healthy

What You Eat Affects Your Productivity

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So grab a bottle of whisky, put your feet up with a burger and read this:

Think back to your most productive workday in the past week. Now ask yourself: On that afternoon, what did you have for lunch?

When we think about the factors that contribute to workplace performance, we rarely give much consideration to food. For those of us battling to stay on top of emails, meetings, and deadlines, food is simply fuel.

But as it turns out, this analogy is misleading. The foods we eat affect us more than we realize. With fuel, you can reliably expect the same performance from your car no matter what brand of unleaded you put in your tank. Food is different. Imagine a world where filling up at Mobil meant avoiding all traffic and using BP meant driving no faster than 20 miles an hour. Would you then be so cavalier about where you purchased your gas?

Food has a direct impact on our cognitive performance, which is why a poor decision at lunch can derail an entire afternoon.

What You Eat Affects Your Productivity – Ron Friedman, Harvard Business Review (17 October 2014

Read the full piece.

Fork. This cutlery will help you eat healthier

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As I raise the fork to my mouth to deliver another Brussel sprout, it starts to violently vibrate, and I almost drop it on the table. The hostess eyes me suspiciously.

The devil fork is called the HAPIfork, but I immediately slip into calling it the “food-shaming fork,” and the name sticks. The moniker isn’t really fair — the fork doesn’t actually take into account what type of food you’re eating. Instead, it measures how quickly you eat, and zaps you with a Pavlovian vibration if you don’t take enough time between bites. It’s supposed to train you to eat slower, which studies have shown can help you feel fuller sooner, thus leading to weight loss. (This effect generally takes about 20 minutes.)

I Ate With a Food-Shaming Fork for a Week – Jessica Roy, NY Mag (1 September 2014)

It’s a very big fork, like a sonic screwdriver with prongs on the end. So there’s also the embarrassment factor of being seen with this, let alone with it, well, um, vibrating like that.

Read Roy’s full feature for how the week went and how the weak survive.