You’re running on coffee, energy drinks, and the kind of willpower that makes you skip lunch three days in a row. Your startup is everything right now. Every minute away from your business feels like a minute wasted. So naturally, eating becomes the thing you fit in between tasks—if you remember at all. Maybe you grab a protein bar at your desk while coding. Maybe you do drive-thru dinners at 9 PM. Maybe it’s just coffee. Lots of coffee.
Here’s the thing nobody tells you: that approach is literally sabotaging your startup.
The Brain is Just an Organ
Let me break this down in a way that matters to your business. Your brain runs on glucose. Not motivation. Not hustle. Not even caffeine. Glucose.
According to Harvard Medical School, brain functions such as thinking, memory, and learning are closely linked to glucose levels and how efficiently the brain uses this fuel source. If there isn’t enough glucose in the brain, neurotransmitters—the brain’s chemical messengers—are not produced and communication between neurons breaks down.
Additionally, research from the American Physiological Society confirms that glucose fulfills many critical functions including adenosine triphosphate (ATP) production, oxidative stress management, and synthesis of neurotransmitters, neuromodulators, and structural components.
Think about what you actually do as an entrepreneur. You make decisions. Hundreds of them every day. You solve problems. You learn new skills. You analyze data. You convince investors, customers, and team members. Every single one of these activities requires glucose to power your brain properly.
Now imagine running your entire business on a fuel tank that’s consistently half-empty or completely volatile. That’s what happens when you skip meals or subsist on energy drinks and processed snacks.
The Blood Sugar Rollercoaster
Here’s where it gets real. Research sheds light on how fluctuations in blood glucose levels correspond with changes in cognition. Not long-term changes. Moment-to-moment changes.
Let’s say you grab a donut and coffee at 8 AM. Your blood sugar spikes. You feel energized. You’re crushing emails and getting things done. But then—usually within 90 minutes—your blood sugar crashes. Hard. And suddenly, that email you were writing makes no sense. The strategic decision you were about to make? You can’t think clearly. You’re irritable. You want to eat everything in sight.
So you grab another coffee and maybe a candy bar. Your blood sugar spikes again. The cycle repeats.
A study published in npj Digital Medicine found that very low and very high glucose levels were associated with slower and less accurate cognitive processing speed. According to the research, cognition was slower in moments when glucose was atypical—considerably higher or lower than someone’s usual glucose level.
The Brain & Behavior Research Foundation further clarifies that large glucose fluctuations were associated with slower and less accurate neural processing speed—the pace at which you take in and respond to information.
Let me translate that into startup language: your ability to process information quickly, make good decisions, and stay focused on what matters deteriorates when your blood sugar is unstable. That’s not a small problem. That’s a core problem.
The Decision-Making Crisis Nobody Talks About
You make hundreds of decisions every day as a founder. Most of them matter. Which feature do you build first? How do you respond to this competitor? Should you hire this person or keep looking? Do you pivot or push forward?
These aren’t simple choices. They require cognitive resources. They require your brain to be firing on all cylinders.
But here’s what happens when your nutrition is inconsistent: your brain is prioritizing survival over strategy. Research on blood glucose and cognitive function shows that when glucose levels deviate significantly from normal, your prefrontal cortex—the part of your brain responsible for complex decision-making, planning, and impulse control—experiences impaired function. A study in Nutrition & Diabetes found that acute hyperglycemia was associated with lower performance in executive function, while better glucose control was associated with better executive and working memory function.
This is why entrepreneurs on terrible diets often make impulsive hiring decisions, abandon strategies too quickly, or misread their market. It’s not stupidity. It’s biochemistry.
The Productivity Paradox
There’s this weird myth in startup culture that skipping meals is somehow admirable. That fueling your body properly is indulgent. That real entrepreneurs run on ambition and coffee.
This is backwards.
When you skip meals, you’re not being productive. You’re being inefficient. You think you’re gaining time, but you’re actually trading quality for quantity. You can sit at your desk for 12 hours, but if your brain is undernourished, you’re probably spending 6 of those hours in a fog, making mediocre decisions and producing subpar work.
Compare that to an entrepreneur who eats a balanced breakfast with protein, healthy fats, and complex carbs. Then has a real lunch. Then has snacks that stabilize blood sugar. That person might only work 8 focused hours, but those 8 hours are exponentially more productive than your 12-hour fog.
You’re not saving time by skipping meals. You’re just spreading your work thinner.
So What Do You Actually Eat?
This isn’t about becoming a nutrition expert or adopting some extreme diet. This is about making strategic choices that fuel your business operations.
The goal is stable blood sugar. That means:
Protein with every meal and snack. Protein slows down the absorption of carbs, preventing those spikes and crashes. A breakfast of eggs with whole grain toast is exponentially better than a pastry. An afternoon snack of Greek yogurt with berries beats an energy drink.
Complex carbs over simple carbs. Oatmeal, brown rice, sweet potatoes, whole grain bread. These break down slowly and provide steady fuel. White bread, pastries, and candy bars break down fast and create the blood sugar chaos we talked about.
Healthy fats. Nuts, avocados, olive oil, fatty fish. These also slow carbohydrate absorption and help you feel satisfied longer. They also fuel brain function directly.
Consistent timing. Don’t skip breakfast. Don’t work through lunch. Yes, your startup is busy, but your productivity suffers more from skipping meals than from taking 30 minutes to eat.
Water. Dehydration impacts cognitive function. If you’re only drinking coffee and energy drinks, you’re actively harming your brain. Drink water. Lots of it.
This doesn’t mean meal prepping for three hours on Sunday or spending a fortune on specialty foods. It means having a basic strategy so that you’re not constantly making survival decisions about food while your brain is starved for fuel.
The Competitive Advantage Nobody Thinks About
Here’s the real insight: most of your competitors are running on terrible nutrition. They’re making suboptimal decisions because their brains are undernourished. They’re less resilient. They’re more irritable. They burn out faster.
You could have a small competitive advantage just by doing the basics. By eating regular meals with protein and whole foods. By stabilizing your blood sugar. By treating your body like the high-performance machine it needs to be.
This isn’t about wellness culture or fitting into your jeans. This is about operating your brain at peak efficiency while your competition is foggy and crashing.
What to Do Monday Morning
Stop treating food as an inconvenience. Start treating it as infrastructure for your business.
Plan your meals for the week. Eat a real breakfast. Take lunch breaks. Have healthy snacks at your desk. Drink water instead of relying on caffeine to carry you through the day.
Pay attention to how you feel. Notice when you can think clearly versus when you’re foggy. Notice your decision-making quality at 10 AM versus 3 PM. Connect those moments to what and when you ate.
Your startup deserves a CEO who’s operating at full capacity. That CEO is you. But only if you fuel him or her properly.
The best business strategy in the world doesn’t matter if your brain can’t execute it. Feed the machine.
Photo by MART PRODUCTION