How to stop snacking at work? Don’t.

By now you are probably well on your way to achieving your new year’s resolution. You have joined a gym, cut out the alcohol, thrown out the chocolate and swapped pasta dinners for Tuna salads. The kilos are dropping and your pants are getting looser. Everything is going as planned, until:

“C’mon Janey, just have one jelly snake, the packet says they’re all natural”

“There’s a free cake downstairs. You have to have some!”

“It’s Mike’s birthday, just come down for a few”

As your colleagues trickle back into the office, your fitness plan begins to be sabotaged by the very phenomenon that has plagued you since junior school:Peer pressure.

The workplace is often a jungle to navigate when it comes to following a healthy lifestyle. But there is hope yet as more companies set out to offer a healthier alternative for every Peter's ice cream and Domino’s pizza. Just walk down a typical supermarket aisle during your lunch break, and you’ll have sugar free chocolate, high protein milk, or even a Wasabi flavored nut bar at your fingertips.

One company that hopes to resolve your boredom snacking or stress snacking at work is Harvest Box. Founded in 2010 by three Australians named Will, George and James, who were suffering from the same problem of having unhealthy snacks in the workplace, Harvest Box aims to provide an array of healthier alternatives to traditional, convenient snacks like a chocolate bar or bag of chips.

Toady Harvest Box has over 100,000 members, and has expanded from delivering boxes of nuts to specific subscribers, to selling all natural snacks in supermarkets and convinence stores.

This expansion to the retail market, according to Harvest Box Communications Manager Victoria Sandison, was a “result of clear feedback from customers, showing a need for healthier snack options in supermarkets and convenience stores (as well as through the post).”

This prompted the company to create a retail range of Snack Packs, Health Bombs and Chia Bars.

“Our ethos is still to create guilt-free snacks that stop you from reaching for a chocolate bar at 3pm,” said Sandison.

But it is not only Harvest Box that caters for the office worker. The whole “3pm sweets craving” thing has turned out to be a niche market that many have begun to capitalise on. There is the “Paleo Cafe” in Bondi, Sydney that specialises in products that fall in line with the paleo eating style. Their menu is void of the traditional overly sweetened cafe foods, but instead made up of items such as bullet proof coffee (long black with butter) and Granola using real fruit and coconut yogurt.

There is also the brand “Double D”, which provide sugar free alternatives to gummi bears and jelly snakes, while “Well Naturally” provides sugar free chocolate. “Airplane Jelly” also has a sugar free range, and who can forget sugar free gum?

But the sweetest of all is that high protein sugar free Ice Cream exists - “Powtein” made right here in Australia.

What stands out about these products is that most of them have profited by avoiding the typical (and indeed profitable) gym/fitness market, showing that offering some sort of weight loss or muscle building product is not a necessity if you want to be financially successful in the healthy eating industry.

As Sandison explained: “Whilst [Harvest Box] products do provide great fuel for the gym, they are targeted towards time-poor people who want an easy way to make a healthy choices.”

So if you’re ever stuck at work being forced to choose between a chocolate bar and a slice of pizza, there is another option. High protein, low carb, or sugar free versions of all the bad food you love now exists to not only fulfill your cravings, but also leave you not looking like a health-crazed outcast.

For those that think it’s still better to cut out the bad stuff completely:

“We believe that it’s all about balance,which is why a lot of [Harvest Box’s]healthy mixes include a little treat such as some dark choc drops. That age-old adage, ‘everything in moderation’, seems to work well in our experience,” says Sandison. “At Harvest Box, our ethos is about making the healthier choice, rather than the healthiest choice.”

Themistocles works as a Personal trainer in Ultimo, Sydney. As a Communications undergraduate, he hopes to contribute to the 'body image' discourse and work as a health journalist in the future