How To Eat Like an Entrepreneur (& More)

by Joan Kent | Aug 24, 2016 | Health and Wellness

You don’t have to be an entrepreneur to eat like one.

My field is Psychoactive Nutrition. I use food to change brain chemistry and hormones.

It’s not about designing products to sell — or selling other people’s products. My clients eat ordinary foods they can buy at the grocery store, and I make food recommendations to help them think better, work better, flip their moods, perform better athletically, and stop being sick.

For a while, I’ve avoided the term psychoactive nutrition because I worried that folks would go glassy-eyed at the word “psychoactive”. But it feels like the right time to put that word on display and start telling people exactly how it can benefit them.

Let’s start with a simple definition of “psychoactive” from Taber’s, my favorite medical dictionary: “affecting mental state, such as a drug that has that action.”

Psychoactive nutrition uses different foods as the drugs that affect mental state.

Spoiler Alert: Foods also affect certain hormones, which in turn affect mental state. So hormones and brain chem may be linked.

Can Psychoactive Nutrition Make You an Entrepreneur?

Okay, psychoactive nutrition will not directly lead to a new career track. But it has been said that entrepreneurial tests are primarily mental. To the degree that how you eat can affect your work performance, you never know, right?

Too much excellent material has been written about the characteristics of entrepreneurs, so it wouldn’t make sense to write about that here. But it would make sense to mention a few traits that might be influenced by food.

An entrepreneur would want to have tenacity, think clearly, visualize goals and stay focused on them. She/he would listen and communicate well to avoid having to repeat instructions or redo tasks due to poor communication. These traits are among those influenced by the neurotransmitter dopamine. Eating to boost that chemical may in turn enhance the traits.

A good entrepreneur would also have the self-control to wait until he/she fully understood the situation before making important decisions, rather than going in a hasty, rash, or even destructive direction. In addition, she/he would show concern for fairness and avoiding harm to others. The neurochemical serotonin would enable these behavior traits.

What About Avoiding the 2:30 Slump?

Eating the right way can help you avoid energy ups and down, or the need for 2 or 3 cups of coffee to re-awaken you right after lunch. It may also eliminate that late-afternoon crash that makes concentration and focus difficult.

Think of the right lunch as enabling you to return to work as motivated as you were in the morning. (Let’s assume you ate right first thing in the morning!)

How Else Can Psychoactive Nutrition Help You?

Because of their effects on hormones, the foods you eat can help you manage — and even reverse — metabolic conditions. Those typically originate with insulin resistance. They include diabetes, hypertension, cholesterol, high triglycerides, and more. All of them are risk factors for heart disease.

Psychoactive nutrition can also help you control your appetite, your food preferences, and any food cravings you may have. In fact, it can help you eliminate cravings altogether. Eating to change your brain chemistry is one of the best ways to stop binge eating.

Sleep problems are often easy to fix with the right foods. And you can use psychoactive nutrition to stop mood swings and improve mood generally. Any of these may be related to either brain chemistry or insulin — or both.

So this post is neither a primer on how to eat nor a collection of recipes. My aim was to explain psychoactive nutrition and suggest that foods do more than provide calories and various nutrients.

Of course, they do that, but they also do much more.