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IT Workers Are Getting Fatter
buzzardsbay writes "While technologies such as virtualization, multi-threading, and blade servers have made the data center leaner, those who work there are getting... well... not leaner. According to a new study by CareerBuilder.com, 34 percent of IT workers say they have gained more than ten pounds in their current jobs. And 16 percent say they've gained at least twice that. The culprits seem to be the stressful-yet-sedentary nature of tech work coupled with our famously poor eating habits. According to the survey, some 41 percent of IT workers eat out for lunch twice or more per week, making portion and calorie control difficult. Eleven percent buy their lunch out of a vending machine at least once a week."
I guess if you're a sysadmin for the Internal Revenue Service then you're really screwed.
Nothing wrong with eating out (besides the financial hit). Just don't go to fastfood :)
...Mac is still skinny. He better watch out; PC may get peckish, and eat him.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
IT jobs like to hand you infinite snacks these days, there's a load of chips and such in the break room. Company culture tends to gravitate towards dubbing a measure of weight gain "The ACME Corp 20" or such nonsense, to which newbies gain some 20 pounds or so and then start limiting snack room visits.
Me, I use the stairs to get to floor 5. I have leg weights. I was in a martial arts class but a shift change took that off my plate, damn. Need to get back to the dojo. Diet? Exercise? Screw that, my entertainment and normal transportation (that is, without elevators) keeps me from being a fat ass.
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What next? to have their own gravity field too?
I didn't RTFA, but one thing to mention is a lot of companies these days have lots of food just laying around.
Where I work there is always a meeting with food somewhere in the building, and they always order more than they can eat. So of course as soon as the meeting is over, everyone goes and gets the leftovers. Next thing you know, you've had two lunches, two cookies and a bunch of soda you don't need.
It was the same at the last two companies I worked for and I asked a few friends and it's the same where they work.
Try some Ankle Weights. Adding just 10 lbs extra to your weight you have to carry around burns calories and adds muscle tone. If you do not have a place you can walk to from your home, a coffee place, bar or the like...find one even if you have to drive to it. Walking around a museum or city park is still walking and you might find a new friend or more. An art museum in my town costs about 50 bucks a year for a year long membership, the natural history museum is almost 150 bucks and the parks are always free.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
This was the contents of his fridge and pantry: Bologna
Beer
Hot dogs
Chocolate Syrup (three of these)
Two cartons of ice cream (only two, yet three chocolate syrup bottles)
Three Jack's frozen pizzas
Four containers of butter, and one box of sticked butter.
Bucket of fried chicken
Two pizzas from some pizza joint
The Pantry:
No bread just hot dog buns
Three containers of peanut butter
At least a pound to a pound a half of sugar I'm missing a few items, but its all about time. He just didn't have enough time to think about what hes eating. Hes on call most of the time and instead of buying healthier solutions he chose quickly made and heavily preserved foods.
around my belly mainly.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Never attribute this kind of stuff to your job unless other factors can be ruled out also. Lots of people without access to free snacks/pop put on weight starting about the age 25. For many, getting married seems to add a the pouch and love handles. Also, about age 25, you aren't as hyper as you were when you were 21, and so you are less anxious to run around. When I was 18-25, and in college, I ate like crap, out of vending machines and a quick pizza for lunch. Lots of un-diet sodas. I was still skinny as a rail. When I turned 25 and got married, then I started putting on weight.
Even with eating better, it still doesn't help because my activity levels are far lower than they were when I was younger.
IT and lights out management have nothing to do with it.
it's part of the stereotype. If your a fatso (me). You will be most likely to get the job. Wearing glasses helps. Evil Spock beard is better, best not to look like Pitr from User Friendly, go for Sid http://www.userfriendly.org/cartoons/sid/ but extra weight helps.
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
I'm still only 30 and my metabolism hasn't slowed down yet.
Given the other studies I see about less computer graduates, that would indicate an aging workforce.
So we have people who have been sitting in uncomfortable office chairs for 20 years writing code, eating Cheez Its or Doritos or jujubees or whatever and drinking copious quantities of caffeinated and often sugary beverages. Is it really surprising that on average they might have a couple extra pounds?
because if the food sucks, you are less likely to overeat?
I have a hunch this isn't so much a function of IT specifically but of the fact that as people get older, they tend to put on weight. The article even indicated that this wasn't just an IT issue.
"But, hey, no matter the culprits, IT workers can take heart in another CareerBuilder finding: They are less chubby than financial services and government workers. Fifty-three percent of financial workers said they have gained weight at their current jobs, while the number for government workers is 52 percent."
