The Most Overlooked Business Strategy on the Planet: Your Health

A deep dive into why prioritizing your health is your ultimate business flex. If you’re not, you’re leaving your best ideas, decisions, and opportunities on the table.

Let’s talk business strategy.

Most entrepreneurs and executives obsess over growth models, marketing funnels, and leadership philosophies. But there’s one strategy that rarely makes the list, even though it fuels every pitch, every idea, and every decision you make: your health.

If your body is constantly playing catch-up, your business will too. Energy, focus, and emotional regulation are the true cornerstones of performance, yet we treat them like optional add-ons. The truth is that your business expands at the pace of your well-being. Yeah, I said it.

This isn’t about being “healthy.” It’s about being resourced—mentally, physically, and emotionally—so you can sustain the vision you’re building. These are a few key ideas I’ve come to live by as I build a new business from the ground up.

The Kitchen as a Laboratory for Leadership

Cooking is polarizing. You either love it or you hate it.

For years, I was firmly in the latter camp. After a long day, the last thing I wanted to do was cook. My default was easy, overly processed meals that left me feeling worse instead of better.

But here’s what changed: I started to see cooking as a ritual of decompression.

The kitchen became my place to slow down, reset, and reconnect. I’d turn on music or a podcast and let chopping vegetables become a meditative act instead of a chore.

When you shift your perspective, cooking stops being about effort and starts becoming nourishment in every sense of the word. I began to treat it like a game, how many nutrients could I fit into one recipe?

And here’s the secret: when you use fresh, high-quality ingredients, you don’t need to work as hard to make a great meal. The ingredients do the heavy lifting.

So instead of seeing cooking as another to-do, try viewing it as your transition ritual from “business mode” to “rest-and-reset mode.”

It’s a business strategy. When your foundation is high-quality, whole foods your output requires less force and more flow.

Rethinking Fat, Focus, and Fuel

The “low-fat” era did more damage to our energy systems than most people realize. Your brain is made of nearly sixty percent fat. Hormones, mood, and cognition all depend on it.

So when you reach for that low-fat Greek yogurt thinking the full-fat version will make you fat, let’s pause. The process of making low-fat yogurt involves stripping out the natural fat (and flavor) and adding back in fillers, stabilizers, and sugar to make it taste creamy again. It’s chemistry pretending to be food.

Prioritizing healthy fats such as avocado, olive oil, grass-fed butter, full-fat Greek yogurt, and salmon does more than nourish your body. These foods stabilize focus, support hormone balance, and calm your nervous system. In short, they turn you into a more grounded leader.

When you fuel your brain properly, clarity expands. You stop operating from caffeine spikes, alcohol-fueled evenings, and sugar crashes, and start leading from a steady, confident baseline. That’s where creativity thrives.

Movement as a Business Meeting with Yourself

Every time you move, you communicate safety to your body. You remind it that you are alive, capable, and adaptable.

Movement enhances oxygen flow, lymphatic circulation, and mood—all directly tied to cognitive performance. But there’s another layer. It’s often the only time your subconscious has space to process ideas. Think about how many breakthroughs you’ve had mid-walk or mid-shower.

Movement also moves stagnant energy out of your body. After a stressful day, that tension doesn’t just vanish; it lodges itself in your tissues. When that energy sits too long, it becomes heavy. You literally start carrying the weight of your stress.

Once you start to move that energy through your body, you feel lighter—physically and mentally.

When you’re constantly in “go” mode and cortisol stays high, your brain prioritizes survival over strategy. The prefrontal cortex, which controls creativity, emotional regulation, and decision-making, goes offline.

That’s why your best ideas don’t show up when you’re staring at your laptop. They arrive in the shower, during a walk, or after a good night’s sleep—when your body feels safe enough to think expansively again.

Movement is where strategy meets embodiment.

The Alcohol Audit

I know this one’s not popular, but it’s real: alcohol is one of the most common forms of self-sabotage for high performers.

It disrupts your sleep architecture, depletes B vitamins, taxes your liver, and increases anxiety the next day—even after one or two glasses. It’s also a depressant, yet we treat it like a stimulant.

And if you struggle with anxiety or panic, alcohol is the ultimate backstabber. It feels like it’s helping you take the edge off, but it’s actually amplifying what you’re trying to escape.

We glamorize “wine to unwind,” but alcohol quietly erodes your sharpest performance edges. When you’re building something from the ground up or trying to level up in your career, why would you want to cloud your judgment? You want to be 100 percent, 100 percent of the time. You don’t want to “get ready” to be great—you want to wake up clear, focused, and fully engaged.

This isn’t about restriction. It’s about discernment. When you reduce alcohol, your energy, mental clarity, and recovery capacity multiply. Suddenly you wake up ready to create, not to recover.

The most successful people I know don’t eliminate joy. They edit what drains their brilliance.

Identity is the Real Strategy

You can’t out-hustle your identity.

If you want to operate at a higher frequency—more disciplined, focused, and aligned—you have to embody that version of yourself before the results show up.

You can’t perform like your future self while identifying as your current one.

Stop saying, “I’m trying to get better at…”
Start saying, “I’m the type of woman who…”

When you say, “I’m trying to get better at prioritizing myself,” your brain hears, “I’m not that person yet.”

But when you shift to:

→ “I’m the type of woman who protects her energy like a CEO protects her calendar.”
→ “I’m the type of woman who goes to bed at 9 because she values her morning focus.”
→ “I’m the type of woman who moves daily because I value my health and my mental clarity.”

That language becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy because your subconscious always acts in service of your dominant identity.

This subtle shift creates alignment between what you say you want and who you believe you are. That is the foundation of sustainable success.

The Bottom Line

You can outsource marketing, admin, and design. But you can’t outsource your energy, your presence, or your resilience.

The women who are truly leveling up aren’t doing it by pushing harder. They’ve learned how to hold more.

More creativity. More uncertainty. More joy. More rest without guilt.

That requires a body that feels safe, stable, and fully alive.

So yes, hire the strategist. Read the books. But understand this: none of it matters if your body isn’t backing your ambition.

Your health isn’t the thing that takes time away from your business. It’s the thing that makes your business sustainable.

You are the strategy.

Your business grows in direct proportion to your energy, your focus, and your alignment. Every decision you make, every early bedtime, every walk between meetings isn’t just self-care—it’s business development.

When you treat your body like your most valuable asset, your business starts to mirror that respect back to you.