Here's How to Eat Healthier When You Work at Home

September 16, 2013

When you first started working at home — either full time, or a day or two a week — you thought it would be the solution to all your bad habits. No longer would you be stuck trying to squeeze in gym time during a half-hour lunch, or choose the least awful snack out of the vending machine. Then you began your WAHing ways, and now the office looks positively healthy by comparison. What gives?

veggies

(Photo Credit: Martin Cathrae/Flickr)

Part of the problem is that, for most of us, working at home means not having to work around other people’s schedules quite as much as we used to, back in the days when we worked in an office. Sure, you still have meetings, and your deadlines might even increase, especially if your boss was lukewarm on the WAH idea in the first place. But minute to minute, you’re wholly in charge of yourself, perhaps for the first time in your professional life.

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A recent Lifehacker post tackled this issue, and inspired us to gather some of our favorite tips on eating well from your home office. Here’s how to keep it under control:

1. Figure out if you’re a morning person or a night person.

This might sound completely unrelated, but bear with us. The trick is to know when your energy — and self-restraint — are highest, and use that to your advantage. Morning people might be fine getting up an hour early to cut up veggies for a quick, healthy snack later on, while night owls can throw together a healthy slow-cooker recipe to simmer while they’re sleeping. (Good for lunch, snacks, even dinner if you get too busy and run over your normal workday — a common event when you’re plugging away in your jammies.)

2. Know your kryptonite.

Have a sweet tooth? Don’t keep bags of mini candy bars in the fridge. Prone to scarfing down a bag of cheese shreds when you’re bored? Stock dairy only sparingly. Don’t force yourself to count on your willpower when you’re stressed out and socially isolated.

3. Get out of the house, even if it’s only to walk to the mailbox.

For whatever reason, it’s harder to eat well if you never have to face other people during the day. Maybe it’s an incipient vitamin D deficiency from being indoors too much, or maybe we think the neighbors can tell we just ate a Pop-Tart sandwich with frosting filling. For whatever reason, if you’re not totally cut off from humanity, it’s easier to keep yourself from devolving into a person who sees vegetables as garnish.

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