Mindful eating is one of the most powerful tools to get you to your goals.
Mindful Eating: A Powerful Tool for the Successful Entrepreneur
Successful entrepreneurs are amazing individuals. They’re hard-working and dedicated to their endeavors. They’re striving to meet and even surpass their goals. They’re always doing their best to maximize their performance. What they might not realize, but, is that one particularly bad habit could be sabotaging their success.
We all have deadlines to meet and goals to achieve, and we can be so busy that we let our eating slide. Unfortunately, when we sacrifice our nutrition, we pay a higher price than we realize. This is especially true when we eat mindlessly for months on end. Ultimately, we suffer from a worsening mood, lower or frazzled energy, a negative attitude and, compromised relationships
Entrepreneurs think that they’re clever cutting corners by skipping meals or subsisting on junk food, but in this way, they’re undermining their success. If you think that by not stopping for proper meals, you’re going to do more, you’re incorrect because, it’ll catch up with you.
If you’re an entrepreneur who’s eating mindlessly while trying to build your business, your relationships might end up suffering. Poor nutrition has emotional consequences as much as physical ones; making you more irritable and impatient. You might snap at a colleague and undermine a potential new business association. You might lose your cool and look bad when you need to impress an investor.
As an entrepreneur, your creativity, your stamina, and your concentration are all essential for your success. But all these things diminish if you don’t have enough high-quality fuel to feed your body and your brain.
If you were a race car driver, you’d want to win every race, so you’d never dream of putting poor-quality fuel into your vehicle. It makes sense that if you’re going to win in your career, you should think in a serious way about what you eat.
I understand why people eat mindlessly. There’s so much going on and so much to do that it’s easy to neglect one thing or another. But eating is the one area you can’t afford to overlook. How you choose to fuel yourself affects your energy, focus and follow through as well as your resilience in the face of challenges and your ability to persevere.
Without adequate, high-quality fuel, you can’t be at your best or do your best work.
The truth is that you can’t afford to engage in mindless eating if you want to
achieve most success and maintain it in the long-run.
These days we have some strange attitudes toward food and eating. We seem to have forgotten that the role of food is as a source of fuel, not as a source of pleasure or gratification.
Of course, food is delicious. It has to be, for our survival. The problem today is that many of us eat almost only for pleasure or convenience, with little regard for how the food we eat is affecting our body, our mind, and our emotions.
Many entrepreneurs are tired and over-worked, so it’s easy to turn to comfort food. But when you’re working so hard, you need higher quality food; not the junk you’re consuming.
When for example, you eat a fast-food meal full of simple carbs, you get a quick burst of energy, followed by a profound sense of lethargy as the body has to work extra hard to process all the sugar that you ate. That’s where the phrase “carb coma” comes from.
Anyone who has important business goals would want to know if they were doing something to sabotage their success. It’s easier to see a problem if it lies in how you delegate work, manage staff or focus on tasks. It’s less obvious when it comes to how you eat.
But what if you could do something right now that gave you more energy and higher concentration; enhanced your creativity and put you in a better mood? Wouldn’t you do it? All you have to do is eat more.
So, what is mindful eating? Mainly it’s being aware of why you’re eating and what you’re eating. For an over-eater, mindful eating is recognizing when you’re eating to deal with your emotions, as opposed to when you’re hungry.
For an entrepreneur, mindful eating is considering the kind of fuel that would optimize your performance and lead you more directly to success. Elite athletes do this all the time. They visit sports nutritionists who figure out the exact ratios of carbs, protein, micro-nutrients, and fats that they need to perform at the highest level.
The truth is that it’s not only athletes who enjoy good nutrition. Entrepreneurs who eat mindfully can ensure that they’re in the best possible shape to achieve their goals.
Mindful eating for an entrepreneur is making sure that you get high-quality food throughout the day so that your blood sugar remains stable and you do not have the mid-morning slump from a too-sugary breakfast or the mid-afternoon brain fog from a poor-quality lunch or no lunch at all.
When you start to eat in a mindful way, you became more alert and focused, energetic and yet calm. You’re productive, and you roll with the punches. All you must do is put some attention on how you’re eating and what you’re eating, and things are going to change.
So, instead of paying minimal attention to your nutrition, you could choose right now to eat mindfully. This might be the secret weapon that puts you ahead of the competition.
The smart entrepreneur is always looking to adopt the most powerful new tools that will maximize their success. Mindful eating is one of the most powerful tools to get you to your goals.
About the Author
Marcia Sirota MD FRCP(C) is a board-certified psychiatrist, that does not ascribe to any one theoretical school. Rather, she has integrated her education and life experiences into a unique approach to the practice of psychotherapy. She considers herself a realist with a healthy measure of optimism.
