Healthy eating for freelance translators
Translating from home and eating well
You are a freelance translator and you’re working from home? On a long assignment with a tight deadline? Then it’s lunch and you don’t have a lot of time on your hands. That’s when you start taking shorcuts and making bad food choices. Yet, Healthy eating should be part of your routine as translators.
Here’s why:
Well, healthy food can help in:
- Prevention and treatment of diseases
- Good performance in sports and physical activity
- Controlling body weight
- Preventing allergies and food intolerance
- Reducing the risk factors for chronic diseases.
Food is also an important part of the treatment of diseases such as hypertension, diabetes, dyslipidemias, heart diseases, kidney diseases, liver diseases, etc. Over the years, the body undergoes transformations. In addition, sedentarism has become a constant in people’s lives, mainly adults and the elderly.
How to maintain a healthy diet these days, especially you spend days translating indoors?
Here are some tips to get a healthy life as a translator:
- Organise meal times: Start with the first meal as soon as you wake up and try to organise them every 3 hours. By scheduling routines, you will feel hungry at normal hours, thus avoiding possible cravings or fast periods.
- Get your phone to wake you up at mealtime. When you get involved with work, you often forget about time, and suddenly, the day is over and you’ve just had one meal.
- Plan the next day’s meals the night before. This minimises the possibility of nibbling for lack of ideas of what to eat or lack of healthy eating options.
- Always plan all meals for the week, especially if you cook and have lunch and dinner at home. Go to the grocery store with your weekly shopping list and buy only what you need. The more you anticipate your grocery shopping, the less temptation you will have at home. Moreover, you are not running the risk of running out of anything to prepare and end up buying some fast food.
- Hydrate !!!! Water is critical to the proper functioning of the brain, so we work better when we are hydrated. The recommended water is 0.045 ml x kg (e.g. a person weighing 65 kg should drink 2.9 litres of water per day). This recommendation may include water and teas distributed throughout the day.
- Beware of carbohydrates! By now, you should be fed up of hearing this. Yet, the ingestion of bread and flour (pasta) is very high in freelancers’ diet plan, because access is easy, and it is a fast and convenient food to prepare.
- Practice physical activity regularly. Regular exercise helps in maintaining sleep. When sleep occurs on a regular basis, we are more likely to maintain weight.
- Sleep and wake up always at regular times and at hours that suit a normal work routine at the office. Waking up around 7 am and sleeping around 10 pm creates the right hormone release overnight, so you have a more productive day.
- Give preference and attention to natural foods. Foods that nature offers us are always healthy and should certainly be prioritised in any healthy eating plan. They are free of preservatives, colourants, flavourings, flavour enhancers, etc., which the food industry uses to produce most of the food.
Your body is your “home”
Use food as your source of nutrition and energy. Remember that your body is your main “home” and that if it is not well cared for and well treated, it will become more difficult to perform routine tasks. Our body is our greatest asset! We are not talking about being thin and beauty standards. We are talking about HEALTH and being more productive as a freelancer because of it. We want healthier bodies to live healthier and happier lives!
As you can see, a healthy eating habit coupled with an active life is fundamental for our health, especially for us translators, because we have such a sedentary professional life!
