Diet | She Owns It

Know what to do but just aren’t doing it with diet?

As an entrepreneur, executive or other high-performing leader, you’ve got more “to do’s” on your list than any one human being can realistically finish. Yet you know how to set your priorities and get the important things done for your business, even your family and your home.

Why then, don’t you eat more greens, eat less takeout pizza, or drink less wine (soda, beer, etc.)? Why can’t you get your healthy eating skills down in the same way you’ve got your work skills down?

I’ll let you in on a little secret:

It’s not because you’re lazy, you just aren’t cut out for being a healthier person, or you don’t have the willpower.

One of the main reasons is you haven’t yet developed a system to make healthier eating an easy and natural part of your life. Much like in your work life, until you have a system, it’s not going to be easy to get it done time after time.

Systems aren’t only for work. You have systems in other parts of life that you may not have even realized. Take your morning routine, for example. Whether or not you purposefully set one up, you have a system in the morning.

Once you get out of bed, you follow a series of steps that end up getting you to work on time, or otherwise starting your day off on the right foot. No doubt you’ve tried a few different morning routines and found the system that works best for you at this time.

And then you continue without having to think much more about it.

Does that sound like something you’d like to have happen in your life with healthy food? I’ve been helping entrepreneurs, executives and other high-performers accomplish this throughout my career, and it’s what I help readers to do in my new book, Eat to Lead.

Let’s create one system for better nutrition together right now.

Just like when you set up any other system, you 1) define the goal, 2) plan a system, 3) then put the system into practice and refine it.

Here’s how:

Define your goal.

Work on one small goal at a time so you don’t add unnecessary overwhelm to your life. Don’t overthink it.

Here’s an example: Let’s say your larger goal is to drink more water and less coffee. You might pick a smaller, more specific goal of drinking one glass of water, first thing the morning.

Plan your system.

Let’s say, after a little thought, you decide you’ll pour a jug of water in the kitchen at night, so it’s ready for you in the morning. Your idea is that when you see the pitcher in the morning, you’ll remember your goal, and you’ll have a drink before doing anything else.

It’s a good plan. That’ll be one more glass of water than you normally have each day and it’s a great step in the right direction. Know that any new healthy habit you implement will have compounding effects.

Practice and refine.

Give yourself at least a week to refine your system for successful implementation. No more than two.

In this example, as you go through your week, you may find it’s easiest to drink a glass of water while you’re making breakfast for the kids. You have your coffee with breakfast as usual. Surprisingly, you find you need less coffee when you’re more hydrated. You also find that you can pour the rest of the water from the pitcher into a mug and drink it on your commute to work.

After working on that one step for a week, you’ve created a great little system in your life for drinking more water and being more hydrated.

In this scenario, your system had compounding effects, much like in reality: Pouring a pitcher of water at night made it easier for you to remember and drink water in the morning. Unexpectedly, it has increased your morning energy, improved your daily hydration, and reduced the amount of coffee you need in the morning. And just like your routine for getting up and out the door, you’ve gotten your first system in place for better self-care.

What small system can you start today that’ll help you eat better tomorrow?

If you liked this article, you may be interested in my book, Eat to Lead, where I lead readers (who are leaders) through six weeks of small steps towards healthier eating. “This book by smart nutritionist Luci Gabel guides you in making your own personal food decisions that lead to higher energy levels, more brainpower, better sleep, weight loss, disease prevention, and more. The pace is designed to fit into the life of a busy professional.”
—Lee Constantine, Publishizer

You can preorder the book here. Between now and June 14, I’ve got some great bonuses to go along with the preorders. Come on by and check it out!

Luci Gabel

Luci Gabel- MA, MBA, ACE, ACSM – Exercise Physiologist, nutritionist, content manager and owner of LuciFit, LLC.

Luci helps clients and students drop the fads, sort out the myths from reality, and understand food and fitness in a way that works for their body, and for life. She has over 20 years of experience working with a wide range of clients, from professional athletes to the business savvy woman. You can count on Luci to be your truth-teller, and your myth dispeller when it comes to mass media information about food and exercise. And she’ll always be a cheerleader on your side!

LuciFit.com

by Luci Gabel | Featured Contributor

In February 2018, a study from Stanford University¹ provided continued evidence that when it comes to weight loss, high-fat and high-carbohydrate diets are the same when they offer the same amount of protein and are made up largely of real, whole, healthy food. As I wrote about the findings of the study here, it became apparent that, besides weight-loss, the study also shows evidence that the lower-fat diets were healthier because of the higher fiber and lower LDL blood values that the lower-fat participants ended up with.

