Hello, I'm Kate Freeman, and this is The Daily Dollar. Transform your eating habits and achieve long-term wellbeing with ALA Health. ALA Health is a mobile app that combines micro-learning with meal planning into a seamless user experience that teaches you how to eat well for the rest of your life, one habit at a time. Download it now from the App Store.
It's free! On this episode of The Daily Dollar, we're chatting about key ways you can create a healthy work environment through the routines, habits and behaviours you create throughout your day. Today's episode we're chatting about visual food cues and what you can do to manage them and your food choices. It's dollop time.
Hey, hey, my name's Kate. I'm a registered nutritionist and after 20 years in the field of nutrition, I'm tired of seeing people stressed about eating and confused about where to start. And so, I'm changing the conversation. You deserve to feel confident in your food choices and empower to maximize your health.
Every weekday will dollop an episode into your feed covering everything from busting nutrition myths, practical food ideas, my thoughts on trending topics and habits for a healthy life. My promise to you, it will always be sustainable, realistic, restriction-free and strictly no-woo. Only good science translated into easy, everyday advice. Let's do this.
Welcome back to the podcast, Developers. Happy Wednesday. It's hump day today. You are halfway through your work week.
And speaking of work, we're chatting about eating at work. And today I want to chat about eating food because it's there. That is a very, very common phrase that I've heard over the years from working with clients or doing corporate presentations or consulting with businesses on workplace nutrition policies and environments. And it is essentially the concept of feeling like I'm literally only eating this food because I can see it and it's available to me.
I'm not hungry. I don't really want it. It's just there. And so I'm eating it because it's there.
Now, there's a lot to unpack with this kind of eating pattern. And we don't have time to go into it in detail and depth in this episode. But what we are going to chat about is what we can do if that is the primary reason. So you're not hungry.
You don't really want to eat it, but you're simply eating something because it's there. What can you do to manage that situation? Before I do get into that, I do want to preface this by saying there's a lot of health and nutrition information online and shared by qualified and non-qualified people that talks about what to do to avoid eating particular foods. And they're often snack-based foods or ultra-processed foods or sometimes junk food.
They call them junk foods. If they're psychotically scaremongering, they'll call them toxic foods. So there's lots of talk about how we avoid eating these foods. If they're really ignorant health practitioners, they'll just say things like this food is toxic to your body and they just hope that's enough for you to just do something about it.
If they do have a scary of actual information and understanding about the sociology and the psychology of eating, they will try to come up with a bit more practical solutions about how you might reduce your eating of those foods. But almost always, this advice is given in the context of weight loss, because obviously if you are not in an energy deficit, which is the only proven way to lose weight, then weight loss won't be successful. And so anytime you're going to be eating ultra-processed foods or snacking too much, right, extra food is going to impair weight loss efforts. And so we get this advice given in this context constantly.
And so what it does is it creates this underlying belief system that healthy eating is trying to avoid eating, which is actually not true. If you want to lose weight, yes, we have to avoid eating. And that's a whole other conversation because we're trying to get our body to do something that's not biologically wired to do. But if we want to be eating well, if we want to be feeling our body, if we want to have adequate nutrients to function at our best and feel good, we need to be eating.
And so this underlying belief system that, you know, eating food is not good, and we should try and avoid it, can be really unhelpful. So we do need to eat regularly throughout the day. And research has shown that this increases our chances of hitting our body's nutrient needs, particularly if what we are choosing to eat is mostly minimally processed whole foods from a wide variety of food groups, and we're doing that consistently. Now, research also shows that if we were eating according to our hunger and fullness cues, which are related to our body's energy needs, that we'd feel hungry at regular intervals throughout the day, and that this hunger is signaled by a slight drop in our blood sugar levels.
Now, when our blood sugar level would drop and trigger this hunger would depend on what we ate at the previous meal, and our individual body and our needs. However, we know that this would happen at periodic times throughout the day. But we know that not all eating is triggered by this physical need for fuel. We don't live in a bubble.
We're constantly surrounded by food. There's food used in many social occasions to celebrate, to commiserate, to stave off boredom. Food is delicious. Food makes us feel good.
We socially connect around food. So there's so many more triggers that can trigger feelings of hunger or a desire to eat that is independent of our body's energy needs. And sometimes we're triggered by our environment, regardless of whether we're full, right or not hungry. And I would actually describe this as neither a good nor a bad thing.
It just is a thing. And I think that treating this as neutral, so neither good nor bad, puts you in a better space to manage it according to what's right for you. Because if we call it bad, it means that every time we eat when we're not hungry, we're thinking, well, this is a detrimental thing and I shouldn't be doing it. But there are plenty of occasions in our life where it's perfectly fine and healthy and good for us to eat, even though we're not hungry.
