Remote work changes meals, but weight gain is not inevitable

Remote work can change cooking time, meal timing and how much you eat. The research shows why better eating habits and weight gain can coexist.

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In the morning, you head for the dining chair instead of the station. Lunch happens in the same chair. In the evening, you close the screen and move straight into preparing dinner. You have barely left home, yet you are tired from work. The refrigerator has been nearby all day, but somehow lunch never happened.

Does working from home make you gain weight? That question contains several others: have you moved less, has your eating changed, and has your weight actually increased? Research finds people eating more and people eating less. It also includes a survey in which changes in remote working were not significantly associated with obesity. Your workplace alone cannot tell you where your weight is heading.[13][14]

When the commute from Tachikawa disappears, what needs a place in the day? Our features on breaking up prolonged sitting and on cycling or walking to work cover those movement questions in more detail. Here, the focus is cooking at home, changes in food intake and skipped meals.

Reallocating commute time between cooking, meals and movement

An observational study using the American Time Use Survey compared how adults aged 25–54 spent the day recorded in their time diary. The data came from 2017–2018, before pandemic restrictions changed where people could go. Those who worked at home spent less time working and on personal care than those who worked away from home, and more time on leisure, sleep, food preparation, and eating and drinking. This was a comparison of daily time allocation, rather than a weight-loss intervention.[18]

Among people with a spouse or partner present, working at home was associated with 25 more minutes preparing food and 48 more minutes eating and drinking at home. For context, the sample averages were 33 minutes for food preparation and 31 minutes for eating and drinking at home. Those differences were substantial relative to the averages. The researchers counted preparation and consumption separately: time at the kitchen counter and time at the table were distinct outcomes. Both differed between the working groups. The comparison shows why a question about making food and a question about having time to eat cannot be answered by the same observation about being at home.[18]

The extra 25 minutes is not the time you should spend making lunch on a remote day. It is a difference between the groups being compared. The study did not assign people a cooking schedule and follow their weight. Its practical interest is that home working may leave more time available for food-related activities. The spouse-or-partner condition also matters: this particular comparison should not be treated as a description of every household.[18]

A survey of married working women adds another perspective. Working hours were associated with skipping meals and eating with family. Time saved by staying home was not necessarily time left free for lunch. A kitchen can be available while the working day still crowds out the meal itself. Looking at work duration alongside eating opportunities gives a more specific question than whether remote work is good or bad for your diet.[19]

A reasonable practical response is to put lunch preparation before the working day where possible, and to step away from the work screen when eating. These suggestions follow from the studies that measured preparation and eating separately and examined work hours alongside missed meals. The point is to check whether a meal exists and whether the day contains an opportunity to eat it.[18][19]

Movement remains part of the background. A 2025 review covering 38 studies and 282,264 people found a tendency toward an average of 31 more minutes sitting during work and 2,564 fewer daily steps when working from home. Those are movement outcomes, separate from eating and weight. They explain why losing the commute deserves attention, but do not tell us how much food someone ate or how much weight they gained. The detailed practice of sitting breaks and active commuting belongs in the companion features.[2]

Food intake can rise or fall in the same working environment

A Polish study surveyed 225 people working remotely or combining home and onsite work during the pandemic and lockdown. In that group, 64.4% noticed changes in eating behavior. Asked about food quantity, 44.0% reported eating more than before, 20.0% reported eating less, and 36.0% reported no change. A shared working environment did not produce a shared direction of change. Staying home was compatible with several different eating patterns.[14]

Changes in eating behavior were not correlated with body weight at the time of the survey, but were correlated with changes in weight. These are different measurements. A person’s current weight does not tell you whether they have recently gained or lost weight. When interpreting an association with eating, it matters whether the researchers used weight at a particular time or the change from an earlier point.[14]

The available report does not give average weight changes separately for those who ate more and those who ate less. Nor does it report a change in the number of snacks. That limits the conclusions we can draw. The percentages describe reported food quantity, not a measured snack count, and they cannot be converted into a predicted weight change for a particular pattern of eating.[14]

