Five Simple Tips for Avoiding Junk-food Munchies at Work

Many of us, especially those of us who have sedentary desk jobs or are not as active as we should be, might be carrying a little extra weight around our midsections, thighs, arms – you name it, there’s probably some flab on it.

In an office environment especially, as I had worked in for a few years now, a lot more eating goes on than one would think. Doughnuts for Karen’s birthday, bagels for Steven’s; a beloved client brings in cake, cookies and candies as a gesture of gratitude. In order to get through the grueling 8-hour work day, we reward ourselves with these treats as “well-deserved” restitution for our efforts: in other words, we eat it because it’s right in front of us. Then we wonder why we gain a pound or so here and there.

Through my own experiences, I’ve seen this happen to myself and it makes me incredibly frustrated. As a person who dreads seeing the inches build up, I’ve come up with some ways to battle the office-munchies. Tried and true, these have worked just great for me – even with indulging in a bagel and cream cheese every once in a while.

For those of us who reach for our cookie-and-chip stash in the bottom drawer of our desks… I have discovered a few surprisingly simple solutions to this problem. While of course anything in bulk will be bad for you, there are healthy substitutes. 90 and 100 calorie packs are becoming increasingly popular and almost every snack-food brand carries them now. If you’ve got a sweet tooth, there are miniature substitutes for our favorite chocolate chip, cream-filled, shortbread and alphabet cookies. For salt and chip fanatics, you can buy miniature Doritos, cheese crackers, pretzels and potato chips. While one would think that for 90 or 100 calories per bag, only 5 or 6 cookies and a couple of very broken chips would be included.

However, this is not the case at all. Inside the majority of these bags are between 10 and 20 small cookies, and an average of 20 chips, which, even though they will not give you the feeling of being full (which you don’t exactly want from eating cookies and chips anyway), it will give the illusion that you’ve had more to eat. And at 100 calories or less each, burning the calories in an office environment shouldn’t be too difficult (it can take anywhere from 2-4 hours to fully burn 100 calories if you live a mostly sedentary lifestyle – again, that depends on just how sedentary you are). You can pick these up in any grocery store in the snack foods aisle.