Your Health ROI Effects Your Bottom Line

 Entrepreneur alert: over the top success is not equal to the value of one’s health, it’s our only true “non-negotiable”asset

“Those who have no time for healthy eating will sooner or later have to find time for illness”

—Edward Stanley

In the previous article of our series on “How Small Business Owners Gain an Advantage by Keeping in Tune to their Health,”we detailed the importance of sleep and how sleep deprivation can make executives and entrepreneurs less productive at work in addition to negatively impacting their overall health. We now know that increasing our sleep time can lead to increased work productivity, however if these series of articles are to put you on the journey to health and maximum productivity, you can assume that it takes more than just one health factor to set you on that path.

Proper dietary and lifestyle factors are the cornerstone to the preservation of health, mental acuity, and prevention of disease. In particular, incorporating a daily regimen of proper nutrition and not just occasionally, is a pitfall that many executives and small business owners fall into.

Yes, they surely have good intentions to try and stay away from those unneeded food calories, sugar cravings and high caloric beverages, but the challenge to their reality can be daunting on a day to day basis. Stress inherent to their modern work environment surpasses any level of perception, rationale and self-discipline.

This is especially apparent during times when small business owners time commitment goes into overdrive. These constant pressures leave them feeling overtired, overextended and fatigued causing mindless eating, alcohol use and junk food snacking. If executives don’t take steps to reduce these counterproductive habits, they may experience health risk factors and reduced work efficiency.

Small Business Owners an Executives: Take a Good Look at Your Health ROI:

In our practice, we advocate that “prevention is worth a pound of cure.” “We spend our youth sacrificing our health to attain wealth…we spend our aging years using our wealth to regain our health.”Many small business owners are their business. The amount of time, focus and energy dedicated to their business leaves very little room for prioritizing one’s own health.

However, for all that success is worth, the value of one’s health is our only true “non-negotiable”asset. This asset can not be traded, sold, exchanged or returned once it is compromised.

It is equally if not more important for executives and small business owners to have health as a personal priority and not place it on the back burner until there is a reason to think about it. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health both state that cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of mortality in the US.

Many of today’s chronic conditions such as diabetes, obesity, hypertension, high cholesterol, and smoking affect the cardiovascular system and are considered “slowly progressive”diseases indicating that these conditions worsen over time if no appropriate intervention is taken.

The good news is that there are many ways to keep your cardiovascular system running smoothly and you have far more control over your heart health than you may realize.

Next page: Here are 5 ways Small Business Owners and Executives: Analyze Your Health As You Would Analyze Your Business