Can Peak Performance Be Achieved By Healthy Eating?
The path to wellness is different for everyone, and so too is the path to productivity and entrepreneurial success. However, these seemingly disparate paths often have commonalities and an important one is nutrition.
More and more evidence is mounting to suggest that dialling in your nutrition is a keystone habit that can ripple out into many regions of your life. As things like mental clarity and energy levels improve with more focus on diet, so often can business performance – meaning nutrition should be a top priority for entrepreneurs seeking to achieve peak performance.
Why do we seek peak performance?
If you’re feeling even a little burned out as an entrepreneur, the toxic nature of obsessive hustle culture becomes more and more apparent by the day. While working 20-hour days and living on caffeine certainly isn’t sustainable, that doesn’t mean we need to do away with the concept of peak performance.
For many entrepreneurs, peak performance isn’t about trying to be superhuman. Rather, it’s about having the energy and focus required to deliver brilliant results for customers and stakeholders. When approached in a sustainable way that places a high value on good health and good nutrition, this is a truly worthwhile goal.
How does nutrition affect your business performance?
Feng-Yuan Liu is the Founder of Metro Dietetics. As a CEO, she understands the pressures and demands of entrepreneurial life. As a certified dietician, she also brings to the table a wealth of well-researched knowledge about nutrition and the way it affects performance.
Liu explains that chronic stress leads to over-activation of the hypothalamus, pituitary gland, and adrenal glands (aka the HPA-axis). With your brain constantly in overdrive, cortisol and adrenaline reign supreme, and while this can be energising in the short term, it generally leads to inflammation and elevated blood sugar levels. Over time, you may be looking at insulin resistance and a host of other health-compromising symptoms.
If brain fog, irritability, low mood, anxiety, memory loss, and a general sense of overwhelm sound familiar, then a nutrition-based approach to achieving peak productivity may be a good idea.
Can you really eat your way to peak performance?
Of course, there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to nutrition. It would be marvellously convenient if you could just find an entrepreneur or athlete you admire, copy their eating plan, and get the same results. However, life is far more complex than that.
While there are some generalisable tenets of healthy eating, if you really want to dial in your nutrition for peak performance, your best bet is to seek personalised advice from a registered dietician. If you’ve been suffering from any of the symptoms described above, seeking such guidance may be the best investment you’ve made in your career to date.
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