The Best and Worst Things to Do Before and After Lunch

The easiest way to succeed with not only your health goals, but any goal, is to structure your life and habits in ways that support and make achieving your goals easy. That happens to be particularly true when it comes to your eating habits; not only as far as what you eat, but also as far as sticking to your meal intervals, staying away from bad snacks and what you do before and after your meals. For example, if you are supposed to weight five to six hours between meals and only have healthy snacks as needed, it won’t help if you only have a chance to eat every eight hours and at the same time have people eating candy right next to you. That would be a prescription for failure.

It is interesting sometimes to look at how our routines are set up and notice that often times they are set up exactly the opposite of what is the ideal for our health. Lunch time for most people is a perfect example of that.

What is lunch time like for most people? Well, to begin with, a lot of people skip breakfast or have something really fast and unhealthy, such as a cup of coffee, or maybe even worse, a doughnut or some pastry. Then through the morning they might snack on some candy or whatever is around. And then, when lunch time comes they normally do one of the two things: Go to a restaurant (sometimes a fast food place), grab something from a vending machine or some snack available in the break room, or just get something that they brought from home and eat quickly. Then they go back to work and sit down and work for the rest of the afternoon. Whether this describes you routine accurately, or just partially, this is the worst routine to have.

This routine happens to be exactly the opposite of what would be a good use of your meal time. First of all, by eating an unhealthy breakfast or skipping it altogether, you are putting your body on “starvation mode” from the beginning of the day. You haven’t had any food for many hours, and your body’s response to this is to slow down and conserve as much energy (calories) as possible. Not a good thing if you intend to maintain a healthy weight. Then you make a very common mistake that most people are not aware of: after spending the entire morning on “work mode”, without giving time for your body and mind to relax, you either start eating, or go to a busy place (the restaurant) to eat. That’s a huge mistake. It’s very important that you are in a relaxed state of mind when you eat. Digesting, and resting, are activities that involve your parasympathetic nervous system; the branch of your nervous system responsible for “rest and recovery”, “relaxation” responses. So it’s very important that you are in a relaxed state of mind and body in order to digest your meal properly. Then, after eating, we quickly get back to work, sit down and work for the rest of the afternoon. Another huge mistake, because now your body has received a whole bunch of calories and does not have the chance to burn them, because you will spend the next few hours sitting down. And to make matters worse, although you are sitting down, you are still in “work mode” while your mind and body needs to relax in order to digest your lunch properly.

So what is the opposite of that? What is the best way to use your lunch time? First of all of course, make sure to take time in the morning to have a healthy breakfast with plenty of protein. Then whether you have a high stress job or not, when lunch time comes, make sure to take five minutes to calm your mind and body before having lunch. Just take five minutes to take a few deep breaths and forget about anything that could be stressful.. Then, unless there is a cafeteria or a restaurant that is very close to where you are, you should bring your food to work . This way you have complete control of what you eat. Take your time eating and don’t let anything stressful come your way. Completely turn yourself off from work, problems or anything stressful. Trust me, those things will be there waiting for you when you come back, so for now you can just let them go. Then when you are done, the best thing you do is to go for a walk. Going for a pleasant walk is the single most important thing you can do after any meal.

Going for a walk will help burn some of the sugar in your blood stream and preventing it to be converted into fat. Converting some blood sugar into fat is a natural process that occurs after every meal. If you eat right and don’t eat between your meals that fat will naturally be used up for energy once your liver glycogen storages are depleted. But you will help speed up that process because exercise (even light as a short, pleasant walk) will put your body into “fat burning mode” and will use up some of the glycogen stored in your muscles. You will also get your body moving and your blood flowing. You will do exactly the opposite what you have been doing the entire morning and will most likely do for the whole afternoon. When you are sitting down and working, you are stimulating your mind but keeping your body sedentary. When you go for a walk you will gently stimulate your body while at the same time relax your mind. And that’s exactly what you want your break time to be about: relaxation and balance.

By the way, this does not have to be a “brisk walk”. You should walk at a pace that feels enjoyable to you. Read that again, because that’s very important. This should be an enjoyable time, so walk at a comfortable pace. Don’t force yourself to walk slower or faster. Your body will tell you how much it wants at a time. If you feel the urge to go a little faster, go for it, but never force yourself to go faster when you don’t feel like it. Even if you walked very slowly, you would still accomplish your goal: burn a few calories, get your body moving a little bit, and relax your mind.

So now you know how to optimize your meal time. This is true for any meal. But particularly lunch, you will find that if you follow this routine, you will feel better, will do something tremendously helpful for your health and weight loss/maintenance goals, and your physical and mental alertness/productivity will increase tremendously for the whole afternoon.