Are you healthy as an entrepreneur? We are all busy workers. We all work too hard. Karen Pyke from Inspire Wellness joined Josh to spread her message about how important it is to have a healthy mindset.
How To Tell if You Are Healthy
I think health is a really hard thing to define. Different people have different interpretations of what health is to them. The general telltale signs are a little bit of tiredness, fatigue, headaches, bloating, aches and pains, and the need to grab a coffee to give you that extra energy boost. They’re the things that tell you that the body is probably not functioning the way it needs to function.
How To Work Out the Balance
It’s working out what is too much. There are 24 hours a day. Can somebody work 24 hours a day? Potentially they can, but it’s what is going to happen later in life if you keep working at that speed.
We need to have a balance within life. Between work, play, and rest, the body can only function a certain amount based on the nutrients that it receives.
If you’re continually burning all of those nutrients and you don’t refuel your body either by taking a rest, by what you eat, or by what you drink, eventually something is going to stop. That’s different for different people. That could be six weeks for some people, and six months for others.
We know that there’s a certain amount of sleep that the body needs, and it’s when we sleep that the body repairs and recovers. That’s when it sets you up for the next day. Some people can survive on six-hour sleep. Some people need eight hours. Some people probably can survive on three or four hours at a time, but eventually, something will give.
Why Do Entrepreneurs Need Good Physical and Emotional Health
I became single in 2017, and that meant I lost a business partner and obviously my mental health wasn’t 100% while I was going through a breakup. I thought I could power through it, so I continued to do whatever I could.
I was eating reasonably healthy and going to the gym, but the amount of work that I had to do meant that I wasn’t in check with my balance. I went from talking as a reasonably confident young man to developing a stutter; I wasn’t able to talk on the phone. I could not get words out. We had to start culling clients so that I didn’t have that happening inside me.
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Be Aware of Your Balance
I believe that everything in life is individual. There’s no one right or wrong for every person. It’s really kind of sitting down and looking at your day, your life, how you feel—everything—on that individual basis.
1. Plan
When my clients come in and I feel that they are running a little bit too high, I tell them to stop and have a plan for their day and themselves to know what they’re doing.
We give a lot of time. As entrepreneurs, we want to put so much time into our business. You can only put that much time into your business if you put into yourself as well, so plan your time around yourself and your nutrition. What am I going to eat today? How am I going to fuel myself? Can I get nutrient-rich food into me or is it going to be the fast food, the empty calories, the kind of things that aren’t going to fuel me for success?
I truly believe that planning is the key to everything that we do. It just sets you up for success.
2. Assess
Work out what’s realistic in your life. Is it just me? Is there anyone else that I need to give time to within my life? Do I have a family? Have I checked in on my friends recently? Have I been out socially?
If you’re not doing those things and the only thing you are focusing on is your entrepreneurial pursuits, something’s going to have to give eventually. You’ve got to give time back to yourself and nurture yourself.
I believe that balance should always be there. Obviously, there’s always going to be things that come up and impact our day. We planned to work for 5 hours but ended up working 10 hours. That’s okay every now and again, but that shouldn’t be every single day.
Ask yourself what didn’t happen that day that created that? It’s reflecting on those moments and how you can prevent that from happening. I think every day should be balanced.
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Physical Health and Mental Health
I think they’re both so closely interrelated. It’s so hard to define and say if I concentrate on my mental health, my physical health is going to be great or if I just concentrate on my physical health, my mental health is going to be great. It can’t be that simple. It’s really looking at everything as a whole and thinking about how you can understand when those points are out of balance.
Stop and allow yourself to understand. Ask yourself:
- What are the signs that I’m becoming out of balance?
- What do I need to do to bring myself back into balance?
I have one particular client who’s suffering a little bit with their mental health, and they were going to the gym too much to help themselves with their mental health, to give them clarity. But then, they were working really hard as well, and that was impacting their mental health. Something had to give, and I actually told them to have a day off the gym. Sometimes we think that we need to go to the gym to help with our mental health, but sometimes the gym might be impacting our mental health more. 
