Building Employee Resilience Part 2 – Help your Employees Fuel their Bodies
What do you think of when you consider your most basic needs? Food, water, shelter, and sleep might come to mind. Your physical well-being has a significant impact on how you feel and function. Without taking care of our bodies, everything else gets just a bit more challenging, and our resilience often suffers.
When we think specifically about employee resilience, we have to consider the basics of self-care and well-being before delving deeper into supporting an experience of developing self-awareness and exploring emotions.
The 5 Building Blocks of Well-being and Self-care:
- Movement
- Nutrition
- Sleep
- Mindfulness
- Connection
In this week’s topic of this resilience series, we focus on supporting employees to eat healthy, nourishing foods. Not only will eating healthy foods provide valuable health benefits like reducing the risk of disease (heart disease, stroke, diabetes, and some cancers), lowering blood pressure and cholesterol, but it also offers other invaluable benefits like:
- Improving the ability to fight and recover from illness (crucial in preventing COVID-19)
- Increasing energy levels and elevating moods
- Boosting overall well-being and mental health
While most people know they should eat healthy foods, with the challenges of the past year, we’re hearing from several employers that at the beginning of the pandemic, employees turned to food and substance to cope with the challenges. As the pandemic stretched from a short-term obstacle to a long-term way of life, those coping strategies often morphed into everyday habits – many with negative consequences. The good news is our Human Performance Coaches are experts in habit change, and we’re bringing their expertise here to you to help support your employees to get back on track and find ways to fuel their bodies with healthy choices.
Feeding the Body to Fuel our Lives
Every aspect of how we feed ourselves, from what we eat, to when we eat, to how much we eat, has been the subject of scrutiny for decades. In a world where eggs were good last week, but bad this week, and who knows what the internet will say next week, eating well can be downright confusing for your employees!
The truth is, nourishing our bodies doesn’t need to be complicated. Healthy eating is much bigger than strict rules or “good foods” and “bad foods.” It’s personal, which means how we approach food should be unique as well.
Our basic philosophy around food is – it fuels the body and our lives.
As part of the on-demand content available to our members, we provide many activities and deep-dive Paths that can help support their healthy eating journey. The following are a few resources our nutrition experts start with when working with an individual looking for nutritional support. As an employer, you can share these ideas and tipsheets with employees who aim to improve their dietary habits.
- Make a plan. For many, the barrier to eating more healthy foods is they don’t have a plan. Have you ever found yourself running to the grocery store, hungry and without a list? Help your employees reduce the temptation to impulse buy on an empty stomach or a stressed mind with this Meal Planning 101 tipsheet.
- Incorporating more color to our plates not only looks great, but it also has some health benefits from immunity boosters to cancer prevention. We could all benefit from immune system support. Share this tipsheet with your employees for some ideas to brighten up mealtime.
- Listen to your body. Getting to know how our bodies feel when we’re hungry, satisfied, and full can be challenging. The more body-awareness we have, the easier it is to make intentional choices and provide the nourishment needed. Our nutritional coaches have developed this tipsheet about the importance of mindful eating for you to share with your employees.
Keep this in mind. Healthy eating is less about what rules you need to follow – and more about abundance and feeling your best every day! Fully supporting your employee’s nutritional goals relies on supporting their overall well-being.
Find the tools and resources to support your employees and motivate impactful change can be challenging, but Aduro helps take the guesswork out of what to offer them. Learn more about how Aduro’s employee well-being solution supports nutrition and all the other aspects of life.