20 Eat Like a High Performer

Your calendar isn’t alway the problem, your fuel is. On today's episode, we dive into the hidden productivity engine most professionals ignore: the body. When nutrition slips, your day pays the price through mental fog, short tempers, rework, and that familiar afternoon crash. We unpack a practical approach to eating that protects attention, steadies mood, and lifts decision quality without counting every calorie or swearing off birthday cake.

We start by reframing food as performance gear. You’ll learn why blood sugar stability is the fast lane to clearer thinking and calmer leadership, and how protein at each meal smooths energy while cutting cravings. We dig into simple swaps to limit refined carbs, use fruits and vegetables to buffer spikes, and build hydration habits that sharpen cognition. Then we connect the dots to work: lighter, protein-forward meals before deep work or big meetings, and standardized breakfasts and prepped lunches to remove daily guesswork.

From there, we zoom out to strategy. Consistency beats perfection, and small nutritional habits compound into better sleep, steadier mornings, and greater stress tolerance. Over time, that translates into fewer mistakes, stronger patience, and a real leadership edge. You’ll leave with one clear challenge: pick a single habit and track how your energy, focus, and mood shift over one to two weeks.

Ready to protect your time by protecting your energy? Follow the show, share this episode with a teammate who lives in the 2:30 p.m. slump, and leave a quick review telling us which habit you’ll start this week.

Blinn Bates - BlinnBates.com

Woods & Bates, P.C. - WoodsandBates.com

Right Fit Evaluator: https://blinnbates.com/right-fit-evaluator

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome back. Most professionals focus on productivity systems like calendars, delegation, email control, and we've talked about all those things. And they're important. But less of us focus on the operating system that runs all of it. That's our body. So last week we talked about exercise, and today I want to talk to you a little bit about nutrition. This isn't about dieting, this isn't about trends, this isn't about one and done type things. This is about fueling your life so that you

From Tools To The Body

SPEAKER_00 0:30

can work intentionally. Now you can't perform at a high level if you're underfueled or poorly fueled. And this is evident in any sport that you watch. If you watch sports, you can see that if somebody isn't fueled correctly, they can't perform the way that they want to. Maybe

Why Fuel Beats Willpower

SPEAKER_00 0:46

they're cramping, maybe they're getting injured, maybe they don't have the energy that they need. And just like exercise helps those athletes and helps us as professionals, nutrition affects that greatly. And it affects it more and more as we age, from my experience. Nutrition can affect our focus, it can affect our mood, our decision making, emotional stability, cognitive performance. You know, think about being around somebody that's hungry. They're probably not in the best mood. They aren't able to focus very well. Their decision making suffers and they're unstable. Their emotional stability is just not there. And that's because what we eat determines our blood sugar stability, our energy, our spikes and crashes, and our mental clarity. So if you've ever had, you know, a big, huge lunch and then tried to go back to work, you hit that 2:30 p.m. crash and felt foggy or needed a nap, been irritable the rest of the day. It's it's not necessarily our time management, but it's our fuel. It's what we're fueling our bodies with. So stable energy creates stable performance.

Blood Sugar, Mood, And Focus

SPEAKER_00 1:56

Poor fueling can lead to, like we talked about, slower thinking, more mistakes, more reworks or doing things again, poor sleep, which is going to result in some of these other things also. Reduced willpower, you know, if we're not at our best, maybe we don't have the willpower to say no to that piece of cheesecake or whatever it is, and this emotional volatility we talked about. So in business, that's going to mean shorter attention spans, which isn't good. Our attention spans are getting shorter and shorter as it is. Reduced patience, we're not gonna have a lot of patience for things when those stressors hit us, and probably ultimately poor leadership decisions. And those are all gonna cost us time in the long run. So our low energy from our poor nutrition is ultimately gonna turn these small problems into bigger ones. We're just not at our best and we're not doing our best work if we aren't fueled properly. So I have some high-level principles that I'm gonna give you when it comes to nutrition. These are practical. I am not a nutritionist. I would say seeing one can help demystify some of this because you know I didn't know a lot of these things until I learned about them. But one of the things I try to do is to prioritize protein. This improves fullness, you know, stabilizes the energy, keeps you feeling fuller longer, reduces those afternoon crashes we talked about. Try to avoid blood sugar spikes, so limiting heavily refined carbohydrates like white bread, pastries, sugary cereals, things like that, reducing sugary snacks, balancing the meals with fruits and vegetables. This is not an easy one for me. I'm not a big veggie guy, but I try to eat them to try to balance those meals. Hydrate intentionally. This I like this one. This one I've gotten better and better at. Dehydration mimics fatigue, so it makes us tired. Even mild dehydration can reduce our cognitive function. So for me, I shoot for drinking about 100 to 120 ounces of water a day. Some need more, some need less. That that works out pretty well for me. Makes me feel hydrated, makes my body feel better. And when I don't get that now that it's become a habit, I can feel the difference. If I get too much more than that, I spend most of my days getting rid of it, and that's no fun either. We want to eat to support

