Although I am now, for the moment, mostly freed from such constraints, due to my current job being workable from home, there was a time, not so long ago, where my food habits were a real catastrophe, illustrating pretty much what’s unfortunately become a norm for too many people: when we don’t have the time, we eat the first convenient thing we can lay our hands on.
Until the beginning of 2004, this was still my case. While I had been somewhat lucky during my college years, with cheap uni restaurants which food wasn’t the worst thing on earth and actually helped me eat a little better, the day I moved further and had to take the train everyday to go to work and school marked the end of any kind of healthy meal for me. I would leave home at 7 am, and not come back until 8 pm, staying at the company for lunch on top of it and taking only the minimum allowed break.
My first priority was to fill my stomach at noon in order to not starve during the afternoon, and this included every kind of easily-edible food that I could buy at the railroad station upon getting down the train every morning; this was made too easy, actually, by the fact that we had a meal plan with my company, giving us restaurant tickets of a value of 7 euros each, which could be used in many fast-food stores. This turned out to be a huge trap for me; even the most filled sandwich costs around 4.5 euros maximum, and if using a ticket for this, I wouldn’t get any change handed back to me, thus I was feeling compelled to buy more food than necessary. It’s in this period that I took back at least half of the kilos I had lost before that. And this is a real problem for many of us. While these foods aren’t good for the health of lean people either, in our case, they contribute to our weight gain to an extent that can be quite terrible in the end; four or five extra kilos per year quickly add on, and we all know what the end result is - insidious and unsuspected.
What I now realize is that with some planning, I could have brought better food in, but at the time, I was only focused on the part that was demanding a few minutes of extra effort, in my evenings that were already so short. I’m one of these people who can’t stand the fact of coming back home, eating, then going to bed; I need to have some personal time after a long day of work, even if only for one hour, else I go crazy and frustrated. And frustration feelings don’t do any good to me. At all. So I just didn’t do it, nor did I put any more thought in it, as I was shrugging the food problem off and going on.
Here’s the kicker, though. Once all thoughts of stress and panic are put aside, it really doesn’t take that long to plan for the day after. Provided, of course, that the dinner is of a healthier kind than picking up fast-food on the way back home after work, it doesn’t require much extra time to cook a little more than the normal quantity, and pack what’s left in a box that you can bring to work. Rice and meat, vegetables and pasta - whatever works! It can’t be worse than the mayo sandwich, giant bretzels and other chocolate buns I’d pick, more because they comforted me than out of real necessity.
I also found out that a nice box rather than a bland Tupperware one can even help; every little thing, as insignificant as it can be, that contributes to making the weight loss fight a little more bearable, may someday become the detail that will prevent you from being completely fed up and giving in to a full-blown binge. My pleasure now, on these days when I need to go to the office (or to any other place where I can’t have a proper lunch), is to put my food in a bento box. A friend sent it to me from Japan a few years ago, but it can be bought online or in certain food accessories stores; not only is it more appealing than a stupid plastic box, it also contains compartments for your different foods, and limits the quantity you can take in. Bento boxes aren’t made for huge quantities, that is. They may seem expensive, too, yet once you have one, you really don’t need anything else, save for a pair of chopsticks (a fork works just as well, of course).
Convenient foods rather than healthy ones really can be a danger, what’s with the lack of nutrients and the inversely proportional quantity of added sugars and other processed ingredients in them. Thus, what we all need to do is really to sit down for a moment, clear our heads from all the stressful thoughts of “not having time”, and think of a few better foods we could bring with us to work on a busy day. What do we like? What can be eaten cold without tasting bland? What do we really need to prepare it, and is it such a waste of precious time, or barely more time than preparing the rest of the dinner? Can we buy it in advance and stash it to be used regularly?
Let’s keep in mind that even bringing in a meal as basic as brown rice with a slice of turkey hen meat isn’t worse than snacking on a few Mars bars for a lunch. With some planning, in the end, a solution can always be found - and it won’t be the awful bother that our time-consuming society has made it look like.
- Kery
