Revealed: The Secrets Behind Losing Weight While Stuck in Office

Spend almost every waking minute in office? And don’t have time to get fit?

Unfortunately, most of us will say a resounding yes to both these questions. But there is a way out.

The best option to get past this barrier (the frenzied existence that we lead today) is to try to stay fit in office itself. All you need to do is to follow these four easy bust-your-weight tips at work to keep the pounds away.

Make Your Lunch a Smart Meal

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The rule is to keep lunch light (about 500 calories or less) and low fat to fuel energy, without making you drowsy.

• Try and pack lunch from home. In case of ‘lunch emergencies’ keep a bag of fortified cereal in your drawer: just mix it with milk (there is a milk booth almost everywhere), juice or even with water and have it.
  
• Or make a mini-subway: get chopped up lettuce, tomatoes, and some sliced meat and keep them in the fridge (most offices have a mini fridge these days).
  
• Buy some fresh bread on the way to work, and make your own sandwich.
  
• Another tip is to try to eat your lunch and snack only with colleagues who are on a similar healthy eating bandwidth as you.
  
• And for those in between times, maintain (and keep filled) a healthy food drawer for snacking: store nuts, cheese, boxed juice, buttermilk, green tea. Dig in at the first signs of hunger to avoid overeating later.
  

Sneak in Exercise During Lunch Hour

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Go for a power walk; even 20 minutes snatched during the lunch hour are enough. This break away from the desk will keep you physically and mentally alert, refresh you, decrease stress, release natural endorphins and neurotransmitters that give a natural high, and also help keep you near your optimum weight.

If there’s no place to walk in comfort around your office (or it is too hot to step out), find out if there’s a gym nearby and sign up for a lunch hour session there, or maybe a short yoga class.

Or just go for a dip in a pool near your office – even half an hour of swimming burns off loads of calories.

Fidget. A Lot

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Here’s the deal: every day we ride up the elevator to our office, get stuck on our chair for like light years – and then, during a breather (that rare one), we start despairing about our flab.

Instead of doing that (despairing, that is) incorporate movement smartly during the working hours.

Do desk stretches, walk and talk on phone, and over the time you need to think (in your job there are bound to be times when you need to think!) walk and think. Go up and down the stairs of your office building and think.

Also, stop calling your peon every minute – get up and do the job yourself.

And every hour, get up and move around a bit (put an alarm).

Take That Office Snooze

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Consciously offset work stress related emotional eating by zeroing in on a quick, relaxing ritual (listening to a favourite song, chatting up with a pleasant co worker…).

Also, try to snatch a short 10-minute nap sometime during the day.

Don’t put your head down on the desk and obviously sleep… just learn to arrange yourself on the office chair (to snooze) so that no one notices something amiss!

This will refresh your mind and break the tension of the day and also help offset the ‘sleep debt’ (all the cumulative sleep that you’re losing every night) – a huge reason for gaining weight.

(Kavita Devgan is a weight management consultant, nutritionist, health columnist and author of Don’t Diet! 50 Habits of Thin People.)

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