The Skinny – Amy Brunell

Stop Bringing Us Food!

It’s the topic Oprah never did and…it’s got to stop! I’m imploring you to rise from your couches, scream out your windows, “It’s enough and I won’t take it anymore!” What am I speaking about? The insane problem that Americans have when they are hit with every imaginable junk food available. Where is this place you ask? AT WORK!!! Each day millions of Americans are bombarded by the office junk food and I tell you-it’s got to STOP!

I am constantly told by people I work with in my job, how they go to work and there is this constant stream of sugar laden or low nutritional food hanging around the kitchen. One person recently revealed that her boss personally passes around a basket of pastries to all her employees. Can you imagine the underlying message that sends? Many people have told me over the years that there is “bagel Wednesday” or “donut Friday” each and every week at their office. In all my years working with people with weight issues, no one has ever told me that some company started an “apple Thursday.”

Obesity is an epidemic killing Americans each year, not to mention the cost to companies incurring more for insurance to cover the diseases caused by obesity. We hear of companies installing gyms or offering gym memberships, but at the same time offer vending machines for that mid afternoon snack. No one deals with the root of obesity. No instead they think they’re helping us by feeding us to death. Literally.

The other office culprit is probably you.

Most of us bring our “extras” to work to let others have it. We get it out of our homes and justify bringing it to work thinking, “Oh everyone else will enjoy this and that way I won’t have to deal with it.” I get it. I was once like you. But no longer.

People at work don’t need your left over birthday cake anymore than you do. The way you get anxious that you will eat the cake, so do the others at your office and you are the food pusher supplying the food drug. Even if someone appears not to have a weight problem, you don’t know what their cholesterol count could be; you don’t know they will starve for the rest of the day; you don’t know they don’t purge later.

Sometimes people have justified taking junk food to work in two ways. One: they like to bake so this way they can bake and relieve their anxiety but not have to keep the food around. Great, so you relieve yourself and make everyone else crazy? That’s not really a gift, is it?

Second, no one wants to throw anything away. As if that precious leftover plate of cookies could do someone somewhere any good…May I suggest that we examine the sugar laden problem. It’s not food. It’s sugar. Sugar filled things while tasty are not food. They’re junk. Good, delicious junk, but junk never the less. Funny that so many of us don’t feel so passionate about the vegetables we buy, never use and then have to toss?

Please forward this blog anonymously to your HR manager or better yet the CEO of the company. Help me change America to incorporate “Orange you glad it’s Friday” at the office. Help me let others know that bringing in string cheese or some hummus and carrot sticks would be so appreciated. Efficiency would skyrocket. Employees would get more work accomplished in the afternoons when energy is draining and bodies need protein and complex carbohydrates. Let’s start a revolution. Let’s save each other!

The Actors' Gang

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