6 Office Snacks You Might Regret Eating

Snacking is a big part of the office culture. Snacks taste great, provide a nice distraction, and always seem to be within reach. Snacking becomes bad when you take in extra calories without doing any extra physical activity to burn them off. To help you out, we will analyze six common office snacks.

There is a helpful tool called a metabolic chart that shows exactly how much exercise it takes to burn off calories. To make things easier for example purposes, let's take a look at how much exercise it takes for a 180-pound man to burn off calories. In order to burn 1,000 calories, a 180-pound dude must jog (8 mph) for 1 whole hour. Riding a bike is less intense; one hour of cycling (14-16 mph) will burn off 750 calories. This provides us with some pretty straight forward math that we can use on these 6 snacks.

Pretzels
Reaching in a bag of pretzels might yield 10 pretzels, which comes to 227 calories.

• 18 minutes of biking.
• 14 minutes of running.

Microwave Popcorn
Popcorn is a healthy snack, but when a bag of it is covered in butter and salt, then you are looking at 210 calories.

• 17 minutes of biking.
• 13 minutes of running.

Dry-Roasted Peanuts
Surely peanuts are a good snacking option, right? Nope, this is actually the worse one out of these six. Half a cup of peanuts weigh in at 427 calories.

• 34 minutes of cycling.
• 26 minutes of jogging.

Cookies
As much as you would love to bite into a chewy chocolate chip cookie right now, it's important to keep in mind that just one cookie has 196 calories; and we all know how easy it is to eat five, which is like 1000 calories.

• 16 minutes of biking.
• 12 minutes of running.

Energy Drinks
When you need an extra boost of energy, it's easy to slam down an energy drink and think nothing of it. Considering that a single can of Rockstar Energy Drink has 280 calories, it might be healthier to find an alternative source of energy.

• 22 minutes of biking.
• 17 minutes of running.

Doughnuts
It's difficult to know which one came first, the office or the doughnut. You can find doughnuts in every office around the world. Doughnuts come in every shape, size, and flavor, but the popular flavor that we will look at is chocolate glazed--260 calories.

• 21 minutes of cycling.
• 16 minutes of jogging.

It's impossible to eliminate snacks from the office, that's not our goal here. Instead, we want to help educate office workers with how much exercise your favorite snacks will require to keep you reasonably fit. A person who grazes the break room and mindlessly snacks can easily cross the 1 hour of required exercise mark with just a few handfuls of these snacks. Without exercise, these calories will translate to pounds, which will make physical activity even more difficult.

You can use this metabolic chart to figure out how much all of your snacks and food will take to burn off. Armed with this tool, you can figure out your daily caloric intake, subtract 2000 as your daily allowance, and then determine how much exercise it will take to break even or lose weight. Are you snacking right now? Please share with us in the comments what you are munching on and how many calories it is.