Maybe it's cultural situations, social situations, maybe we're just genuinely enjoying the food, right? And if we, so if we classified as bad, that can make us feel unnecessary guilt and shame over something that should be quite a nice experience. And then the vice versa is if we call it good, this non-hungry eating, it can lead to over consumption and putting our body in a state of poor, long-term health. So we don't want to be doing it too much in excess.
So I like to treat things like this. It's just neutral. It just is. It's something that we do as humans.
And it's up to us to have that own awareness for ourselves to then start to make some decisions about how we want to manage it. And can I just say that for most people, it's not something that's easy to manage on your own, particularly if there is a lot of dieting, history, or disordered eating, or an eating disorder, or trauma associated with food. For a lot of people talking this through with a dietitian qualified in this area or a psychologist experiencing this area is really helpful to unpack non-hungry eating. Okay, so thanks for enduring that.
I think it's really important. I do like to give as much context to this stuff as possible because eating isn't simple. It's very complicated. But if you do genuinely feel distinct from emotional eating or trauma or past experiences that you just find yourself eating literally because it's just in front of you.
Alright, then hiding your snacks is a really good tip and removing the visual cues is key. So this idea of out of sight, out of mind is backed up by science and certainly has shown that some of the biggest drivers of our food choices is opportunity. So they've done studies where there's like little fun sized chocolate sitting in a bowl on a kitchen bench in one home and then in another home, the same amount of chocolates are in a container with tape wrapped around it and up in the cupboard. So which ones are easier to access?
You know, the ones that are on the bench. You see them every time you walk past the kitchen. They're easy to just grab and open and eat. Whereas the ones inside the box wrapped in tape up above the fridge, they require some effort.
You have to go to the fridge. You might need a step stool if you're not tall enough to pull up, climb on that, get the container out, cut the tape, right? Get it out. You might think twice about doing it and you might not think about it all because you won't see it every time you walk through the kitchen.
So this can be a really great way of helping yourself not eat foods that you don't really want to be eating, but that you find yourself eating simply because the opportunity is there. Now, this can happen at work from a bunch of different ways. Maybe there's work morning teas, social club, chocolate, soft drinks, shared biscuits, tins or lolly jars. Maybe your workplace has a snack shack, right?
That's full of delicious snacks, et cetera. These can all trigger that eating opportunity and be something that you might find frustrating throughout the day if you're not wanting to eat them or you find you're non-hungry eating a lot of the time. So if you've set yourself a set of food rules that you should be eating these things, this is a whole other topic to discuss. But if you're finding like, look, I just don't want to be eating them because they either don't make me feel great or I don't really need to be eating them, then one of the things you can do is talk to your workplace about how we can hide these things.
Make the access to them as difficult as possible so that there's lots of steps that you have to go through in order to access it. So the more hurdles you have to overcome to either go buy and purchase some food or grab that snack or eat it, the less likely you are to eat it. So one of the things you can do is use tins or containers that aren't see through or transparent. You can put paper or contact around the outside of a jar so you can't see into it.
You know, if there is a morning tea, all the leftovers are packed up and put away into the fridge rather than left out all day. You can suggest keeping charity chocolates in a drawer or cupboard so not visual all the time. Maybe social club soft drinks in the shed fridge can be put in a non-transparent container. A really fun idea is a joke jar instead of a lollie jar.
This is an idea from my colleague Claire who's the practice manager at the Healthy Eating Clinic. She's like, have a jar full of funny quotes or dad jokes that people can use as a morale booster instead of lollies. And she said, I love the short story happiness pills. So Google that.
That sounds fun. You could leave your cash at home so that you don't have any money to buy the social chocolates or soft drinks. Turn off your phone's ability to pay away. I mean, I don't know many corporate social clubs that have the ability to pay away.
But hey, it's 2025. No, but these are awesome things that you can do to just make this kind of food less accessible to you. The on the flip side of that is having food that you are happy to eat and you want to eat readily available so that when hunger hits you throughout the day you've got something to eat is also a key part of this because like I said at the beginning, it's pretty normal to need to eat regularly throughout your day. Like I said, there's a bunch of reasons why we might eat foods that might make us feel unhappy with our choices and these reasons are not covered today.
And if this happens for you a lot, it's really good idea to unpack this with a non dietitian who can help you create a mindset and thinking pattern where you're able to make rational decisions about food that you feel happy with. And you can actually book a free 30 minute strategy session with myself or my team members and find out how we can help you through ongoing nutrition coaching. So the link to that is in the show notes. Well, that is it for today's episode.
We've got more healthy eating tips at work coming up this week. So we'll catch you later. The Daily Doll Podcast is proudly brought to you by Ayla Health. Build food confidence and learn how to choose foods that are right for you and your body.
Download the app today and build habits that last. As always, you can find out more about our chat in the show notes. You can also join the conversation over in the Ayla Health Community group on Facebook. We'd love to see you there.
If you've got a topic you'd love to hear us chat about on the Daily Dollop, please let us know. Email us at hello at aylahealth.com.au or you can send us a message on Instagram. Until next time.