Busy lifestyles, deadlines, stress, the desire to be crushing business and create wealth or even just struggling to stay ahead is the reality for many of us.
It’s work. It’s business. And it’s what many accept as just the norm.
In addition, most also accept that they are so busy to invest any time or energy into their own health, fitness and well-being.
Holding on to the belief that “I don’t have time, I’m too busy, And I’m too tired to exercise”.
What happens next? Well, it’s not just next, it’s usually years, if not decades later that many busy professionals reach break point.
Overweight, highly stressed, moody, and not sleeping well.
Sometimes coupled with a health scare of high blood pressure or where the third doctors lead to the final statement. “You have to do something about it now”.
These common beliefs are two-fold.
1. You don’t know what you don’t know. So if you don’t take the first step to be are aware and resourceful to ‘find’ new ways, better strategies to achieve a goal, then you never start.
2. It simply means your values are not aligned with your higher objectives. Or one might think it’s important but it’s not high enough no the value list to do anything about.
Let’s dive into a couple of quick solutions, or belief shifts to overcome the most common excuses or beliefs that prevent busy professionals, and executives from losing weight, start implementing an effective health and weight loss program that is sustainable.
That is super essential to many busy people, especially executives, entrepreneurs, and busy professionals that still want to perform at their best., lose weight, get back in control of their health and find better ways of achieving higher levels of health, energy and success.
Most high performers want to be healthy, fit, and focused. Be able to integrate work life balance and have the energy, to be successful. They want to lose weight, get leaner, get fitters, and have the ability to perform optimally given the pressured of work and success.
Now with burnout, meaning deadlines, busy travel schedules, and entertaining, it’s inevitable that when the focus of life is all on business, reaching deadlines, creating wealth, our health becomes a second priority. That is usually because our common beliefs, and especially those that are held by busy professionals is that I don’t have time, I’m too busy, I am too tired, I don’t have enough energy. And this is where we need to reframe or look at a different mindset to now become resourceful, or at least gather new information, a new perspective. And a more effective strategy to achieve specific health, energy, weight loss and mindset objectives that combat and work with all of those common excuses.
The first myth, or limiting belief is “I don’t have time”.
That’s because our belief for most people is that for any exercise or health endeavor to be effective, we need to invest a lot of time and energy into the process. Thinking we need to be at the gym for 60 minutes, five days a week, for it to be effective is myth number one. To combat that, we found that without busy professionals, what’s more powerful, what’s more influential in achieving weight loss, or getting lean or maintaining a good ideal body weight is more about the process of routine.
We found with our busy professionals that their morning routine, whether it be two minutes, 10 minutes, seven minutes, or 15 minutes, if we can create a consistent habit of movement, first thing in the morning, it’s not only going to develop sound routines, it’s also going to help us build a certain level of momentum into achieving and implementing more consistent habits later on in the day.
Those professionals that are implementing a five-minute routine in the morning, are already going to be more energized, they’re already kick starting their metabolism, they’re already getting an adrenaline release, they’re also getting a dopamine hit.
We’re starting an addiction to accomplishment and a sense of achievement. And these morning routines become incredibly powerful, not just in losing weight, but also increasing, creating our mental performance, creating a certain level of leadership, focus, engagement and achievement for other tasks throughout the day.
The second myth is “I’m tired, I don’t have the energy”.
We can look at this in a few different ways. But the most powerful strategy that we have found, resonates and is easy to implement for busy professionals is that we don’t have the energy because we have not mastered the art of managing energy itself. If we look at the factors that can optimize, increase or generate energy, it comes down to three simple factors, number one, movement. And you will be able to test this yourself. If you are feeling tired, lethargic or unfocused, get up, move, follow your morning routine, do some mobility drills, go and talk to people just get out of your chair and move. Whether you are working at home on weekends, and you are losing focus, whether you have been slugging it out for a few hours at work and stuck at your desk, get up and move.
Movement in itself is the key strategy to optimize your energy. And when busy professionals start to connect the dots and understand that to generate more energy or to increase energy is by moving more, we start to build new routines, new habits, new rituals, and we start to identify a new strategy that gives us the outcome that we’re looking for. Being tired is also related to being stressed. When we are stressed.
We switch off, we are disengaged. We look for excuses, our brain stops being resourceful we lose our ability to find solutions. And that plays havoc with our mindset. Because we come from a place of you know, you’ve got your fight and flight reactions. We become reactive to the fight rather than finding that solution to improve our current state, our current level of energy that we are bombarded with on any given day.
To combat the stress is linking back to the first element where we believe more is better, that we need to spend more hours at the desk, we need to spend more hours at work, we need to spend more time to finish the project and get the deadline. When in fact, if we start to focus on quality time and levels of our productivity, you will find that you can oscillate your engagement which will optimize and maximize your mental focus, your productivity and your ability to complete tasks in less time.
In fact, less time at the desk leads to higher levels of productivity and performance, less stress, more energy, less cortisol, greater fat loss. It’s all linked and it’s all related.
It’s not uncommon for our busy professional clients, when they start working with us to lose up to 10 kilograms in their first eight to 12 weeks simply by looking at their nutrition and implementing these effective strategic morning routines. Depending on their initial start point.
And strategies to optimize their energy, their mood, and to facilitate recovery. Nutrition. This is one of the biggest areas that hold people back from achieving their results. Again, usually related to miss information, or the wrong strategy that leads to disappointment and frustration. Thinking that we need to be perfect.
Clients start off thinking that they’ve got to be perfect within nutrition, that I just need to be eating salads, that carbs are bad for us that we have to spend a lot of time and invest time into meal preparation that we have to eat, often smaller meals all the time.
When we get into a state of hunger, and we need to eat, we then panic and we go for whatever is closest and most convenient without even thinking Regardless of where it is, such as Starbucks, it’s pastries, it’s a low quality sandwich — more often than not it’s fast, highly processed food.
One of the key elements of understanding hunger and nutrition is that we must start to focus on eating strategically — that is, eating when we are hungry. Not eating out of habit, routine, or reactively to an emotion trigger like stress, pressure or time of day. That’s the first point We have been programmed to believe that we need to eat at certain times, we need to eat breakfast, we need to eat every two or three hours. Otherwise, our blood sugar is going to drop too low, our metabolism is going to slow down and we’re going to store fat, which is a complete myth.
Through our own experiences and proven methods with clients, that this one strategy alone is critical to long term success, higher levels of wellness, longevity and sustainable lifestyle choice as well as habits.
There are also many sources of research that also support this intervention. If we actually eat less frequently, it leads to:
1. Increased mental and cognitive performance
2. Increased resting metabolic rate
3. Consistent blood sugar levels
4. Reduced insulin and cortisol levels
5. Facilitates cellular recovery.
Clients also experience more energy, greater fat loss, higher levels of productivity. And it also allows us to disassociate our connection, our emotional connection with food.
Secondly, when we focus on meal frequency or eating when we’re hungry, we actually end up eating less calories. This leads us towards more of a calorie deficit more consistently. But it also allows us to have more flexibility with the types of foods that we’re eating. And that is where the magic happens. Because most people are not compliant within nutrition, because they can’t stick to a perfect, healthy or clean diet plan. And this is setting people up to fail. Because there’s no doubt most of us like food.
It’s part of our social culture. It’s about entertaining, spending time with our family, entertaining clients travel, drinking. When you give people the flexibility to work within this kind of threshold, (we call it flow) it leads to much more powerful outcomes and successful sustainable weight loss even for busy professionals.
If you’re looking for new, more effective ways to build an effective energy plan, lose some weight, get your edge back, then reach out and connect with me. |