Being a management consultant is a rewarding yet challenging profession. Business consultancy can involve helping to increase a business’s capabilities, develop a new product, or enter a new market.
While you may be a highly proficient management consultant, the pressures of the job can make it challenging to take consistently good care of yourself. According to Consultancy.org, 77% of management consultants work up to 80 hours per week to meet the demands of the job, which includes handling multiple project deadlines for clients and internal work.
This leaves little time to focus on health, fitness, and weight management. Although it can be easy to maintain your health with regular exercise and a nutritious diet, it can also be easy to fall into bad habits when overworked and cognitively overloaded.
Letting yourself go in terms of weight — such as becoming overweight or obese — can seriously affect your productivity, which is one reason weight management is so important for consultants.
Benefits of weight management
1. Increasing productivity
Excess weight can hamper your productivity, making you fall behind on deadlines. A study on adult obesity and work productivity reveals that people with severe obesity experience significant negative impacts to their quality of life, including productivity impairments. This is partly due to higher rates of absenteeism and presenteeism that result from health problems like hypertension or diabetes.
With proper weight management, you can avoid these complications, allowing you to maintain high productivity and satisfy your responsibilities and commitments.
2. Boosting confidence
Management consultancy involves regularly meeting clients and collaborating with colleagues. In these types of business contexts, obesity can impact your performance by contributing towards reduced confidence, lower self-esteem, and heightened anxiety. This can especially be the case during face-to-face interactions that require presenting yourself in a professional and self-assured manner.
Losing excess weight can boost your confidence. Although clients should ideally judge you based purely on the quality of your ideas, the reality is that the confidence clients place in the advice they receive is influenced by a range of factors, including how the consultants physically present themselves.
By being in shape, you’ll be able to take one potential issue off the table, hold your head high, and better convince your clients to consider your advice. As a busy consultant, you want to stack the deck in your favour. Being able to consistently project confidence can affect whether your advice is accepted by the client and thereby leads to lasting organizational change.
3. Taking on bigger responsibilities
Carrying excess weight can cause you to become tired more easily. For instance, you might experience insulin resistance due to having higher amounts of fatty acids, glycerol, and hormones pumping through your blood stream. This can prompt fatigue, leading you to decline bigger projects or be reluctant to take on more senior roles.
Fatigue can prevent you from working at your best, and thereby limit promotion opportunities. According to an article in the Motley Fool, 43% of weight loss program participants experienced weight stigma at work, with 57% reporting unfair treatment or discrimination by a colleague. Proper weight management can help you regain energy, avoid fatigue, and advance more quickly within your field.
How to manage your weight
1. Pack healthy meals
You may have a habit of eating out or ordering fast food meals so as not to interfere with your work. Sadly, this can cause you to gain unnecessary weight due to the processed ingredients in your meals. To avoid this, you should pack healthy meals for work.
As a busy management consultant, you can prepare your meals at the beginning of the week. Make big batches of salad, fresh fruit cups, and sandwiches filled with fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and healthy fats. Store these in the fridge and reheat them when it’s time to eat.
2. Seek a support network
The management consultancy life can be hectic. You may have wondered if consulting is the right career for you when you’ve consistently had to work more than 40 hours per week and cancel dinner plans so that you can finish work for a client project. Given the hectic schedule, thinking about fitness, nutrition, and achieving weight management may be the last thing on your mind.
This is why it’s vital to seek support when starting your journey. A simple search for things like ‘crossfit near me’, ‘parkrun near me’, or ‘weight loss groups near me’ can allow you to discover a support system where you can get advice from coaches or other people with similar health goals. This will allow you to share your experience, benefit from the advice of others, and receive encouragement as you navigate better fitness and weight management. You can attend meetings as you please, suiting your busy lifestyle as a management consultant.
3. Find time to work out
Finding time to squeeze in a workout can be challenging because of your busy schedule. Nonetheless, exercise is essential to burn excess calories that contribute to weight gain. When choosing the right time to work out, remember that this depends on your home, work, and gym situation. You don’t have to follow others’ advice. Figure out what works for you.
For example, you can get your dose of cardio by taking the stairs instead of the elevator when possible and conducting walking meetings with clients and colleagues. You could also consider getting a standing desk so you don’t sit for too long at work and do stretches every hour or so to keep your blood pumping. Outside of the office, you can slowly work physical activity into your daily routine, such as getting a membership at a nearby gym or starting with short 10-minute video workouts on YouTube that you can follow at home.
The bottom line
Weight management can improve your productivity, focus, and overall work performance.
As a busy management consultant, you can get started with boosting your overall fitness and achieving a healthy weight by following the tips shared in this article.
Image: DALL-E 3