A work routine to keep slim and fit
Ryan’s daily work routine and diet
Ryan Gibson sees working from home as the ideal opportunity to eat good quality food and take time out from his work routine to keep fit. In this guest post he shares how his typical day has changed since he started working at home:
The office environment and work routine bring out the worst diet in us all. Regular birthday celebrations, canteen with subsidised food and vending machines on tap. It’s extremely easy to overindulge when working in such a place.
I was never significantly overweight and always went to the gym a couple of times a week however I wasn’t leading a healthy lifestyle. Long hours, short gym sessions, overloading on carbs; my lifestyle was lethargic in the same way my diet was.
There’s a general consensus between home workers that it’s easy to put on weight when working at home as you have the ability to over-indulge on snacks from the cupboard and there’s no peers to monitor you unlike in the office.
When I accepted my work from home role a year ago I saw it more as an opportunity to lead a lifestyle opposite to what I was previously leading.
Having the ability to cook my own fresh food using the ingredients I had bought as well as deciding when I eat was a huge opportunity to really introduce the type of lifestyle I wanted to lead. Furthermore I saw my lunch break as a time when the gym would become my friend.
Let’s be real it can be pretty isolated when working from home and I saw a lunchtime gym session as the perfect opportunity to socialise with fellow human beings. It also gave me the sense of work routine which some lose when working from home.
The business I work for is based in Asia so the start time is to work within the time zones as much as possible. Luckily I have always been a morning person.
Working from home is a lifestyle change and one which you should fully embrace. The flexibility most work from home roles afford means you can introduce healthy living into your life not just in body but also in mind.
My current diet cycle is related to my gym routine and the reduction of fat for the summer months. It also allows me to maintain energy levels to complete my daily work routine.
5:45am: Wake up, grab a coffee (black) with my breakfast of oats with water.
6am: Begin work, typically checking my emails, catching up on Skype with my manager and so forth.
8am: Second coffee of the day with plenty of water in between. 8:30am: Daily catch-up call with team to go through what we have delivered individually for the prior day, business performance and any outstanding issues. This call is imperative for a remote worker on a different timezone to his team.
9am: Four eggs scrambled (3 egg whites, 1 whole egg) (no milk or butter) with four cooked cherry tomatoes.
10:15am: Protein shake. 9am – 10:30am: Work routine continues as normal.
10:30: Gym.
12: Protein shake.
12 – 4pm: Answering emails, working through my to do list until 4pm when my day job finishes.
1pm: Piece of white meat or fish with vegetables or salad with white meat/fish.
2pm: Green tea or coffee.
3pm: Green and mint tea or coffee. 4pm: Usually take a shower, change clothes and have some downtime before jumping back onto the laptop to work on my blog GenerationY.com.
5pm: Boiled egg or can of tuna with chopped peppers.
7pm: Turn off the laptop and begin making dinner.
7-10pm: Quality time with my partner either spent listening to each other’s day, watching television or going for a walk. Occasionally we still see friends but we tend to keep most of our socialising to Friday-Saturday.
7:45pm: Salmon, broccoli and green beans or similar (sea bass, chicken, turkey steaks).
8:45pm: Mixed berries with Quark.
10pm: Bed. Starting work at 6am means you are ready to sleep by 10pm.
That’s my typical diet, work routine and lifestyle 5-6 days a week since beginning to work from home. Like anything I have adapted to my routine and absolutely love it.
What is your daily work routine and diet? How do you try and maintain a healthy lifestyle since working from home? What do you find most difficult?
Read about Ryan’s experiences of working from home and his tips on creating your own ideal lifestyle by combining work and life at GenerationY.com.
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Great post Ryan!
I’ve always been a big fan of multi meals per day, and agree that working from home is ideally suited to facilitate this.
I would be interested in a ballpark cost per week of this amount of food, and how you integrate this in you shopping with your partner’s food. Do you typically eat the same dinner at 7.45?
I’m a little off this level of commitment to eating and gym going after suffering an Achilles rupture recently, but am documenting the journey back to training and good eating.
I also work from home but I am not as fit as I should be, it takes a lot of dedication and willpower to keep yourself active.
Great post Ryan :-). I also find working from home is very conducive to exercising and eating healthy, especially as it’s easier to schedule these with your own body clock rather than with an office set up. It gives me more time to prepare healthy snacks like sugar free granola or activated nuts that need to be cooked in the oven slowly and stirred every few hours – good excuse for a trip to the kitchen to make a cuppa :-). I just have to be careful to put cooking and experimenting with food into play and not work time 😉
Hey Both,
Thanks for the comments. Really appreciated.
Iain: Typical cost is between £80-90 a week but that covers every meal/snack for 2 people. That works out just over £5 a day. I then have protein shakes on top of that costing.
Meal wise we either eat the same at dinner or I will cook my partner an alternative meal. For example she may have fish in breadcrumbs when I have salmon or Chicken Kiev’s when I just have chicken. Other meals are typically the same other than I will have mine with vegetables and she will have brown rice with hers. It works quite well 🙂
That is a very active routine you have, wish i had the will to pull it off too, ill try.
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