Avoiding high calorie office food

Water Bottle: Most offices these days have water coolers where you can get yourself a glass of cool refreshing water whenever you want. The problem is, that sometimes you get so busy that you can go hours without filling your empty glass. Drinking water is far too important to your overall health and weight loss aspirations to leave to chance and having a decent sized bottle of water at your desk all the time will help insure you're getting enough. The other great benefit of using a large bottle instead of glasses or cups of water is that you can easily track how much you've consumed during your day. Having plenty of water within your reach at all times will keep you well hydrated and help you avoid the office munchies by keeping your stomach nice and full. Fruit: Each couple of days, bring a bag of fresh fruit to the office and store it at your desk. Try to be adventurous; don't just stick with the common fare of apples and mandarins. Berries, grapes, mangos and kiwi fruit will keep for several days, more if you have access to an office refrigerator, and provide variety to whet your appetite for something other than chocolate biscuits. If you have a blender, take it to work with you and create a wonderful smoothie or fruit cocktail made with banana, pear, apple, pineapple, strawberries, orange juice and ice. Store it in the office fridge and it will stay good for a whole day or more. Nutritious Snack or Protein bars: You can also use these as meal replacements, but be careful to read the labels. Many "nutritional bars" are nothing more than candy bars in deceptive packaging. Stay well away from those with high levels of sugar and fat. Vegetables: Bring a couple of small ziplocked bags of sliced carrot, celery sticks or your favorite veggies. Low-fat cottage cheese/low sugar yogurt: Small containers of these on hand will provide nutritional meal options. Ricecakes: A bag of low-sodium ricecakes tucked away can satisfy a need to eat something crunchy. Just stay away from the ones loaded with flavored sugar coating. Toothbrush/Mouthwash: Apparently, this is an age old competitive bodybuilding trick. During pre-contest dieting, some bodybuilders attempt to deflect the temptation to eat blacklisted foods within reach by brushing their teeth. As you can imagine, the last thing they would want to do after brushing with minty toothpaste or gargling with mouthwash would be to eat a piece of chocolate or lollies. Not bad for keeping your breath fresh, too.

Emotional Eating

Occasional emotional eating is normal. Everyone has celebrated with food before, that’s what birthday parties, Christmas lunch and BBQ’s on grand final day are all about. But emotional eating can become a serious problem when it leads to negative emotional and physical imbalances in our lives.

Frequent emotional eating can easily become a destructive cycle. Emotional eating becomes entrenched in the lives of its sufferers when they use food to regulate their mood, cope with stress or overcome feelings of anxiety or boredom.

This type of behaviour can easily lead emotional eaters to become overweight or obese because many of them feel hungry most of the time.

"Satisfying" this insatiable hunger with food, many emotional eaters consume far more calories than their body needs and they gain a lot of weight which becomes extremely difficult, if not impossible to lose.

Common signs of Emotional Eating

Here are some common signs of emotional eating:

• Eating when not physically hungry.

• Eating during times of strong emotions, like anger or depression.

• Eating when bored.

• Rapid eating.

• Eating immediately after arriving home from work.

• Eating alone out of embarrassment at the quantity or type of food being eaten.

• Eating until uncomfortably full.

• Feelings of disgust, depression, or guilt after overeating.

Recognizing emotional hunger

Recognizing emotional hunger (as apposed to real physical hunger) is one of the keys to overcoming or staving off frequent emotional eating.

Some of the characteristics of emotional hunger include:

• Emotional hunger comes on suddenly.

• One minute you're not hungry at all and the next minute you're starving.

• Emotional hunger often craves specific food, like pizza, chocolate, or a cheeseburger.

• Emotional hunger begins in the mouth and the mind, not the stomach.

• Emotional hunger often accompanies an unpleasant emotion.

• Emotional hunger involves automatic or absent-minded eating.

• Emotional hunger isn’t satisfied when you’re full.

• Emotional hunger makes you feel guilty.

Calcium and Weight Loss

Most nutritionists agree that in order to make sure your body gets all the nutrients it needs to stay healthy you should eat the widest possible variety of foods.

This principle is often overlooked by dieters who restrict the types of food they eat in order to lose weight.

If your diet is restrictive, or is simply low in calcium and calcium rich foods, you would be well advised to remember that calcium helps the body to function in many important ways.

For example, calcium is believed to help:

• Strengthen our bones and teeth

• Help our muscles function properly

• Regulate our heart

• Keep our nervous system healthy

• Activate and regulate certain enzymes and hormones such as insulin

• Our body metabolize or burn body fat

• Us to lose weight more efficiently.

How much Calcium do we need?

It has been estimated by an Australian Nutrition Survey that around 90 per cent of women and 70 per cent of children do not achieve the recommended daily intake (RDI) of calcium.

According to the Australian Food and Grocery Council's Food Science Bureau, the recommended dietary calcium intake per day varies depending on factors such as age and gender. The recommended daily dietary intake of calcium in the following table from the NHMRC is designed to cover the needs of most people.

Recommended calcium intake per day
Category	Recommended daily intake
Adult women 19-54	800 mg
Adult women, pregnant	1100 mg
Adult women, breastfeeding	1200 mg
Adult woman, after menopause	1000 mg
Infants, 0-1 year	300-550 mg
Children, 1-7 years	700-800 mg
Girls, 8-11	900 mg
Girls, 12-15	1000 mg
Girls, 16-18	800 mg
Boys, 8-11	800 mg
Boys 12-15	1200 mg
Boys, 16-18	1000 mg
Men, 19-64+	800 mg

Depending on the stage of life and the duration of the deficiency, inadequate calcium intake can lead to sometimes debilitating effects such as poor bone formation, weak bones, osteoporosis and poor dental health.

Conclusion.

If you are trying to lose weight and minimize your body fat, many research studies suggest that maintaining a diet high in calcium should be a high priority.

In this article we discussed the role of calcium in our diets, why calcium is important to people wanting to achieve or maintain a healthy weight, what foods have the best sources of calcium and provided tips to increase your daily calcium intake.

Diet Plan

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