 2.

Waist protection:

• Choose low-caffeine teas and drink more herbal teas, such as peppermint and chamomile, which are free from caffeine.

• After you’ve had your daily coffee, use a coffee substitute such as dandelion tea.

• Swap tea for a H20 break: You will still get the benefit of getting up from your desk and moving around, and the water will help you stay full so you snack less, but it’s completely free of kilojoules and won’t cause you to release any stress hormones. Start by making every second tea urge a pit stop for a glass of water instead and continue to reduce your caffeine as much as you can.

6 ways work is making you fat