Eating Your Way To Entrepreneurial Peak Performance
It’s a known fact that entrepreneurship is FREAKIN’ hard.
It’s also a known fact that stress and burnout plagues the entrepreneurial community.
So many articles have been written about the emotional battles that business owners have with running a business, and the inevitable personal battles they’ve got with self-worth, motivation and their own definitions of success.
What’s been interesting for me, is the number of entrepreneurs who are looking for way to boost energy and peak performance. Books have been written on this topic, events and programs have been developed for this, yet when I’ve dug deeper, what I’ve noticed is that the focus is usually from a daily habits, mindset, and business psychology perspective. Whenever there’s been anything on health, it’s been broad, like eat healthy, exercise and sleep well, or, consists of quirky hacks like cryotherapy and infrared saunas.
Don’t get me wrong. I think cryo- and infrared therapy are both amazing. I also strongly believe in personal development, mindset shifts, and creating habits conducive to productivity, deep work and creativity.
But as a dietitian, my inclination is to delve deeper into the nutrition side of things.
Having done quite a bit of work with entrepreneurs, I’ve discovered that virtually every single one of our entrepreneur clients, past and present, have a history of mental and cognitive health conditions – depression, anxiety, irritability, low mood, brain fog, poor memory, short attention span and energy crashes.
This prompted me to extend my research to see if this was a phenomenon that existed beyond my client cohort. To my shock horror, a study conducted in 2015 showed that almost half (49%) of the entrepreneur participants in the study had 1 or more mental health conditions, compared to the 32% of their non-entrepreneur counterparts.
Whilst there are limitations to this Study, it still got me thinking –
What if entrepreneurial stress weighs in heavily on the development and expression of these mental and cognitive issues?
What if we can build an armour to better deal with the entrepreneurial stress and significantly reduce its impact on our mental and cognitive function?
What if this armour is best built through the way we eat and not so much the way we think? Therefore –
What if entrepreneurial peak performance is less about the psychology but more about the physiology?
Let’s explore this more.
Your brain controls all the regulatory processes in your body, including your energy, mood and cognitive function.
When under chronic stress, you’re constantly activating a particular pathway known as the HPA-axis. This triggers your brain to work over time, stimulating the release of cortisol and adrenaline. Over time, this overactivation of the HPA-axis fatigues your brain, increases inflammation throughout your body (and brain) and leads to chronic elevated blood sugar levels and insulin resistance.
The combination of systemic inflammation and insulin resistance, with the continuous activation of your fight-or-flight mechanism, forms the perfect backdrop for all your cognitive, energetic and mental symptoms, including fatigue, brain fog, memory loss, irritability, low mood, depression, anxiety and overwhelm.
Ultimately, when entrepreneurs like you want peak performance, I know that what you’re really after is to feel your absolute best, so you can give your absolute all. You want your body to be in the best shape possible, your brain to be sharp as a tac, and to have all the energy in the world so you can out-work and out-perform all your competitors.
I know it sounds crazy, and for some of you, you’ve been feeling like crap for so long that you can’t even come at this concept yet, but here’s the thing –
It is possible.
In fact, that’s what we do. We literally teach entrepreneurs like yourself how to
EAT your way to entrepreneurial peak performance.
You see, we know that as business owners, there are lots of demands daily.
You’re required to think on your feet, make decisions quickly, take on risks, deal with inconsistent cashflow and income, deal with staff, clients and suppliers.
The list goes on.
Yet, not many business owners consider these demands as being “above average” and eat accordingly. In fact, many of the business owners we speak to don’t ever prioritise their food and end up having very little to eat all day. Yet, you may have noticed that your weight keeps creeping up. Hardly seems fair, right? I explain this phenomenon in more detail here.
Take athletes for example.
If someone was training for and competing in ultra-marathons, would you be surprised if we told you that their nutrition requirements would differ, and would likely consist of a lot more food, than the average person?
Of course you wouldn’t be. Why?
Because their “above average” needs are tangible. You can see that person running every single day, and as a society, we’ve been conditioned to identify physical exertion as “energy output”. Therefore, to suggest that these guys need to match their output with the right input is not exactly a difficult concept to grasp.
Conversely, we’re also conditioned to think that if we sit behind a desk, our energy output is less. Despite the million-and-one things you need to do, and the concentration and focus you require, society is still convinced you don’t need to eat as much. In fact, since you’re so sedentary, you should eat less.
As a business owner myself, I know that this isn’t the case. Your mental energy output is still “energy output”.
Personally, I have to ensure that I’m able to stay mentally sharp 10 hours a day. When I’m hosting events like retreats, I’m literally “switched on” 24 hours a day. Trust me when I say, this requires an extraordinary amount of energy and the right nutrition protocol to manage and maintain.
Within my client cohort, my top-level clients have incredibly busy and demanding schedules, flying interstate and overseas regularly. In addition, they also present on stage, with events that go for a full 5 days. When you have to be engaging and engaged with a whole room of people for 5 days in a row, meticulous planning around your nutrition becomes vitally important. Otherwise, the yawns and brain fog will kick in, you’ll live off copious amounts of coffee during the day, wind down with copious amounts of booze at night, and you’ll find yourself fading with each day that passes.
Then, for those who do recognise the importance of eating well, the messages out there on what to eat is so confusing.
On a population level, if you look at how we eat these days, it’s completely unsupportive of the type of chronic stress entrepreneurs are under every single day.
When you think about it, our diets are low fat (especially animal fat), low cholesterol, and high in sugars and starches.
When our brain composition is 70% fat, and uses 25% of the body’s cholesterol supply, a low-fat and low cholesterol way of eating literally starves the brain!
So – is the answer then to add extra butter to your toast and drink full fat milkshakes? Absolutely not.
This is where it get’s more intricate.
Quantity, quality and meal timing all need to be designed to match your individual health status. Depending on what symptoms you have, how your bloods look, what your long term goals are, we need to create a blueprint specifically for you.
So, what can you do to make a start TODAY?
Whilst it does take a lot more specificity to get completely right, we’ve created a simple 3-step process for you to follow to start making some changes straight away.
Whilst this isn’t a full fix, it will provide you with something tangible to work on that will yield results.
In addition, we’ve also included a full symptoms checker list for you to download and check off. This will allow you to see how many symptoms you experience (some of which you probably didn’t even realise were symptoms), and will give you a great insight into where you’re at now, and the main areas of focus on moving forward.
If you resonated with what I discussed in this article and want to chat further, make sure you reach out to us here.
