10 Reasons Why You Shouldn’t Be Eating Lunch At Your Desk
Here’s why you should stop eating lunch at your desk.
1. Increased long-term health risks
Eating lunch at your desk means you’ll be sitting for longer periods of time, and sitting for long periods of time can make you sick in more ways than one. Sitting for hours on end can increase your risk of heart disease, high blood pressure and high cholesterol. It can also cause your pancreas to go into overdrive, leading to diabetes and other diseases, because sedentary muscles don’t respond well to insulin. In other words, if you don’t leave your desk to eat lunch, you may end up taking a lot more time off work in the long run.
2. Leads to weight gain
Eating while continuing to check email, etc., can lead to “mindless eating,” which can lead people to overeat and/or eat the wrong foods, and thus gain weight.
3. Reduced productivity
If multitasking is your game, think again. Multitasking is still not as effective as focusing on one thing at a time.
4. You miss out on your social activities
Spending your lunch hour cooped up at the office can limit the amount of time you spend socializing. This can impact your happiness and productivity. Taking time off from work at lunchtime will allow you to come back happier and more focused to start the afternoon.
5. You need sunshine
With many people working early mornings and late evenings, most office workers inevitably spend their time going back and forth to the office when sunlight is limited.
Lunchtime can be one of the few opportunities we have to get a dose of sunshine. Be sure to get outside and recharge your vitamin D levels.
6. Lack of balance
Staying in work mode all the time (and not taking a break) is a surefire shortcut to burnout.
To avoid burnout, choose steps at certain times during your day that will allow you to take a break. This will help you refresh and refocus when you return to work.
6. Your mental and physical health suffers
The mental effects of sitting are less well known than some of its physical effects. However, the risk of depression and anxiety is higher in people who sit the most. This may be because the mental health benefits of sitting rather than moving are lacking.
7. Germs on your desk
You may look at your desk and think it’s pretty clean. But it’s not, because there are over 10 million bacteria lurking on the mouse and keyboard you use every day. When you eat at your desk, you expose your food to a germy environment. So eating somewhere else is a healthier choice.
9. Digestion
When you eat at your desk while working, you focus more on your work than your food, which causes the blood supply to be diverted from the digestive system to the brain and heart. If your body is not relaxed when you eat, body function, especially digestion, may be stressed.
10. Weakness in the legs and buttocks
If you don’t use them, you lose them! By sitting all day, you don’t rely on your powerful lower body muscles to hold you up. This leads to muscle atrophy, which is the weakening of these muscles. Without strong leg and buttock muscles to stabilize you, your body is at risk of injury.
