Buddha's Diet by Tara Cottrell

Author:Tara Cottrell
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780762460472
Publisher: Running Press
Published: 2016-08-21T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 15

Buddha at Work

ANOTHER OBSTACLE MANY OF US FACE IN NAVIGATING Buddha’s Diet is work. It’s a problem of simple math: if your eating window is nine hours per day, and you’re spending at least eight hours each day on the job, then chances are you’ll need to do some of your eating at work. And we’re including all kinds of work here. If you’re a stay-at-home parent, you may be even more susceptible to poor eating choices, and your work day extends much longer than nine hours. If you do shift work at odd times, you’ll have other special challenges to consider.

Eating in a healthy way on the job—any job—is not easy. As one study explained, “recent polls suggest that a third of employees felt pressure from their managers to work through lunch, with similar numbers eating lunch at their desks.”1 Half of office employees polled said they had too much work to take a real break for lunch. If you’re a stay-at-home parent this may be doubly true—your schedule is dictated by your children, and they aren’t known to be accommodating bosses.

One of the challenges with eating at your desk or while juggling kids at home is that you are probably eating mindlessly. At the office, you’re on your computer or phone, multitasking various things. At home, you may be trying to squeeze in lunch between a child’s checkup, a stop at the park, a few errands, and a nap—though probably not for you. We’ve already had a whole chapter on the pitfalls of multitasking your food; we just don’t make good food choices when we aren’t paying attention. And we won’t know when to stop if we’re eating on autopilot. You’re much more likely to have a healthy lunch if you give it a bit of focus.

A real lunch break will do much more than help you eat right. Just as our metabolisms need a break from food, our minds need a break from work. We need time to recover from work-related stress—at the end of the day, but if possible also in the middle. Some researchers believe that the lack of time for this recovery is a bigger health concern than the sheer quantity of stress itself.2

A study of 103 administrative employees at a large North American university found that those who relaxed during lunch experienced less fatigue at the end of the day.3 Interestingly, it wasn’t just working through lunch that left employees exhausted—socializing at lunch often had similar effects. Sometimes we need a break not just from work, but from our coworkers.

If you’re a stay-at-home parent, this may be the part of the chapter where you’re shaking your head in dismay, knowing a leisurely lunch is a laughable concept. Maybe your only break from your diminutive “coworkers” is when you lock yourself in the bathroom. But there’s still good reason to make your best efforts to carve out a few minutes for a real, healthy lunch. A 2011 study of new parents found that young adult mothers consumed both more sugary drinks and more saturated fats than nonmothers.

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