Losing weight in the office - Fit and healthy through office life
During their lunch break office workers will often reach for fast food due to a lack of time. Whilst in the office their movement is limited to getting up to go to the toilet or making coffee. Sitting for hours on end causes back pain, staring at the screen makes their eyes tired…
There are many little habits that can help you to lose weight, save calories at work or at a business dinner and eat a healthy diet. A little exercise during or after work will do wonders to balance out your stressful everyday life.
We will show you how to avoid your job becoming a fat trap, how to lose weight “whilst sitting” and how a day at the office can be healthy.
Your commute to work - 3 top tricks to burn calories
The more movement you can incorporate into your everyday life, the more calories you will burn. Here are our three top tips for incorparating exercise into your daily life:
- Ride your bike or walk to work! This gets your circulation going and will help you on the way to your dream figure.
- If you travel by bus or train, get off a few stops earlier and walk the rest of the way.
- Take the stairs instead of the elevator! It all helps to burn more calories.
Whilst at work healthy eating and exercise are essential!
The biggest health killers in the office are sitting for hours and an unhealthy diet. Most of us sit in the office with bad postures. There’s constant pressure on our bum muscles. As a result, most people lose their natural mobility – they can no longer squat down. Furthermore, sitting burns fewer calories than standing.
Standing burns about twice as many calories per hour as sitting.
Most people then add a high calorie lunch to the minimal amount of calories they burned during the morning from sitting- and they put on weight! This makes the goal of losing weight seem very unnatainable.
But don’t worry, you can easily increase your calorie consumption in the office by simply:
- Walking small distances more often (e.g. to your colleagues, to the toilet, to the coffee area)
- Working at bar tables – this also prevents back pain!
- Use your lunch break for a little walk
- Integrate simple fitness exercises into your everyday life
Office ailments - What you can do against headaches, heavy legs and tired eyes
Pressure at the temples, a stiff back, heavy legs – When we are concentrating on a presentation, which we absolutely must finish before the end of the day, we often remain motionless in one position. Usually we don’t even notice it. But in the long run it can lead to back problems, tension and inflammation in our shoulders and neck area. Your legs also become heavy – the blood that your heart pumps through your body collects there and has to fight against gravity back to the heart.
According to a study, almost 80% of people in everyday office life suffer from physical complaints.
The solution: More exercise!
These quick tricks can be easily integrated into your everyday life:
- Change your sitting position every 30 to 60 minutes
- Get up every hour to loosen your muscles
- Circle your head, hands and feet to prevent tension and pain
- Look out the window once in a while to relax your eyes
- Sit on a gymnastics ball or go into a deep squat (e.g. during a telephone call).
- After work, sport is the perfect way to relax.
End boss headache - Why healthy eating helps!
The most common causes of headaches for office workers are high stress levels, bad air quality, tension and poor lighting. However, poor nutrition that does not provide you with the required macro- and micronutrients can also lead to deficiency symptoms and thus to concentration problems and headaches. (Tip: You can easily determine your optimal nutrient requirements with our BMI calculator)
To make it as easy as possible for you to follow a healthy diet at work, we have compiled our 5 Do’s and Don’ts here.
| Do | Dont | Why? |
|---|---|---|
| Eat fruit and healthy snacks | Dip into the candy bowl | Yoghurt, apple, vegetable sticks and co. reduce the craving |
| Meal Prep | Eat fast food or eat out on a regular basis | You can control what is in your meal! |
| Pay attention to protein content | Eat excess carbohydrates and fats | Protein saturates and is not hard to digest – no afternoon depression! |
| Drink a lot of water | Drink soft drinks, energy drinks | Water, tea and black coffee will keep you well hydrated and prevent headaches! No calories guarantee your weight loss success! |
| Eat a health breakfast | Starve yourself | Your breakfast is your start into the day! You need energy to give your best. |
Healthy eating at lunchtime - 5 good reasons for Meal Prep
If you bring your own food with you for lunch, you will not succumb to the temptation to go out to eat with your colleagues, to order take away or to plunder the candy bowl. Our top 5 reasons to start meal prepping:
- Pre-cooked meals prevent food cravings
- You save time on cooking
- You know the ingredients and nutritional values in what you are eating
- All you have to do is warm up your meal at lunch, or when you get home from work or the gym
- You save money because you use up all the food you buy
Are you unsure how to meal prep or pre-cook and which dishes are suitable for this? Here you can find everything you need to know about meal prep!
Is a low carb or metabolic diet better for people with a sedentary job? What is the best diet for losing weight at the office?
There is not one diet that is best for everyone. Each person is unique and has unique preferences! We have compiled an overview of the most common diets for you in the Upfit diet comparison – here you can find the diet that suits you best.
For losing weight in the office, a low carb diet is ideal. Working people who are not very active do not have a high calorie requirement. The energy from excess carbohydrates is therefore not utilized and is often stored as fat on the stomach and hips.
Which diet suits you best is individual!
After work: slim in your sleep?
Do you eat a healthy breakfast, snack on fruit and vegetables at the office, bring your lunch from home and exercise before, during and after work? Great! But that’s not enough for you? You want to do more for your weight loss and health? Then go to sleep! At least seven or eight hours of sleep should be enough. A power nap in the afternoon can also work wonders.
Sleep and the feeling of hunger are directly related.
Lack of sleep increases appetite and impairs the feeling of satiety in the brain.
If you sleep too little, your brain gets stressed and reacts. In particular the hormones ghrelin, leptin, insulin and glucagon play a role. If you have not slept enough, ghrelin, which is responsible for the feeling of hunger, signals an empty stomach, which in turn signals to the brain that you are hungry – even though you may not be at all.
Losing weight in the office with Upfit
These tips aren’t enough for you? You want to lose weight, build muscles, define your body or eat healthier? Then let us create a meal plan for you. With a personal nutrition plan from Upfit you can make sure that you keep all your necessary nutrients in check. We will create a nutrition plan that perfectly suits you and your needs. It’s easy and straightforward to create a balanced and healthy diet and to meet your micro and macro nutrient requirements in the best possible way.
Designed especially for busy professionals we have recipes for meals with short cooking times and delicious, healthy snacks for in between. Do you eat vegetarian, vegan or Paleo? We take this into account, along with any allergies, intolerances and individual foods that you just don’t like!
Sources
Glöckl, J. & Breithecker, D. (2015). Active Office. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-07516-3
Pohl, E. (2015). Karrierefaktor guter Schlaf: Wie Sie sich zu Höchstleistungen schlummern (essentials) (German Edition) (2015. Aufl.). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-08440-0