There’s much confusion around which diet is best,

mainly because of the unlimited sources in the media pushing us to be on one diet or another.

But, an entrepreneur needs to choose her diet wisely.

We can’t afford to have a diet derail our energy or jeopardize our productivity. We need food that will sustain us, optimize our mental and physical energy, and help us to perform, look and feel our best while we go on impacting and improving the world.

We need to protect our most valuable assets,

two of which are time and mental energy. We can’t afford to waste them on diets or weight-loss programs that work only for the short term.

From my experience working with executives and entrepreneurs

over the last twenty years, it’s not about the whole grains, or the corn on the cob, or even the bananas that are the problem. It’s the“cake” for breakfast (something made of processed flour with heaps of sugar) with a high-calorie coffee, a salad (or nothing) for lunch, another high-sugar drink as a hold-over til dinner, and then take-out pizza, Chinese food, or a frozen meal for dinner. On the weekends, there’s usually more variety but not better—mostly more chips, pizza, wings, more dessert and more alcohol.

Proponents of a high-fat fad will say

the diet that nutritionists, professors and government agencies have been recommending isn’t working. So, we should swing in the opposite direction and instead of eating 50-60 percent of our calories from carbohydrates, we should be eating 50-90 percent of our calories from fat.

But, it’s not true that the guidelines aren’t working. We’re just not following them.

The 2015 Dietary Guidelines committee said it best in a nutshell:²

The US population as a whole does not meet recommendations for vegetables, fruit, dairy, or whole grains, and hasn’t done so for years.
We eat too much sodium and saturated fat, refined grains, solid fats, and added sugar.
We don’t get enough vitamin A, vitamin D, vitamin E, vitamin C, folate, iron, calcium, magnesium, fiber, and potassium (all nutrients we obtain from food in the first bullet above).

While it is true that the majority of the nutrition science professionals recommend

50-60 percent of calories in a diet come from carbohydrate, carbs are not only sugar, pizza, white bread, pretzels, French fries, and potato chips.

Carbohydrates include all of the healthy, fiber-filled, nutrient-rich, antioxidant-packed plant foods—from ancient grains to fruit, vegetables and legumes. It’s these foods that need to make up the majority of our diet. It’s also these foods that will aid in a healthy gut microbiome and, as it appears, will also keep our brains working optimally.

So, the vast majority of evidence points to:

Those who eat more fruits, vegetables, legumes, and whole grains reduce their risk for preventable disease and live a healthier, longer and stronger life.
The more vitamins, minerals and antioxidants that we eat (from plant foods), the better our body and our brain will work now and for the long term.
Both high-fat and high-sugar diets show connections to brain damaging effects.³^,4

We need to start to get it right

on how to make healthy choices and eat whole, real foods instead of focusing on one macronutrient being “in or out” of vogue. If we don’t get this right, in ten or twenty years we’ll have a whole different health problem on our hands because we will have swung from high-sugar to high-fat diets, mostly junk.

Moderation and healthy choices in every food group wins every time. It’s most beneficial when you know you can be in any country, at any table, and successfully choose the foods that will sustain your optimal mind and body.

As busy women, we need not be asking “which diet is better?”

Rather, we need to foster healthier habits that produce better brain power, more energy, and a higher quality of life.

Thoughts?

Please share in the comments.

References:

1. Foster, Gary D., et al. “A Randomized Trial of a Low-Carbohydrate Diet for Obesity.” New England Journal of Medicine, vol. 348, no. 21, 2003, pp. 2082–2090., doi:10.1056/nejmoa022207.

2. Scientific Report of the 2015 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee – http://www.health.gov/dietaryguidelines/2015-scientific-report/PDFs/Scientific-Report-of-the-2015-Dietary-Guidelines-Advisory-Committee.pdf

3. Obese-type Gut Microbiota Induce Neurobehavioral Changes in the Absence of Obesity. Bruce-Keller, Annadora J. et al. Biological Psychiatry, Volume 77, Issue 7, 607-615

4. MindBodyGreen Health: Are Carbs Bad for Your Brain? A Neuroscientist Explains. https://www.mindbodygreen.com/articles/are-carbs-bad-for-your-brain