Biohacking Your (Leadership) Energy

Breakthroughs with a Continuous Glucose Monitor

The most under-appreciated quality of top leaders might be ENERGY. Aside from the long hours, constant time-zone shifting, and huge decisions that interrupt sleep, leaders need to stay positive in the face of constant challenges, inspire their troops, be resilient, and be ENERGETIC in tough times (i.e., all the time).

Kate Bullis, a top C-Suite recruiter, once told me:
“Energy is your greatest asset - even greater than money.”

Over the last several years, I’ve been biohacking my energy with benign to invasive experiments: I’ve kept a sleep schedule, I’ve worked at weight lifting and regular (still hard for while traveling), I’ve limited alcohol, I even trialed a really strict elimination diet and hired a dietitian at one point. I’m recently obsessed with maxing out my protein consumption. It’s all helped. But a recent experiment with a Continuous Glucose Monitor has been a breakthrough in my energy levels, and helps me keep patterns while traveling for work.

Health Hacking

It all started when I read the recent health phenom book Outlive by Peter Atia. He goes through all sorts of medical, nutritional, exercise, and mindset advice for extending your life and extending the QUALITY of your life as you age. In one section he went through was glucose issues - often correlated with diabetes, but not solely. The constant spiking and dipping of glucose correlated with eating sugar and carbs, exercising, and stress creates a cycle of energy highs and lows that not only lasts immediately after the meal but has impacts overnight and sometimes the next day. Diabetics have more trouble managing it, but it affects everyone to some degree. Atia talked about a continuous glucose monitor that you can wear for a period of time to observe the effects of your own personal diet on your own personal body to improve.

I have used sugar my whole life to get the energy to power through work: cups and cups of sugar-laden coffee to stay engaged at offsites, cookies or candy every afternoon, sugar-laden granola bars on the drive home, sweet alcohol drinks to stay awake while networking in the evenings… I knew I was a junkie. I was intrigued. What would I do with more energy? Better work, more fun, be more patient with my kids. I wanted it all!

Continuous Glucose Monitors

My nutritionist recommended Theia Health (I have no relationship with them, I’m just a happy customer with a blog for exhausted executives), but there are several different companies that can help you. I planned to track for 1 month, then extended, then extended, and now might be addicted. I love seeing the immediate impacts of what I eat on how I feel with specific data. Before I could blame all sorts of things on my fatigue, now I can more closely isolate factors. Plus I’m still optimizing the non-standard foods I eat while traveling, at restaurants, or on special occasions (How bad could this really be… Ohhhhhh…..)

Here’s a quick snapshot of my journey

What did I learn? 

• I was a sugar junkie - I already knew this but didn’t realize how high the highs were and how low the lows were until I could see them in real time. On the high I start to feel foggy and have a headache, on the lows I’m just utterly exhausted.

• For decades I have been trying to glucose spike myself out of a glucose dip in the early afternoon (I’ve always felt dead between 2:30-4:30ish) I used more sugar snacks and caffeine to power through.

• The highs and lows affect you for longer than you’d think. I had a lot of trouble with extreme lows overnight after extreme highs in the proceeding day.

• A lot of my waking up in the middle of the night (which I thought was BECAUSE I was worried about this or that work thing) may have ACTUALLY been related to my glucose highs and lows overnight. Here’s a recent example:

  

• Walking after dinner really is the best medicine. Just 10 minutes of walking helps the glucose absorb better and makes me sleep better. (My dad took us on walks when we were young, but I didn’t realize it was strategic!) I’ve done more intense exercise after big spiking meals (Thai) to help bring down the spike more quickly, but my body keeps processing the food and releasing glucose longer than you’d think too - for me, sometimes 90 minutes or more

• Eating too close to bedtime leads to poorer glucose absorption and poorer sleep. This includes overall carbs, sugar, and alcohol (ideally stop eating 3 hrs before bed)

• Eating more veggies, protein, and fat instead of so many carbs helps keep it in check, and the order matters, with eating carbs later in the meal vs the beginning. To be on Peter Aria’s really strict “peaks no more than 130,” I can have roughly 1/3 a cup of a good carb (quinoa, sweet potatoes or brown rice) per meal (way less than I usually had)

• Eating sweets or carbs after a solid meal or before exercising neutralizes them more than on an empty stomach. My highest peak of this whole experience was some (yummy) maple fudge on an empty stomach in the middle of the afternoon - the sugar basically went right into my bloodstream.

It was expensive ($150/ month for the applicator and $149 for the annual subscription.) But seeing real-time data and gamifying what I eat has been so helpful in actually motivating me - ESPECIALLY when I’m traveling for work and have to make a lot of exceptions.

There are so many aspects of getting our best energy - a glucose monitor is just a very small component in a larger life. Still, for me, it zeroed in on a personal issue I had downplayed before being able to see the actual impact. 

I’ve been amazed by how much energy I’ve won back after using a continuous glucose monitor. I can’t remember ever feeling better. Seriously. 

Have you tracked your glucose? What have you learned?