Five Day-to-Day Tips to be Healthier at Work

If you’re like me and spend most of the day sitting, you’d be smart to find a few ways to be more active or eat a little healthier. It’s easy to lose track of fitness while you’re at work, but there are a few tweaks you can make to improve your overall health while adding minimal time and work to your day. I’d like to share five tips that I implement in my day-to-day life to be healthier while working a job that requires me to sit for five hours a day.

Now, there are some obvious tips I could recommend. It’s easy to tell people to use your lunch break to walk or to prepare a healthy lunch at home. These are nice tips, but I’m not going to do that because it would require more work than more people are willing to commit to. The tips I’d like to recommend are easier to implement without modifying much of your schedule.

Take Stairs

It’s easy to take the stairs, but realistically it’s not going to happen every time. I used to work on the fifth floor and there was no way I’d take four flights of stairs every time I wanted to enter or leave a building. Instead, I’d recommend setting a number of flights you’d like to climb each week. Perhaps you start with 25, five flights a day. That should increase your movement throughout the day without adding guilt when you choose take the elevator to bring your bag upstairs.

Bring Drinks

While I’d not going to tell you to bring lunch to work because that does take extra time at home, grabbing a drink can be done in seconds. It’s easy to get a soda along with your lunch, but if you chose to bring a drink from home you’ll have more option and it’s easier to pick a healthy one. Pretend you’re grabbing Subway for lunch. You can’t buy a can of seltzer, but you can buy a Coke for $2. Even if you want Coke, bringing a can from home will save you about $1 each day.

Drink More Water

Coffee seems to be the work beverage of choice, but water is the nectar of life. It’s common for people to drink less of it than they should, but drinking more is very simple. The key is to set a daily amount. While some people say you need at least 64 ounces a day, other people say you should drink half your body weight in ounces (a 200 lb. person should drink 100 oz.). Familiarize yourself with the capacity of your cup or water bottle and drink a set amount based on your needs. As an added bonus, some people mistake hunger with thirst so this may be a way to eat less.

Treat Yourself, Eventually

It’s not uncommon for office treats to pop up. Perhaps there’s left over donuts from a breakfast or someone brought in her kid’s Halloween candy. If you want a treat, go for it, but be smart about it. If I wanted to have a donut, I would tell myself I’d eat it after I finished responding to e-mails (or any other task). That way, I’d know I would truly want the donut and wouldn’t just eat the donut because of the initial allure. Plus, by waiting I’d likely avoid going back for seconds.

Sit Up Straight

Hours of staring at the computer can lead to slouching shoulders and poor posture.  This is not an ideal position and it can lead to back pain as well as a slew of other issues. There are many tips for improving your posture while at work, such as these, but an easy for step is to sit up straight with your shoulders under your ears. Make this a habit and improved posture will start to become second nature.

Conclusion

If you look, you’ll find many tips to improve your overall wellness while at work. Small tweaks can lead to improvements over time. The examples I’ve provided are tips I’ve actually implemented and I can confirm they’re incredibly easy to implement without much preparation. It’s easy to fall into bad habits while at work. Having a conscious focus on wellness will encourage you to take steps toward being healthier and incorporating more health tips into your routines.