With deadlines, I tell people to stop and think what would be the worst-case scenario if they didn’t hit the deadline. Is the world going to end tomorrow if you don’t put that extra hour in when you’re absolutely exhausted and you need to go to bed? What happens if you actually go to bed, you get up in the morning, you’re fresh and you find a solution to your problem within 15 minutes, instead of spending extra 2 or 3 hours at night trying to fix it and work it out? Sometimes it’s okay to not always push for those deadlines.
Go to sleep with a question, wake up with an answer.
Like with kids, we always tell our kids to actually get up, walk away, have a break, go outside, and play for a while, yet we don’t do the same and we think we can’t because we’ve got to get this finished. The truth is we can and if we actually take those breaks, we give our mind a bit of a rest so the thoughts come back. It’s like the network, which is being clogged with thoughts, clears up.
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Starting Is the Hardest Bit
A lot of people always get up with good intentions, but then work-life balance doesn’t actually hit the way it’s supposed to. We then don’t always follow through on our good habits. We become too busy, so we grab those fast foods or pull into service stations on our way running between clients. We don’t actually drink enough water.
I think everybody eats the best way they feel they’re eating for themselves at the time, but it’s not necessarily the right food to fuel them and help them with the energy they need to get through the day.
Follow Through on Good Habits
I work on individualised nutrition. I encourage people to eat real foods again, not McDonald’s or KFC, the real whole foods that you can buy from the outside of the supermarket, not the inside aisles, but the garden market, the butchers.
Once I get people eating the right foods for them to fuel them, the change is pretty instantaneous. People can recognise within a couple of weeks that this is the right food to fuel them.
I normally work around a 3-month period to really kind of understand that somebody can eat a certain way and make a habitual change to keep this ongoing. We don’t need to be grabbing snacks all the time. We don’t need to be using caffeine to pick us up for energy. There are other ways to fuel ourselves.
I never work with calories. I only work with nutrients.
It’s the nutrients that your body needs to allow you to sleep, have clarity, function, and allow metabolism to work again. Once you’ve got all those nutrients right and if it’s the excess weight that your body wants to release, it will release it. If it’s dermatitis that you want to get rid of, you’ve given your body the right fuel through those nutrients to get those metabolic pathways working to help with those skin issues.
By cutting out all of what I call non-food—the foods that have no nutrients in them—you started to put nutrients back into your body and that’s what your body needed for fuel.
Metabolic Health and How To Inspire Wellness
What I work on at Inspire Wellness is metabolic health. Metabolism is responsible for pretty much everything we do. It’s responsible for movement, heat production, stress, weight gain, and weight loss.
There are thousands of chemical reactions happening in our bodies every single day. Our lifestyle, what we’ve eaten in the past, the toxins we’re exposed to basically takes it all out of balance. What I do is pull that back into balance.
We do a body reset. We look at individualised nutrition for everybody because everybody walking through the door has different requirements for the way they eat.
At the moment, there’s a lot of information out there on the Paleo diet, some vegan diets, the Mediterranean diet. Yes, they’ll work for some people, but they won’t work for everybody because it’s not what that person needs.
The people that I work with are the people who recognise that there is a dysfunction happening within their body, within themselves. Whether they want to lose weight, they’re experiencing headaches, or they’re on medications that they don’t want to be on anymore and they want to take control back of their life, we help them with food.
Food and fluids are the only things you can put inside you that will get everything functioning again. There’s not a lot of exercises that you can put inside you to do that; exercise has other benefits.
It’s really looking at anything out of balance, like after we eat, do we get bloated after we eat? Do we have to sit and have a rest after we’ve eaten because we have no energy? That’s a dysfunction within the body. That’s why we look at them individually. We find out the right foods for them, and then we teach them how to eat them to then live their life.
We only have a certain amount of time within our lives that we work. At the end of that time, we want to enjoy the rest of our life. We want to be able to travel. We want to be able to spend time with our grandkids. We want to be able to walk along the beach.
If you don’t look after yourself through your working life, when you get to the end, there isn’t any time because you’re out of balance, you’ve got dysfunction, you’ve got some lifestyle disease. We’re in too much pain that we don’t get to enjoy it. I want everyone to enjoy the rest of their lives.
If you put wealth before health, you’ll be sure that when you retire, you’ll be spending your wealth on your health.
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