munch on lunch

Lunch is a tad awkward these days. It wasn’t awkward back when I was the only one in the office. I’d leave around noon, take a long walk, grab something to go, and bring it back to eat at my desk. Mid-afternoon, when I would get sleepy, I’d take a second trip out for coffee or some other snack. A natural consequence of condensing my classic Monday afternoon coffee, Tuesday lunch, and Friday afternoon snack into one singular office day.

Nowadays, everyone is here, and it’d be bad form to bring back something like bibimbap or nachos and make the whole office smell like my lunch all afternoon. Instead, I eat out. But then I feel self-conscious about the amount of time I’m spending away from my desk. (To my knowledge, Noah doesn’t go out for lunch at all. I think he keeps protein shakes in the fridge.) So I leave late, take a shorter walk, and omit the afternoon coffee run. I either skip the coffee or grab something on my way back from lunch. It’s not like I’m hurting for sugar (Noah has a snack bowl on his desk), but I miss the extra steps and the extra opportunity to walk around town.

Fitbit is still shortchanging me on steps, by the way. It’s not just historical data that’s affected; my steps are getting docked on an ongoing basis. I know because yesterday I checked shortly before midnight and I was set to hit 21k. Today, it shows I got 20.7k. That’s not a huge deficit, but I’m still being cheated of steps, and it could make a difference if I happen to be just barely above 20k.

I have a suspicion as to what might cause this discrepancy. I’ve noticed for the past few years that sometimes, the bar graph visually undercounts the amount of steps taken. For instance, the tracker registers 1500 steps, but the bar shows 1200. This frequently happens when I’m walking at my desk instead of walking real distance. My guess is that, for some reason, Fitbit is now computing its step totals by adding up the bars instead of using the step total recorded by the tracker.

Whatever the reason, it’s very annoying.

In any case, I’m probably overthinking the lunch thing. I’m entitled to a lunch hour, and it’s probably also fine to go grab coffee down the block (but also fine to not get coffee and save myself the caffeine and calories).