As a growing number of businesses and offices bring their employees back in after having worked remotely, you may find that you’re slipping into habits that are ruining your weight loss. Blaming inactivity now that you’re back at your desk in the office instead of doing laps between your home office and kid’s virtual classroom? It couldn’t be what you’re eating, right? You just stop off for coffee on your breaks and have a lunch at light speed.
Is Your Coffee Habit Ruining Your Weight Loss?
Whether you head to a coffee chain, a mom-and-pop café, a drive-through window at a fast food place, or even just heading into the company break room, it’s easy to grab a coffee while on the go. Unfortunately, many of us don’t realize that what seems like an innocent coffee habit could be ruining your weight loss.
Cafes are notorious for drawing you in to get a cookie or a muffin. Fast food drive-through windows come with a full menu of to-go options that seem innocent when you get them one at a time. The break room has cookies, candies, birthday cake slices and other fun and well-meaning treats often brought from home by other co-workers but that can quickly ruin your efforts to lose weight.
How to Keep Things Going in the Right Direction
A study recently published in PLOS Medicine, the researchers found that when employers stock healthier options in their break rooms or their own cafés, workers tend to naturally make healthier choices. If these options are available at your employer, you’re naturally less likely to make choices that risk ruining your weight loss.
Though the responsibility doesn’t belong to your employer to provide you with only healthy snacks and beverages while you’re on the job, if the food on site is only junk food, it might be in your best interest to see if healthier options can be included among the available choices.
If you’re relying on a café outside your workplace, start making healthier choices or drop an email to the company suggesting a broader healthy menu. The more they see that it’s important to their customers to have healthy choices, the more they will consider adding them to their menus. As long as they know the options will sell, they’ll want to provide them.
Sometimes it’s Up to You Not to Ruin Your Weight Loss
Don’t forget that you can always bring your healthy snacks from home. You can also bring your coffee from home, which helps to avoid specialty coffees that are shockingly high in fat and sugars.