Biscuits and cakes in the office: Why they aren’t working any more

Around twenty years ago, we rarely saw a cake in the office unless it was to celebrate the end of year results, or the launch of a new product. These days, we’re lucky to get through a week without cake: a birthday in the team, a charity bake-off or just a reward for making it to Friday. And we haven’t even mentioned the tub of biscuits in the kitchen.

Pastries are seen as a way of keeping us going, building a team, and making the workplace more pleasant. But what if they’re undermining our health and our energy?

Recent research shows that 68% of Australians are eating cakes and biscuits daily and that most of this consumption occurs in the workplace. What’s more, the research shows, if you don’t partake of these sugary treats, you’re perceived as not much of a team player, even a bit of a killjoy.

In the UK, the Royal College of Surgeons argued that ‘cake culture’ is fuelling obesity and dental problems.

Yet for many, the sugar hit is a much needed relief from the daily grind. Long hours and stress exhaust us, and refined carbohydrates are just the thing for a dopamine hit, an insulin rush and a moment of physical bliss before the ache of keeping one’s nose to the grindstone returns.

Perhaps a better way to celebrate a birthday is with a shorter day, a walk outside, and the chance to catch up on a bit of sleep. It would make us all feel better, and might even increase productivity.

Or is this a step too far?

September 7, 2018 0

Eat at your desk at your peril…

Eating without noticing is one of the fastest ways to put on weight.

Snacks are so easy to forget. They are usually high calories and not very filling. In fact some (like a handful of sugary lollies or muesli bars) can even make you feel hungrier shortly afterwards. If we’re eating at our desk, it’s even easier not to register what we’re consuming. Our minds are focused on the spreadsheet, conference call or project, while we funnel foods into our mouths.

If you want a snack, try and get a plate, and make a proper small meal.

I can feel you resisting. “But then I’ll get fat if I eat all that.” “But I don’t want a proper meal’. If you don’t want a proper meal, perhaps you’re not hungry and you actually don’t need a snack either. In the event that you are hungry, maybe it would be better that you register that you’ve eaten something, something substantial, which might sustain you and prevent you from nibbling again in half an hour.

There are other hazards of snacking. The constant stimulation of our stomach means that it never has a chance to rest, or more importantly ‘clean up’. We have brilliant little helpers in our guts that maintain our bodies. If we have eaten a steak, it might take five hours for it to be digested in the stomach and small intestine. Once this is done, the small intestine sweeps itself in a such a cute manner that even tough-minded scientists have called it the ‘housekeeper’. If we eat before it has a chance to do this, it once again goes on standby to receive food. But constant snacking means there is no time for ‘cleaning’ which helps keep our gut healthy.

The drip feed of food also keeps insulin churning up and down. Our bodies don’t have an opportunity to find their point of homeostasis where blood sugar and hormones are regulated, balanced and consistent and don’t have to deal with a constant influx of food. This constant demand for insulin, to deal with the food, can artificially inflate our appetite. So constant nibbling and snacking not only adds to our waistline because we’re not paying attention to it, but also because it makes us want to eat more.

If that isn’t bad enough, if we eat at our desks, we associate being at our desk with eating, which triggers us to want to eat, whether we’re hungry or not. All in all, we’re not helping ourselves.

Step away from the desk. Can you get in the habit of eating somewhere else?

August 3, 2018 0

Can you lose weight on junk food?

An American professor of nutrition has, in the name of research, spent ten weeks losing weight on junk food. He wanted to prove that it could be done. And it has been done! He has spent weeks on a diet of biscuits, cakes and other high-sugar, fat-laden junk food and has generated a great deal of media hype with tales of weight loss, deeper sleep and better general health.

Mark Haub is an associate professor from the department of human nutrition at Kansas State University. Over ten weeks, Mark ate sponge cakes, biscuits, some raw vegetables and drank full fat milk and a protein shake every day. He lost 12.1 kilograms from his original 91.3-kilogram body weight.

The but (and it’s a big one) is that he carefully controlled his calories intake. He limited his intake to a maximum of 1800 calories (7531 kilojoules) a day, exercised heavily throughout the period and took vitamin supplements in addition to “muscle” protein shakes.

At one point he estimated that he had worked off, and not replaced, more than 800 calories through an abnormally strenuous workout.

“I am not recommending or promoting this approach. I am simply in the process of illustrating that foods deemed to wreck diets, cause obesity, lead to diabetes, etc… do not – in and of themselves – do that,” he said after four days and a 3.2-kilogram loss.

