Why Nutrition is Foundational to Leadership
With the New Year approaching, I want to share how you can refocus on your nutrition and health in this next year.
Picture a leader leading a mid-day team meeting that the team thinks is unproductive. The leader is having trouble focusing, isn’t engaging his team effectively, is slow to respond to questions, and isn’t showing empathy during a challenging discussion.
What’s going on? The leader has hit a brick wall. Feeling sluggish since waking up and having sleep issues, he is experiencing the mid-day energy crash. He has no energy left to lead. The question is why is this happening? The answer could be his nutrition.
Solutions to leadership issues tend to focus on how to improve leadership skills. However, if what’s behind the behavior is a nutrition issue, developing skills won’t have an impact without first focusing on improving health.
To lead at your best entails having an abundance of energy. Food is a huge source of energy; it is foundational to our wellbeing. What we choose to put in our bodies impacts how we feel and how much energy we have to give as leaders.
Unfortunately, what I found both in my own experience and from those around me: nutrition is one of the first things we compromise in leadership. It’s why I became a nutritionist. Whether due to a busy travel schedule or an overbooked calendar, we reach for what’s convenient and often unhealthy, not what’s energy sustaining.
A key piece of being well and healthy is the food we’re putting into our body every day.
Yet, the standard way we approach health goals doesn’t always work.
What’s Wrong with Standard Approaches
The top New Year’s resolutions for the past few years have been: exercise more, eat healthier and lose weight. Unfortunately, only 8% of Americans achieve their resolutions each year, with over 80% giving up by February.
Sadly, without achieving last year’s resolutions, health goals tend to remain on the top of the list year after year, with the failure cycle repeating.
Why do health goals often fail year after year?
We have the wrong goal. Without realizing it, we can set goals from the saboteur aspect of ourselves—our harsh, negative self-talk—such as to lose weight. Goals around stepping on the scale can be incredibly demotivating.
We go way too hard, way too fast. We try to change everything at once. Then, when nothing sticks and we haven’t transformed immediately, we feel like a failure.
We don’t understand nutrition is a balance between our physiology and psychology. Whether it’s not understanding either or only relying on one, we need the combination to change from a nutrition perspective.
We deprioritize ourselves. We can start with good intentions, but then don’t take actions in support of serving ourselves. When we allow everything else in our lives to be a higher priority, we remain at the bottom of our priority list.
We can easily get caught in a negative downward spiral when we think nothing is working. It can feel defeating to not achieve health goals year after year. In these moments, we can bring compassion and kindness to ourselves.
How to make progress:
I want to share a different approach to make progress on health goals in the upcoming year.
Connect to a place of possibility. Envision what’s possible if you achieve a lasting healthy lifestyle. Check-in with your best-self, focusing on the long-term big picture. Consider how you could cultivate your physical energy to lead at your full capacity.
Leverage the neuroscience of change. Our brains are wired to make small incremental changes, not massive changes all at once. Recognize it’s taking one small step at a time that brings long-term transformation. Start by doing the easy small step right in front of you.
Prioritize Vital Leadership. Caring for yourself through good nutrition as a leader requires intentionality and prioritization. By planning ahead, you ensure you have healthy food and snacks with you throughout the week. During busy times, it will be easy to grab your own previously packed food with sustenance. Reflect on what serves your physical body every day.
Balance both your physiology and psychology. Acknowledge there are a lot of bad cycles to break in order to get to an energy sustaining cycle of good sleep, good food, and good hydration. Focus on creating good cycles that support both your physiology and psychology, without depriving yourself. Use the 80/20 rule where 80% of the time, you eat healthy, nutrient dense foods good for your body and 20% of the time, you eat foods that feed your soul.
Foundational Steps for Improved Nutrition:
Here are three ideas to get you started on small steps that make a big difference towards attaining your health goals.
You are the Expert: Everyone is biochemically different. You are the expert of your body. Though a lot of people (including me!) may tell you what’s good for you, you intuitively know. What foods make you feel good and energized? What foods make you feel awful? If you are unclear about how food makes you feel, start to pay attention to become wise about your body.
Hydrate: Being dehydrated puts a strain on our bodies. With 75% of Americans chronically dehydrated, even if you don’t feel thirsty, know that most of us don’t drink enough water. Drinking more water is one of the easiest and highest impact steps in the right direction. As a baseline, take your weight and divide it in half to determine how many ounces of water to drink daily. Other factors such as exercise, altitude, sickness, etc. do contribute so take this as a starting point. Increase your water intake slowly, by 8 ounces a week.
Eat Real Food: If you don’t know what something is, don’t put it in your body. Many ingredients in food we buy aren’t actually food, including wood and petroleum—items that aren’t supposed to be ingested. My rule is: if you don’t know what something is, look it up and then decide if it’s good to eat. Make small changes to slowly include more whole food in your diet. Balance your macronutrients in every meal, which means including the three major nutrients of: protein, carbohydrates, and healthy fats.
Reflection questions:
What do I most want for my health this next year?
What are the best ways to nourish myself physically and emotionally?
How might I show myself self-compassion in this journey versus allowing myself to dip into negativity?
What’s the small step I could take that’s right in front of me?
“I want to feel good again.” Leaders regularly share with me when feeling inspired to improve their health. They recognize they don’t feel as good as they know they could in their body, health, and energy.
When leaders take steps towards improving their nutrition and health, they do feel good again. They start spiraling up: sleeping better, waking up refreshed and having the highest brain capacity. They operate as highly vital leaders, with the sustained physical, emotional, and mental energy and capacity to excel in leadership and in life.
Nutrition is not separate from leadership: it is absolutely foundational to leading at your peak performance. To lead at your best next year starts with cultivating your energy with food.