Office Workers Unite!

Desk job here...I've been brown bagging my breakfast, lunch, and snacks for about 4.5 years now. I rarely participate in the office potlucks...occasionally, if it's actually a special occasion like the office Christmas party or whatever...but just some random Friday, and I'll pass. I have no issue forgoing the doughnuts and whatnot...they're really not my thing...occasionally I get a desire to have one, but it's rare so I don't worry about it much.

To move more I generally will get up and go talk to colleagues about this or that rather than emailing them or paging them on a phone. I work on the third floor and typically take the stairs...I also tend to use the first floor break room to get my water and the first floor restroom facilities. I park further away from the building and I also don't look for rock star parking at the supermarket or other venues...nothing wrong with having to walk a bit. When I get home I'm usually on my feet cooking or cleaning or playing with my kids, etc...I don't usually sit down until dinner which is around 8:30 most nights.

Beyond that, I make time for deliberate exercise most days.

I try to get up and move around a lot. I drink a ton of water so that means hourly trips to the restroom anyway. Sometimes I'll walk down the stairs (I'm on the 6th floor) and around the building on breaks but it's starting to get really hot during the day. I exercise every evening for 30-45 mins and I do my best to avoid the potlucks/team lunches and birthday cakes/cupcakes that seem to happen on an almost weekly basis. I bring my lunch to work and sit in the breakroom with my favorite coworker and we take lunch later (2pm) so we don't have a ton of people in there with us. Office work is great, but I kinda miss running around like a crazy person when I was a veterinary practice manager. Got lots of exercise just at work!

I work a desk job, but for some reason I find it the easiest to stay on my diet while at work. Our building has a private gym so I almost always go hit the weights and cardio immediately as work lets out. Really helps me partition my day. Otherwise during the day I like to take little field trips and say hello to coworkers lol.

At the moment I have a Vari-Desk in an office on a 5th floor of a building on a 10-acre site of several buildings. I stand at the desk most hours of most days, and this past week finally began walking outside in varying paths around and among the buildings. My time is being billed to "unassigned", so I regard my perambulation as business. I've also some times used the 1st floor restroom and climbed the stairs back to the 5th floor, which earns 1 minute of stair climbing for 9 calories. I recently acquired a bread making machine and discovered that I particularly like a whole wheat bread that I can easily make with it. So, now that I've got so much bread, I bring a slice to work each day and make my lunch with it. I toast the bread and cut about an inch of banana and spread it on the bread for an all-natural fruit topping, and have a pleasant little lunch. I've also recently moved my protein shake from having it in the morning at home to having it with my lunch at work.

In the early months of this journey, I was taking my lunch from among the free snacks offered by my employer. I found that simply by speaking up, I could influence the shopper to supply us with a more attractive variety of snacks, such as yogurt, mozzarella sticks, granola, and jerky.

I luck out and work in a powerhouse where there's no vending machine. So I bring my lunch and there's no temptation. I try to get up as often as possible, but I just make sure when I get home I workout.