Workplace: Do We Eat More At Work When We’re Stressed?

There’s no question about it — being in an office and undergoing the ups and downs of office life DO affect eating and diet. But the stress affects eating and diet both ways:

Some people eat less when they are busy. Some eat less when they re stressed. Being busy and being stressed are not always the same thing. Some people eat because they have nothing to do or they can’t figure out what to do at work. These are usually the same people who procrastinate. If they work at home, they’ll check for the mail twelve times a day, clean the house and make every call possible before conquering the work task at hand. In the office, there are fewer things to do, but eating is one of them.

In addition, some people who don’t normally eat lunch, will eat lunch because there is a lunch hour, a lunch break or a time when everyone else in the office is out to lunch and picking up sandwiches to bring back to the office to eat. It’s sort of peer pressure.

Then there are those people who have expense accounts and eat because the lunch is free.

And finally, are those people who have to wine and dine people as part of their job, and feel funny not ordering an appetizer and desert when their clients are. They eat to keep their clients feeling comfortable, and they gain weight that their clients don’t as a result!

Emotional Eating

Women are not necessarily more vulnerable to emotional eating than men, however, women talk about it more, and, as a rule, are more weight conscious than men are.

Women are also more in touch with their feelings, as a rule, so that when they feel bad — they know it! Men may have emotions, but they don’t necessarily pay attention to them. A woman may feel badly, know she feels badly, and know that she wants to feel better. Instead of confronting the feelings that are making her hurt, and figuring out why she feels badly, she may try to numb the feelings or distract herself from the feelings by using a substance. The substance can be food, alcohol, drugs, work, exercise or something more damaging like cutting.

To avoid emotional eating, follow the following steps:

1. Try to identify your feelings. This is a discipline for many people.

2. When you identify a feeling, figure out what made you feel that way.

3. See if you can eliminate the things that made you feel bad — or rather than eliminate them, face them and solve the problem that is causing the bad feelings.

4. Recognize this pattern when it occurs again.

5. Keep at it. This is not an overnight fix.