For Greater Productivity, Watch What—and When—You Eat

Diets don’t only change what the scale says. They can also alter how your mind and body feel, which plays a role in how you perform at work. Maybe you’re the rare person operating at 100% efficiency with your current eating habits, but if not, looking at what’s on your plate might be helpful. “People react to diets in different ways,” says Marion Nestle, professor emerita of nutrition and public health at New York University. “Some people flourish on fad diets, others don’t. In general, we all need enough calories to keep our brains happy, but not so many that we nod off.”

The National Institutes of Health is running a decade-long, roughly $18 billion research effort to tease out how and why diets affect individuals differently, in hopes of ultimately learning to optimize individual nutrition. In the meantime, trust your gut. “It should be easy enough to tell whether a diet makes you feel sluggish or hungry to the point of distracted,” says Nestle. In other words, you don’t want to be nodding off or daydreaming about that sandwich in the fridge.