On September 10, he ate:

– a double espresso

– two servings of Hostess Twinkies Golden Sponge Cake

– one Centrum Advance Formula “From A To Zinc” pill

– one serving of Little Debbie Star Crunch cookies

– a Diet Mr Dew drink

– half a serving of Doritos Cool Ranch corn chips

– two servings of Kellogg’s Corn Pops cereal

– a serving of whole milk

– half a serving of raw baby carrots

– one and a half servings of Duncan Hines Family Style Chewy Fudge brownie

– half a serving of Little Debbie Zebra Cake

– one serving of Muscle Milk Protein Shake drink

– Total: 1589 calories

Excerpt from ‘Why we Cheat when we Eat and how to stop’.

July 27, 2018 0

The bites that ‘don’t count’

Perhaps you turned down a slice of cake, but now you find yourself at the plate, knife in hand, just making sure that the edge is even. You cut a sliver and shove it into your mouth. The cake tastes delicious. You return to the platter and ease off another morsel. Now the edge is a mess. You take the knife again and cut to smooth the ends. A short while later, the cake is considerably smaller…

It’s very easy to say that one mouthful won’t make a difference. The question is then, which mouthful makes us fat? Is it the first? Or the hundredth?

Maybe your friends are saying, come on, you’ve done really well! One dessert won’t kill you! They are right, it won’t, but it’s very easy for that one dessert to become many.

There are many times we can tell ourselves ‘This doesn’t count’. I didn’t order a dessert – I ate it from my husband’s plate, so that doesn’t count. Or I was just clearing dishes, and it was a shame to let the rest go to waste. So I scoffed it rather than put it in the garbage.

It’s much easier to let ourselves off the hook than stick to a diet because diets require us to make a huge effort. They ask for such a large change. Everything we know, everything we do is thrown out of the window. Your normal eating habits are utterly disrupted to make way for a new miracle fix that promises amazing results.

This is mainly because most of us believe that losing weight is so hard, so painful and so mysterious, that only the truly radical solutions will work.

But what if that wasn’t the case at all? What if one tiny change was all that was needed?

Excerpt from ‘Why we Cheat when we Eat and how to stop’.

July 20, 2018 0

One small change can shed kilos

I used to think that one tiny change would never result in the loss of the fifteen kilos that I wanted to shed. To lose that kind of weight, a change had to be dramatic, drastic, and most of all, tortuous.

Medical research is showing that is not the case at all. They examined the world’s fattest man, and to reach his astronomical weight, all you have to do is eat 300 calories more than you need, every day, for about twenty years. He was so large that they had to take him to hospital on a forklift truck. So basically, all you need to do, to become enormously fat, is to eat one Mars Bar too many, every day. Gosh, I thought. That’s so easy to do! I could easily eat a small bar of chocolate more than I need every day. And some days, I could eat several.

Luckily, the reverse is also true.

If you reduce you calories a little bit every day, even if only by 50, you will lose weight. That’s just one biscuit. If you eat one biscuit less, every day, over the course of a year, you’ll lose weight. About five pounds or two kilograms, to be exact.

Excerpt from ‘Why we Cheat when we Eat and how to stop’.

July 13, 2018 0

When Food is Love…

Some foods can feel like love. They fill us, soothe us, comfort us. They are there for us after a hard day, no matter what. A few mouthfuls later and a sensation of bliss flows through our bodies. It can feel as safe and nurturing as a mother’s embrace, as sublime as a lover’s kiss.

Often, these are foods we have learned to crave since childhood. Strong memories and associations underpin some of the meanings they hold for us. Somewhere in the past we have had experiences where we made a connection between the food and the emotions.

A friend told me: “I’m going home and I just know that Mum is going to ply me with cake. She’ll have baked just for me, and I both want to gorge myself on it, and want to refuse it. Because I’ll feel crap the next day.”

Who wouldn’t want to gorge themselves on their mother’s love? To feel replete with worthiness, safe as a fluffy chick in a nest.

But food isn’t love. And cake isn’t worthiness.

They can feel similar physically, which is part of the mix-up. Both trigger dopamine, and can release endorphins and other chemicals that do indeed make us ‘feel better’. We have a physiological response both to hugs and love, and to certain foods, and that response in our body is close enough for us to get confused. In fact, it not only gets us confused, it can make us rely on one when the other (usually love) isn’t available, or doesn’t feel like it is.

One of the first things we can do is to recognise that we have conflated the two, confused ourselves by mixing love into the pie.

Then, if we find ourselves turning to food, when what we really want is love, we need to ask what else might serve in its place? Would curling up under a blanket do it? Or walking in nature? Do you need to be with a friend, even if its on the other end of the phone? Or can you bear to be with yourself, take your need for love and treasure it, and love that need in yourself enough that all thoughts of cake fade away?

June 29, 2018 0