Video: Why You Really Shouldn’t Eat Lunch at Your Desk Today
On a typical work day, my lunch break looks like this: Me, hunched over my desk, shoveling some sort of salad/wrap/quinoa concoction into my mouth with my right hand while very inefficiently typing with my left hand. It’s not that I can’t leave my desk during lunch. But the weather has been so miserable for the past five months, that venturing outside for lunch simply wasn’t an option. Plus, why go somewhere else when my desk chair is comfortable enough? Well, here’s why: According to this video posted by The Atlantic, eating lunch in your lonely cubicle, day after day, isn’t just sad, it’s also bad for your health.
According to the video, a whopping 65 percent of Americans eat lunch at their desks (even though, we all know sitting is killing us). This is bad news for a few reasons: For one, folks who eat lunch at their desks consume more calories than those who venture outside of their cubicles. And people who report feeling both socially isolated and stressed — feelings which tend to creep up on you when you haven’t left your desk for ten hours — increase their risk of death by a very scary 400 percent.
That said, I’ll be eating my quinoa salad far, far away from the walls of my cubicle come lunchtime. How about you?
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