Working from home definitely has its advantages. No morning or afternoon commute in heavy traffic. You can sleep in a bit longer because you don’t have to drive to the office twenty miles away. And, perhaps most importantly, you can spend more time with your family even as you toil away in your back bedroom makeshift office.
All of these benefits of working from home leads to one overall lifestyle change; your energy level is much higher after 5 pm because you haven’t expended so much of it driving back and forth on the freeways. You most probably have also not lost any energy dealing with office politics and interacting with any toxic personalities that might be roaming around the office.
But there’s one danger to your health that you might not think much about when you start working from home; you now have the freedom to snack throughout the day whenever you want. The temptation to graze all day in the kitchen is always there.
At the office, you didn’t have this problem. Sure, you might have nibbled on a few snacks throughout the day that weren’t exactly healthy, but you had coworkers around, there was a structure, a schedule that dictated when you have could have lunch and when you could leave. You couldn’t just stroll into the break room whenever you wanted throughout the day.
At home, however, between phone calls and Zoom meetings, you can stroll into the kitchen whenever the mood strikes, which might be often since it’s just a few steps away from your temporary bedroom office. And once there, you have access to all kinds of delicious snacks and junk food. The only things standing between you and those Doritos and Oreo cookies is your willpower and self-control.
But rely on your self-discipline alone when you can utilize something even more powerful, something that makes it impossible for you to give in to temptation. As difficult as it might appear, stripping your kitchen of all of those tempting snacks will ensure that you do not fall back on your commitment to a healthy diet, one that is free of lots of carbs and sugar.
Saying no to these foods when they are mere feet away from where you are working will require the most disciplined among us. Why rely on an internal resource that studies show is in limited supply, one that dissipates gradually throughout the day, every time you tap into it?
There’s a much easier–and foolproof–way to keep you on your path of a healthy diet. Simply commit to yourself that you will no longer tolerate having junk food in your kitchen, which, of course, means that you will not be buying any more of it at the store when you do your grocery shopping.
If you make this one single commitment–that you will not allow junk food into your home–you are virtually guaranteeing that you will never be tempted to open up that family-size bag of M&Ms ever again.
As the saying goes, “the best defense is a good offense,” taking the initiative before the cravings strike, makes your game plan a winning one. Never again will you have to dig into that ever-dwindling source of willpower. You will have won the game even before it began.
