Weight Management for the Entrepreneur

Guest Post by Cheryl Cope

Is weight management any different for the entrepreneur than for people who are not entrepreneurs? The basic principles of weight management will not change, but what might change is the amount of attention you need to place on them.

Making an appointment with self-care!

Most of the entrepreneurs I know, including myself, have a very flexible schedule, even sometimes having large chunks of unscheduled time. (I’m not implying that entrepreneurs aren’t busy, but that not everything we do is tied to a time on the clock.) Because of this, we need to be extra diligent about preparing and planning for our most important priorities. This usually involves either making an appointment in the calendar or setting up a routine for whatever the task is.

Just because we are so “busy” as entrepreneurs and have so much on our plate, we need to make sure we don’t neglect self-care, which includes items related to weight management. We need to schedule in or make a habitual routine for physical exercise. We need to plan ahead to make sure we have healthy food to eat, including the purchasing, storing, cooking, and consuming of the food, and including an approximate time of when we will consume the food.

Skipping Meals vs. Planning out meals

The reason why we need a time is because it is so common for entreprenueurs to get involved deeply in some project or thing-to-do that we lose track of time and may end up skipping meals or resort to grabbing any piece of food that is handy (which usually ends up to be junk food if we haven’t planned ahead).

Skipping meals is generally not conducive to weight management because normally what happens is that we get extra hunger later and we overeat, usually closer to bedtime, which is a time when we are more likely to store those calories as fat.

One way to avoid this is to plan ahead and have healthy snacks or meals prepared ahead of time. Make the effort to plan out your meals and snacks, and then do some preparation before they are needed. All this takes time so it needs to be allowed for in your schedule.

Junk food won’t help you as an entrepreneur

What to eat can be a question for some people. Generally accepted “junk” food (sweets, candy, cake, cookies, pie, chips, soda pop, etc.) should be eaten sparingly or not at all. It won’t help you to be a better entrepreneur or person in any way, but may sap your energy, make your brain foggier, make you sick, and make you gain weight.

Even if you are one of the “lucky” ones who seems to be able to “get away with” eating a bunch of junk food and not gaining weight, I don’t recommend doing it. Not only are you eventually going to hurt your health, but you are setting up bad habits that will be hard to break, when later in life your metabolism slows down.

Watching carbs

The main thing that most people need to keep an eye on, in watching their weight, is how many carbohydrates they are eating, or more accurately, how high on the glycemic load scale are the items you are eating. Carbohydrates are the foods that raise your blood sugar, which raises your insulin, which signals your body to store fat.

Staying mindful to manage your weight

Basically we need to stay mindful of what we are eating and of how much we are exercising, and not let those things slip down into the “not important” section of our to-do lists. As entrepreneurs, we are the only ones in charge of our time (even for client appointments, don’t we have a say as to when they will be?), so let’s make sure we do those things that help us to manage our weight.

Cheryl Cope is a Christian woman’s weight loss and habit change coach, helping women achieve healthy and sustainable weight loss, greater health and closer intimacy with God. She helps her clients change their eating, exercising, health, thinking and spiritual habits for the better. She incorporates prayer, biblical principles and the leading of the Holy Spirit in all aspects of her work.

Cheryl offers private and group coaching programs. Her next group weight loss program starts on Monday, January 23rd, 2012. For more information on Cheryl or her services, please visit www.Cherylcope.com or email her at cheryl@cherylcope.com.