How Sane Eating Habits and Mindful Munching Can Help You at the Office

If you’re like many women, in addition to trying to be the perfect employee, you’re also trying to walk the straight and narrow when it comes to your diet.  Who among us doesn’t want to lose a few pounds?  But the truth is, if you’re focusing on dieting and calorie restriction, you could be negatively impacting your performance at work. Or, as no less than the New York Times notes (bluntly), “Dieting can make you dumber.”

The 2013 article in the Times (whose title says it all: “The Mental Strain of Making Do with Less”), by a professor of economics at Harvard, reported that counting calories usurps valuable brain capacity that would otherwise be used for cognitive processing at work. In other words, all that clouded mental space focused on calorie-counting doesn’t allow you to fully concentrate on other tasks, and can negatively affect logical reasoning, problem-solving, and absorbing unfamiliar information. Obviously, that’s not great news if you’re trying to acquire new skills to move up the ladder.

It also noted that dieters spend more of their time agonizing over food choices, leaving less time to focus on work-related tasks.  So if you spend an entire afternoon internally struggling with whether to get a candy bar from the vending machine, you’re likely to miss what’s actually happening at your desk.  Or, when in a lunch meeting, if instead of listening to a presentation, you’re trying to figure out whether to have a cookie (or two) to keep you going, you may end up with this result, as the article wryly notes: “That cookie threatened to strain your waistline. It succeeded in straining your mind.” So  non-dieting co-workers will be focused on their work, and you will be left at a disadvantage.

How to Nosh Knowledgably – And Keep Your Focus on Work 

But what if you want to lose a few pounds without setting yourself back at the office?  Here are a few tips to get healthier while staying sharp at your workplace:

Don’t diet.  Yes, that’s correct. 

“Going on a diet” implies that you’ll be getting off the diet eventually.  But as large number of dieters who regain the weight they lose can attest, this is a losing proposition.  By adopting strict rules and adhering to restrictive eating patterns until you reach an exhausting goal, you will be not only setting yourself up to regain the weight you lose, but also using precious mental bandwidth.

Instead of adopting a restrictive diet, make small changes one step at a time.  Incorporate a new  healthy habit – for instance, switching to a smart sugar alternative for your morning coffee or eating turkey bacon in place of the regular kind — until it no longer takes a lot of effort.  Then move on to the next habit.  The American Psychological Association’s Help Center notes that you’re more likely to be successful with small, incremental changes, and minor steps won’t be as mentally taxing as attempting a complete diet overhaul.

Take food decision-making out of the work day.

We all make tens, even hundreds, of decisions about food in a given day.  We choose what to eat, when to eat, when to stop eating.

If you’re trying to lose weight and you want to keep those food decisions as healthy as possible, pre-set your work-day food intake so you don’t have to think about it once you’re in the office.  Pack your lunch.  Decide in advance of the meeting whether you’ll have a cookie.  Figure out  how many snacks you will have each day and what you’ll have, then prepare them in advance, and don’t even consider eating anything different.

The point is to make all of this as easy as possible so that, come three o’clock, you don’t find yourself standing in front of the vending machine for half an hour weighing the virtues of Sunchips versus m&ms. Even if you still have to struggle with food decisions outside of work, if you keep your mental space during the work day free of “food chatter,” you can avoid the drag on mental resources that might keep you from performing your best.

Follow broad, simple rules. If you feel like you need a framework for how to eat, make the rules easy to follow and understand.

For example, instead of counting calories —  which can take literally hours a day when you factor in time spent looking up calorie information, logging food, and trying to choose foods that fit into your calorie budget – simply commit to avoiding bread and sweets during the work week.  This type of easy, avoid-empty-calories rule is helpful, since, as the Times article notes, it frees you from having to use a lot of time or mental capacity thinking about what you will or won’t be eating.

Other ideas for easy-to-follow frameworks include committing to a certain number of servings of veggies each day, avoiding alcohol, or going cold turkey on giving up sugar altogether.

Put a limit on “food obsession” time. Despite your best efforts, there will undoubtedly come a time at the office when you’re faced with a food choice that has you spinning your mental wheels.

When you’re working late unexpectedly and agonizing over what to order for dinner, or bargaining with yourself over what you will give up later in order to eat a brownie at your afternoon meeting, do this: take a breath, give yourself thirty seconds to think about what to do, make a decision, and move on.

Whatever you decide, don’t make a big thing about it.  If you decide to order pizza for dinner because you’re feeling run down and you need a delicious, familiar pick-me-up, it’s not the end of the world.  On the other hand, if you decide not to eat the brownie, remind yourself of why you’re making that choice, and that skipping this delectable chocolate treat doesn’t mean you will never eat a chocolate treat again – then bring your thoughts back to work.  By bringing awareness (otherwise known as “mindfulness”) to the amount of time you spend thinking about food, you are more likely to be able to stop yourself and bring your focus back to your job.

Reform your thinking around food. 

When food is both your best friend and your worst enemy, there are a lot of emotions that come into play as you’re deciding what to eat.

If you find yourself obsessing about food and dieting, or pummeling yourself because of a poor body image, consider whether food and weight occupy more of your time and mental energy than you’d like. It is possible, after all,  to be healthy without spending most of your day thinking about food!

You may want to check out these blogs suggested by the Institute for the Psychology of Eating (whose mission is to provide “a forward thinking, positive, holistic approach to eating psychology”).  Then speak to a therapist, write in a journal, read books on emotional eating, and find a way to release your mind from the pattern of “eat, regret, repeat.“

To sum up: the next time you think about embarking on a new diet, remember that diets not only don’t work, they hurt your job performance, too. By taking steps to be healthier without obsessing about strict, agonizing food rules, you’ll have more energy and clarity at work — and you may find that you’re a lot happier outside of work, too!