The More You Know

Your Colleagues Are Making You Fat

You know your co-worker who just made delicious brownies? She’s not-so-secretly trying to sabotage your diet.

Or so today’s Wall Street Journal claims. According to the business-focused paper, the new type of office shark is not the colleague who sucks up to your boss and steals the hottest new deal from right under you — it’s the person trying to make you gain an extra 5lbs. That’s terrible news for us at The Jane Dough. Not only did our colleagues bring us homemade chocolate-covered strawberries today (thanks, Jen!), but they brought us girl scout cookies as well. The horror!

Oddly enough, a significant amount of people feel threatened when their co-workers do something sweet (pun intended) and bring homemade goods into the office. A recent survey of 325 dieters by Survey Sampling International for Medi-Weightloss Clinics shows that 29 percent of people on diets say colleagues pressure them to eat more, make fun of their diets, or order them restaurant food they know isn’t on their diets.

Does this sort of thing really happen? According to Chelsey Millstone, corporate dietitian for Medi-Weightloss Clinics, yes. She says that deep down co-workers may feel abandoned by a dieter who no longer joins them for lunch or drinks, or might feel jealous because they aren’t losing weight.

Seems super-childish to me. I’m pretty confident that if you say no to the brownies, no one’s feelings will get hurt. And if they do, I promise- they’ll get it over.

[WSJ]

TAGS: food in the office | office obesity

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