“I’m skinnier in those pictures.”
“Yeah, you are, why?”
“Because I work in an office now.”
According to statistics, I’m not overweight. I’m within the acceptable range for someone with my body type. I never eat fast food (pizza isn’t fast food!). But in the past year I’ve put on 15 pounds. This gain has not only been a hit to my self-esteem, it’s made my stomach problems worse, and made me more tired than I should be for a healthy person my age.
There are several factors that have contributed to me putting on weight, and a majority have to do with my job.
When you work in a typical American office you have access to donuts, danishes, cookies and other sweet things quite often. Just this morning there were a couple boxes of delicious looking donuts in the kitchen that I managed to avoid (yay me!). When I worked at home, or didn’t work at all, I didn’t have access to the temptation. I didn’t have to walk by a box of donuts every time I went to the bathroom, no need to constantly exercise willpower when avoiding sweets is as easy as skipping that aisle in the grocery store once a week.
For some reason I’m hungrier when I actually go somewhere for work. I’m not entirely sure how this works, but I can get up at the same time on a weekend, spend all morning working on projects, clean the house and not feel hungry until 2PM. Then, if I go to work and don’t eat breakfast my stomach is complaining by 10AM. I suspect that part of the problem is being bored.
And when you work full time away from home the time for exercise is cut. I try to take walks during my lunch break, but any sort of exercising at home is difficult after a hard day at work. I suppose I could try to get into a routine of doing exercise in the morning, but when I’ve tried that in the past it just made me grumpy.
Similarly, when you work full time away from home you don’t have time to spend on creating elaborate, healthy meals. So often I am wiped out from working all day and tell Michael to order a pizza or take me out to dinner where I’ll eat something that’s terrible for me.
Eating when I’m depressed is a problem too. I find excuses to buy goodies, get a bagel loaded with cream cheese on my way to work “because it’s a monday” or buy brownie mix “because work was rough this week.”
What I have to drink might be an issue too. Damn PA only allowing us to buy beer by the case! I love beer… and soda, soda good! Yum!
Over the past month or so I’ve begun to tackle these issues. My stomach issues are calming down again, I’m hoping as I get back into healthy eating patterns that my energy will come back too. Getting into my favorite jeans has been easier too ;) Yay!
A big help has been Michael helping out with dinners. When I was only working part time or not at all I wouldn’t let him near the kitchen. But now that we’re both working all the time he’s put a lot of effort into cooking and I’m proud to say that his cooking horror stories may be a thing of the past! Since he works from home 2 days a week he’s been able to prepare some nice dinners for us when I’ve just been too tired to attempt it. He even made a loaf of bread yesterday! With yeast and everything!
The eating when depressed one is something I can handle, I have in the past. It is directly related to my general eating habits. If I’m eating healthy in general I won’t need as much sweets to improve my mood. The problem occurs when I’m eating sweets often, so cheer up sweets have to be bigger.
Beer will be a hard one to tackle, I love beer. But soda is not so hard, we haven’t been buying it much, water is what I drink mostly these days. Soda is back to being a treat when we eat out or have pizza.
I’ve also worked on willpower. This is a hard one %\ Damn this office and it’s delicious sugary pastries!
Exercise? Gosh, I don’t know. Maybe I should jump on the bandwagon and get a DDR mat and game for my PS2.
I think the next thing I need to do is work out what I should be eating for breakfast and lunch. I’ve been eating oatmeal at work lately for breakfast, which lasts long enough to get m
y stomach to lunchtime. I’d like to get away with munching on salad for lunch, but I always end up hungry again in the late afternoon, and then the plate of cookies down the hall is that much more tempting. I need to find food that will keep me satisfied and not be bad for me. Turkey sandwiches are probably good, I just need to cut down on the mayo (oh how I love the mayo!).
Any suggestions?