Beyond Home · Space 7 of 7 · 38 min
Your Workplace
You cannot control the whole office. You can control your desk.
The workplace is a genuinely difficult environment, mostly because you do not control all of it. The good news is that you do control your own space and how you behave in it.
Question 1 · What’s here?
You did not choose the bagels
Breakfast meetings turn into bagel brunches. Around the holidays, customers and clients show their appreciation with cookies, cakes, and candy. You do not always have the option of keeping food out of the workplace, so the question becomes what you can actually do about it.
Question 2 · What’s seen?
Cover it, bag it, move it
The key here is out of sight. The more you can hide, the less you will eat. Cover food with paper towels, put it in bags or boxes, move it to cabinets, or donate it to another department.
Question 3 · What’s convenient?
Six feet is worth 48 percent
While you are getting food out of sight, make it inconvenient too. Do not just put it in a cabinet — put it in a high cabinet, or one inside a closet. It sounds silly and it works, because you are not depriving anyone. You are just making everyone work for it.
In Wansink’s office study, secretaries were given containers of chocolate kisses either on the desk or about six feet away. When the candy was on the desk they ate roughly 48% more. Even moving it into a desk drawer — barely inconvenient — cut consumption by 25%.
As Wansink noted, the encouraging implication is that if visibility and convenience increase chocolate consumption, the same effect should work for fruit and vegetables. What makes the candy dish dangerous might bring the fruit bowl back into fashion.
Question 4 · How does it feel?
Keep your desk for working
If you develop the habit of eating at your desk, you will end up eating there out of habit rather than hunger. Roughly 83% of Americans regularly eat at their desks, according to a survey from the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics.
Keep work about working, and stop working to actually enjoy your food. You will probably enjoy the food more and feel better about getting back to it.