High-Level Nutrition Principles

SPEAKER_00 4:20

our working blocks so we know when we're gonna be working because we've planned our week out, and so probably lighter meals before we get into some deep work of two to three hour periods of time. We don't want to be sluggish. We want to avoid those heavy lunches before big meetings, things like that. So kind of plan those meals out when you're planning your week. And along those same lines, we can meal prep and we can standardize some things so that we can reduce our decision fatigue. We we, as leaders, make hundreds of decisions a day, and the less decisions that we can make, the better. So if we have standardized, here's what I eat for breakfast every day, I've prepped my lunch, I just have to grab and go, and we're removing that daily food guesswork. You know, we're not opening the fridge and looking in there and seeing what do we have to eat. We have it all planned out, just like we're planning our week. And this is discipline and small nutritional habits that can protect our performance all day and all week. And this doesn't have to be perfect. I am by no means a division one athlete. I'm never going to be. If I go to my daughter's birthday party and there's birthday cake there, I'm gonna have a piece of birthday cake. But much like planning our weeks, one setback over the course of the week isn't gonna derail our entire week. You know, it's it's not gonna be the end of the world. Just have to get back on track and do all these things most of the time. So this nutrition is gonna be for us preventative leverage. Just like delegation is leveraged, this is gonna be leverage for us too. This is going to ultimately reduce our sick days because we're gonna be healthier, it's gonna improve our sleep, so we're gonna be at our best when we wake up, it's going to improve our mood and it's gonna support our long-term health. And over the long term, we're going to be able to perform at a higher level. So we're actually protecting our calendar by doing this. We're protecting our earning capacity and we're protecting our leadership edge because we are fueled and ready to perform the way that we need to. This isn't necessarily just cosmetic. You know, if you eat better and your diet is better, you're probably gonna look better. But this is strategic. This is strategic for us and for our businesses, and over time, this is gonna compound because it's going to lead to better workouts. It's gonna lead to that better sleep. It's gonna lead to I've got better mornings because I'm in a better mood. And so I'm not fighting with my spouse or my children

Hydration And Work Blocks

SPEAKER_00 6:46

or you know, yelling at them to hurry up because I have rested. I'm up, I'm ready to go, I have better stress tolerance, I'm able to handle the stressors when they hit me better. So over time, that's gonna give us higher capacity, more stamina, and greater resilience. And this is the miracle of compounding. It works in our bank accounts, our savings accounts, retirement accounts. It also works in our life. When we get a little bit better, that interest that we're earning is going to compound over time, and we're gonna get better and better exponentially as we move on down the road. So this week, I would challenge you to improve one nutritional habit. Just pick one. We've talked about adding protein, we've talked about increasing water intake. I think that would be a very easy one to start with. Removing the afternoon sugar, maybe planning meal prepping your lunches. Don't try to overhaul everything at once because you're gonna get overwhelmed. Pick one thing, move that one lever, do that for a week, two weeks. Over time, I want you to observe how your energy changes, how your focus changes, your mood, and your productivity. Eventually, these are gonna become natural, they're gonna become habitual, and you're just gonna do them. We can't expect elite output from a poorly fueled system. Food isn't just about health, it's also about our performance, it's about our clarity, and it's about our sustainability. Fueling our bodies intentionally is going to protect our energy. That's how you're gonna maximize your time and elevate your life.