The Importance of Nutrition and Wellness in the Workplace with Kate Cook

These days, everyone is hungry for more advice and guidance, especially about finding ways to get to their optimal weight, improve their work productivity, or eat mindfully.

This podcast clocks in at around 47 minutes. You can also listen to it on Apple Podcasts, stream it on Google Podcasts or Spotify or grab the RSS feed in your player of choice. So, head out for a walk in nature and let Kate and I keep you company.

As I've discussed many times before, one of the biggest inhibitors to nutrition and wellness is in the workplace. Work for most people is stressful and mentally taxing––schedules can change in the last minute, and coworkers inevitably influence behavior. Most of us are creatures of habit with daily routines centered around work demands. However, these factors make the workplace a great opportunity to improve our intentional nutrition game.

Today’s guest on the podcast, Kate Cook says:

“Nowadays, lots of people are quite knowledgeable and savvy in terms of their nutrition. The problem is that many are massively missing the point and choose to get on the bandwagon with the latest diet instead of getting down to the fundamentals.”

Kate Cook

Let's break this down.

Kate Cook's Approach to Nutrition

With nearly 20 years of experience, Kate knows a thing or two about nutrition. She is one of the UK’s leading wellness and nutrition experts, an international speaker, and accomplished author of seven books.

Kate Cook: one of the UK's leading wellness and nutrition experts.

Some of Kate's titles are ‘Get Healthy for Good’, ‘Drop a Dress Size’ and the most recent ‘Positive Nutrition - Strategic Eating to Upgrade Your Health and Energy.’ Besides seeing clients privately (Kate has seen well over 8,500 patients one to one), she works with corporations by giving talks and workshops that empower their staff to adopt healthier lifestyles.

She also has written columns for Marie-Claire, Men’s Health, and many other magazines. She is currently doing an MA in Anthropology of Food at SOAS, London University. 

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Kate joins me on The Nourishing Workplace to discuss everything from why there is so much confusion around the term healthy eating and lifestyle, what the issues with the latest food trends, fads, and tribalism are, and what it takes to create a balanced and well-maintained diet that will aid in our professional and personal lives.

Much like me, Kate’s interests are broad and cross over food into trends, agriculture, the food system, and the evolution of work culture. As you can probably feel from our conversation, Kate and I could go on and on and chat for hours.

Key Take-aways

Short on time? Here are four quick takeaways:

How we are working is not working. We need to look at structural problems, which gives a clear indication of what's wrong with how we engage individually and collectively with food.

People are quite knowledgeable and savvy in terms of their nutrition. However, many people tend to go very tribal in diets, whilst missing the fundamentals. For example, the quality of the food or where food comes from.

Healthy eating and lifestyle lack in inclusivity and diversity. How might we make it more inclusive and diverse?

Even though lots of diets work to maintain them you need structure.

Show Notes A shortlist of articles and resources mentioned in this episode plus further resources:

Let them eat cake and other sugary carbs (Kate's website)

Go-to tactics for engaging audiences after lunch at your company event or conference (WE Factory)

Learn more about Kate's work:

Kate has been so kind as to give away for free a copy of her latest book ‘Positive Nutrition - Strategic Eating to Upgrade Your Health and Energy’ to one of you listening today. Make sure to tune in to this episode to learn how to enter the competition.

Visit Kate’s website or follow Kate on LinkedIn

Did you enjoy this episode on nutrition and wellness?

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