I actually draw a different conclusion from the article, the fact that 34% of IT professionals have gained 10+ lbs in their current profession means they've been in that profession a few years (generally you don't gain that weight overnight).
I don't know about financial workers but this hypothesis is backed up by the growth of government workers who don't change jobs a lot.
I stole this Sig
weird hours
This is actually probably a major part of IT weight gain. I was going to the gym and working out (actually working out, not standing around watching everyone else work out) for a long time, and my weight and my pants size just kept creeping up. Went to the doctor because I figured something must be wrong, and long story short, the problem was getting home at 8-9pm, making dinner, eating dinner, and going to bed. Doc told me to take my dinner to work and eat it at 6pm every day.
In the past 5 months since I got that advice, I've lost almost 40 pounds, putting me at the lowest weight I've been since sometime in the middle of college. Can't say it's made my life great (food is so boring now, since I pretty much have to make the entire week's dinner on Sunday, by Friday dinner is just depressing, and I have to spend the weekend to figure out what dish I'll hate next week...) but I'm sure I'm healthier for it.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
(insert fat, deep laugh) Just because I'm unafraid of thermal detonators, collaborate with bounty hunters, have a small rat-like thingy, gammorean guards and a passion for live, frozen wall ornaments does NOT make me fat!
PS, Where's my money Solo?
...would be to have a treadmill or cross-trainer in every cubicle. The harder the worker exercises, the higher the priority his/her processes are given.
"Hey, Joe, you're covered in sweat!"
"Yeah, I know, those KDE apps take ages to compile!"
-- In the beginning was the WORD, and the WORD was UNSIGNED, and the main(){} was without form and void...
I don't see any mention of a control group or comparison to other occupations.
Maybe 34% of all people gain 10 pounds anyway regardless of their profession or even whether or not they're employed. A lot of people gain weight over time irrespective. What phenomena is being described here?
The Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle program has worked for me. I wrote a long summary of it a while back, and I'll just link it:
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=226411&cid=18343433
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
I'm a vegetarian.
I used to weigh about 250 pounds. My current weight is about 180. The majority of the weight I lost was when I was an omnivore. It wasn't a wholesale change in my diet, it was a vast increase in exercise.
I have gained about 10 pounds since I left my last job, but that's because my old job was a 25 minute bike ride away and I'd walk around at lunch.
My new job is a 10 minute drive (I take the kids to daycare now) and I don't really have anywhere to walk to.
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
Never mind. For anyone interested, look here and here . Both seem to be pretty reputable sources.
-Arthur
Cave ne ante ullas catapultas ambules
When you eat the calories affects the number of calories you burn. You don't burn many calories when you sleep.
but have the cubes grown in proportion to the programmers?
Your post makes no sense.
NOBODY is suggesting you're gonna gain more than 1kg of mass from eating 1 kg of food. No one.
Usually the energy density of food is somewhat less than 100%, unless you're drinking olive oil. Calories are a measure of the amount of heat produced when the carbs, protein, and fat in your food are burnt under laboratory conditions. It's a measure of available energy. This energy can be stored as lipids in the body, and those lipids, or fat, have a mass. It's around 3600 calories per pound of body fat if I'm not mistaken. This correlates just fine with conservation of mass.
In the future, while you're checking up on principles of physics, check out the laws of thermodynamics too.
occultae nullus est respectus musicae - originally a Greek proverb
You actually burn about 60 per hour.
Your body's doing a lot while sleeping. Your heart's beating, your core body temperature is maintained (this takes a reasonable amount of energy just by itself), systemic repair mechanisms are working, you're tossing and turning, etc.
occultae nullus est respectus musicae - originally a Greek proverb
"walking isn't enough"
Speaking as someone who walked off 50 lbs in four months, walking is enough if you do A LOT of it, i.e. 3-4 hrs 7 days/week, you have to go by distance over time walked, i.e. you count distance, not time. All it takes is some balls and commitment and you can makeup for it on days off and what have you, one of people's biggest reason for not losing wait is making excuses and having become accustomed to bad habits.
I lost some weight when I became vegan (going from omni), but I later went back to my normal weight.
I attribute to not knowing what junk food was vegan in the beginning, and later learning. :D
For losing weight, the Hacker's Diet (google it) and exercise is working for me, but I'm never more than 20-25 lbs above my ideal body weight. It is rare I stray outside of a "healthy" BMI -- but I do tend to keep a little fat around my middle even if the BMI says I'm healthy.
