Wednesday, January 22, 2014

Can Better Eating Help Your Career?


You may start out the new year with the intention of taking better care of yourself.
But then you go to work.
In the break room is a birthday cake. The boss orders pizza when everyone is forced to work late.
The vending machines have offerings that include chips, candy bars and sugared drinks. You get swamped at work and decide to skip lunch — after breakfast was a giant cup of coffee.
As for exercise, when you get home from work you're too tired to get off the couch. Mornings are too hectic to schedule exercise, so you plan to try and find some time at lunch to go for a walk.
But it never happens because your work takes precedence.
The best way to stick to your resolutions to eat better and exercise more may be in looking at those things as a career-enhancing strategy, experts say. That way you won't push them aside.
If you want to grab that big promotion, earn a better paycheck or impress the boss, then you need to be more aware of what you eat and how you move.
One of the first steps to being healthier is to stop focusing on your weight because it is not a great indicator of health, says Alexis Conason, a New York-based clinical psychologist who teaches mindful eating. So when you eat a piece of colleague's birthday cake, stop seeing yourself as being bad.
She also considers it a bad idea to respond to overeating pizza by doing something like a juice cleanse, which she argues will throw your body out of whack.
"The more we fight against our bodies, the more disconnected we are," she says. "We will eat an entire pizza and lose touch with our internal cues that tell us when we're full."
Conason advocates mindful eating, learning to notice (read more here)

No comments: