Lunch at work: how to avoid the midday dip

Midday doldrums are often caused by heavy lunches and a lack of energy-inducing activities. Try the following steps to make the best out of your lunch time and start a productive afternoon work session.

• Better still, have your lunch outside and divide your break between eating and a walk.
• Here's why: your office probably has about 500 luxes of light, which is equal to about 500 candles.
• That compares with 10,000 luxes at sunrise and 100,000 at noon on a July day.
• So when the afternoon doldrums hit, go outside and sit in the sunlight.
• It will help reset your chronological clock, keep down the amount of melatonin (the sleep hormone) your body produces during this circadian dip and give you a valuable boost of beneficial vitamin D, reducing your risk of osteoporosis as well as various cancers.

• Take a brief midmorning break for tea, coffee and/or a snack.
• Use this time to relax and refocus, but, more importantly, to consume a few calories you might otherwise eat at lunchtime.
• Shrink the size of your lunch accordingly and the result will be less stupefying later.

• Simply snack on nutritious foods whenever you get hungry, rather than eating lunch per se – but watch portion sizes.
• Then use your lunch break for some kind of exercise, whether it's in the company gym or walking around a park.

Choose activating protein, not energy-sapping carbs.

• So a tuna salad without the bread is a better choice than a tuna sandwich.
• A green salad sprinkled with low-fat cheese, a hard-boiled egg and some sliced turkey wins over a pasta salad. The change can really make a difference.
• When researchers compared men who ate an 1,000-calorie lunch with those who ate a 300-calorie lunch or skipped the meal altogether, they found that when given a chance to nap after lunch, nearly all of the participants did so.
• But while the lunch-eaters slept for an average of 90 minutes, those who skipped lunch slept for only 30 minutes.
• These were also high-carbohydrate lunches (carbs stimulate serotonin release, which increases sleepiness), which may have contributed to the napping.
• You shouldn't skip lunch altogether, but the combination of eating less and eating fewer carbohydrates should lead to less sleepiness.