What is the best time to have lunch when working from home?
Many of us are celebrating a rather sour anniversary around this time: one year of working from home. Although at first it may have seemed fantastic that you could stroll into your kitchen at any time of day to make yourself a snack board (okay, it still is), by now it’s a little less funny when all the hours and days seem to blur together without clearly marked points, and a day behind a screen sometimes feels like one big energy dip. Hence the question: what is the best time to have lunch when working from home?
Especially if you don’t make sure to schedule regular movement and relaxation during a workday, it’s tempting to eat away your feelings or energy dips with guilty pleasures throughout the day. The result: the familiar carb coma or sugar crash. But how can we all make sure, while working from home, that we remain as productive as possible?
Tailored to you
According to Gerard Mullin, gastroenterologist and professor, there is no clear-cut answer. It will always depend on your caloric needs, appetite, how much you move, and how you organize your work-from-home day. It’s quite possible that you sit longer than usual at the office, work at different times, and that the pandemic is causing you more stress anyway (tip: try stress-baking). All of this affects your health and digestion. It can also cause you to eat more than you should, which in turn can lead to fatigue, discomfort, and concentration problems.
Avoid being truly hungry
He does recommend having lunch about three to five hours after breakfast (and don’t forget: breakfast first, coffee later). If you’ve eaten a balanced breakfast and haven’t stuffed yourself but your stomach is about half full, digesting solid food should take about four hours. According to him, it’s best not to wait until you’re completely hungry again, but to plan the frequency of your meals and healthy snacks so that you provide your brain with fuel (energy) steadily. So he also recommends eating a small snack two hours after a full meal.
Snack attack
And yes, as tempting as it is to treat yourself to a piece of Oreo cheesecake as a snack every day, the idea is of course that these should be healthy snacks containing plenty of fiber, some healthy fats, and protein. Apple with peanut butter, whole-grain crackers with hummus, some dried fruit with a piece of cheese—that sort of thing. But indulging every now and then, to break up the tedium of yet another week of working from home and eat something that genuinely makes you happy, should of course be allowed too. Now that’s advice we can get behind!
Also read:
- Why do people think it’s strange when you have breakfast?
- The strangest eating habits during office lunch
- Your breakfast is fooling you: whole grain isn’t whole grain at all
Source: Huffington Post