The study also examined feelings and eating behavior. People whose questionnaire responses indicated a tendency to lose control over eating or to eat under emotional pressure were more likely to report poor well-being. Those reporting dietary restraint were more likely to report good well-being. These were relationships among questionnaire answers. The researchers were not testing whether imposing food restriction would improve mood, and the survey could not establish whether mood or eating changed first.[14]

For everyday use, the finding invites a closer look at the situation around food. When you eat something during work, did lunch run late? Were you hungry? Had a tense meeting just ended? They make the description more precise than “I overeat because I work from home.” Snack frequency can be something you examine in your own routine, while remaining distinct from what this study measured.[14]

Skipped meals deserve equal attention. A study reported in 2024 surveyed 150 married working women aged 25–40, and half said they skipped meals. It used an online questionnaire and purposive sampling, meaning participants were selected to fit the research purpose rather than randomly drawn from the general adult population. Daily working hours were significantly associated both with meal skipping and with eating meals alongside family. The authors linked long working hours with skipped meals and irregular meal timing.[19]

Working and living in the same place can therefore contain different possibilities: more scope to prepare food, and more scope for work to push eating aside. The women in this survey do not represent every remote worker. Still, the questions about work duration and whether meals happened are useful. They direct attention to an eating opportunity, rather than only to the food that eventually appeared on the plate.[19]

The survey also considered sleep and employment. Almost 60% of the women were not getting the 8 hours of sleep described as recommended in the study, and 60% did not have secure employment. Significant associations were found between work duration and employment type, job stress and work duration, and sleep duration and employment type. Food was one part of a set of connected working and living conditions. The questions did not examine eating in isolation: they also asked about how long women worked, the security of their employment, stress and sleep. A missed meal needs to be read within those conditions, as well as alongside what was eventually eaten.[19]

Reported weight gain is a finding, not everyone’s forecast

A web-based cross-sectional survey of 328 people working from home in 2021 found that 59.1% reported weight gain. There were 260 women and 68 men, with a mean age of 31.3 years. Working hours, sedentary time and perceived stress also increased. Participants who gained weight had higher sedentary time and higher scores on an unhealthy-diet measure.[4]

But 59.1% describes the responses of the participating group. It is not your personal probability of gaining weight. The researchers did not randomly assign workplaces as part of a weight-loss trial. A report of weight gain does not establish that home working alone caused it, how much weight was gained, or whether returning to onsite work would reverse it. The finding deserves attention without being turned into a forecast for every reader.[4]

A separate online cross-sectional survey of 748 people at an Italian research institution, conducted in early 2022, found that 39.9% reported weight gain during home working. At the same time, 48% reported more sedentary time. Some participants who had previously done moderate physical activity increased that activity. Adherence to the Mediterranean diet also improved. Better scores on an eating-pattern measure and reports of weight gain were present within the same survey.[10]

The Italian study’s mood results were mixed as well. Average mental health showed no overall change, while the proportions with mild and moderate depression increased. Participants who reported values indicating depression before moving to home working reported improvement. Diet, weight, movement and mood did not all point in the same direction, even when the researchers asked about them within a single study.[10]

These findings fit neither “cooking at home solves the weight problem” nor “food habits inevitably get worse at home.” An improvement in a group-level diet measure is a different result from the change in each person’s food quantity or activity. The report does not tell us what proportion of participants both improved their diet score and gained weight. We should not connect separate group results to invent an individual history that was not reported.[10]

Numbers: meals on remote working days

In the survey of 225 remote and hybrid workers, 64.4% noticed changes in eating behavior.[14]

Reported food quantity increased for 44.0%, decreased for 20.0%, and stayed unchanged for 36.0%.[14]

Food preparation at home took 25 more minutes in the US comparison of people with a spouse or partner present.[18]

Eating and drinking at home took 48 more minutes, measured separately from preparation time.[18]

Half of the 150 married working women aged 25–40 reported skipping meals in an online survey.[19]