Wait a minute, what's going on here? None of the figures quoted in the summary or article are above 50%, so wouldn't that mean most I.T. workers are either staying the same weight or losing weight? Wouldn't that make the majority of I.T. workers a fairly healthy bunch overall, the exact opposite of what the rather smugly-written article is trying to say? I could see if they were saying that the numbers have increased compared to an identical survey in the past but they're not even doing that. Forget making mountains out of molehills, this article made one out of a canyon.
Give it five years. I used to be the same way, now it's starting to catch up with me in my "old age".
I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it! --Longbottle
If you'd ever been depressed (or fat or a smoker, etc.), you know that "knowing how" and "being able to execute" are totally unrelated.
And some sort-term advise for the grandparent: Hard liquor. Fewer calories. Less filling. Better drunk/dollar value, particularly if you don't make "tastes great" a requirement.
... Seven of Nine? I guess its true, there are all sorts of weirdoes on the Internet...
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
I bet I know why that works. When you eat at 6 with your pre-prepared meal it's of a proper size and probably reasonably balanced nutrition.
If you wait to eat until you get home, when it's late and you're tired and cranky you're far more likely to
1) snack while cooking
2) cook a larger meal because you're really hungry
3) cook something easy and quick, which is likely to be lower in nutrition and higher in calories
Very easy to do without realising it, and even when you do it's easy to rationalise as 'just this once'.
Eating 4-5 small meals a day as opposed to 2-3 large ones actually tends to lead to lower weight, as people actually eat less in total when they're not ravenously hungry.
Remember kids, it's all fun and games until someone commits wholesale galactic genocide.
People here are giving well meant advice like 'Cycle to work', 'Change diet', etc.
However, I've observed that most of my geek friends - including my once slender geek buddy now turned fatso - have gained the habit of eating far beyond their appetite. And my fat buddy does a lot of exercise.
Newsflash: Exercise doesn't help you lose weight very effectively. There is a far more effective solution: Eat less.
Whenever I notice my jeans pinching and my belly gaining (my thighs have gained to much allready - I ought to get them a tad thinner aswell) and my belt going up a notch I simply eat less. It's become something of a bi-monthly rythym of eating normal or what my spoose has trained me to consider normal (read: eating to much!) and barking at her or simply refusing to eat when she heaps to much on to my plate despite me telling her that I'll help myself.
Eating over your appetite has become a social thing, and if you refuse to do it you get queer looks from all sides. Especially if you're still what other *call* slender. Well, guess why I *am* slender, fat-ass!? It's not because I'm doing Aikido twice a week. I simply restrain myself from stuffing my face. Eating slowly helps btw. Eating to fast is one of my prime cause for overweight tendency.
Bottom line: If you can't come up with anthing better, switch to scheduled Broughth and Ramen for 10 weeks and you'll be suprised how well your body starts eating away at those extra pounds stored all over the place. And train yourself to eat less, even if it takes a few ups and downs along the JoJo String. You'll eventually reach your ideal weight if you apply reason to your image in the mirror.
My 2 cents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
except that it doesn't work that way:
mat@desktop:~$ host -t ANY mlkqsdjf.irs.gov
mlkqsdjf.irs.gov mail is handled by 5 MX-RELAY1.treas.gov.
mlkqsdjf.irs.gov mail is handled by 10 mx-relay24.treas.gov.
Anything (*.irs.gov) will get handled by that server; doesn't mean that the address exists.
Posting anon because I modded the fp funny.
You wouldn't believe the looks I get from my family when I tell them that WoW has improved my diet and helped in my effort to control my weight, but it's true. As long as I'm getting regular exercise before sitting down for my marathon sessions, WoW is actually more interesting than snacking.
This won't work for everyone, especially if you like to bring cheetos to your computer, but for me it's been a very pleasant surprise.
I've also found that Rock Band drums give you a pretty decent workout, the Wii sports like boxing can be a bit of a challenge, and of course the benefits of DDR are pretty well known. I'm really looking forward to Wii Fit today.
microsoftword.mp3 - it doesn't care that they're not words...
Eating breakfast is essentially a bunch of "free" calories. Since doing so ups your metabolism for the whole day. Or at least that's what I think the evidence suggests.
No matter how you slice it though, there's a huge positive correlation with eating breakfast and losing and maintaining a healthy weight.
See:
Skipping Cereal and Eggs, and Packing on Pounds
Lose Weight: Eat Breakfast
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.