Your body's boardroom: the meeting you keep skipping
What happens when you finally show up for yourself.
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The CEO of your Body’s Boardroom has a critical meeting scheduled every day. Same time.
It’s not with your boss, your spouse, or your kids.
It’s with your Executive Team—your Nervous System.
And you keep skipping it.
You reschedule. You squeeze it between other things. You show up but check your phone the whole time. Or you ghost entirely—again—and promise yourself you’ll make the next one.
This isn’t about productivity. It’s not about “optimizing your lunch hour.”
It’s about what happens when you finally stop canceling on yourself.
The cost of skipping
Every time you eat standing at the counter, inhale your food between calls, or skip lunch entirely because you “didn’t have time,” you’re sending a message.
Not to your calendar but to your nervous system.
The message is: Your needs are secondary to external demands.
Your body registers this. It doesn’t forget.
The person who keeps skipping this meeting makes decisions from depletion, not direction. You’re reactive. You’re scattered. You’re borrowing tomorrow’s energy to survive today. By 3 PM, you’re not reaching for caffeine; you’re reaching for anything to prop up the collapse that you scheduled yourself.
The 3pm crash isn’t about food.
It’s about the pattern of abandonment that preceded it.
This is what living by other people’s clocks looks like. You’ve outsourced your attention, your energy, and your pace. The result: you feel like an intern running errands for everyone else’s schedule.
You’re not lazy. Nothing’s wrong with you. You’re simply never in the room when the most important decisions are made.
Here’s the question no one’s asking:
What would you do with 15-20 extra hours of mental clarity every week?
Not hours added to your calendar. Hours reclaimed—from the fog, the crash, the slow bleed of decisions made from depletion.
That’s what’s on the table. And it starts with lunch.
“But I’m overbooked. What does a warm lunch have to do with my to-do list?”
Everything.
A warm lunch doesn’t magically fix busyness.
But it does something more important: it creates friction with the story that your busyness is non-negotiable.
When you sit down—really sit, for 15 minutes, no screens, no multitasking—you’re drawing a line. You’re saying:
This matters. I matter. My capacity is not what happens after everything else gets handled.
That line will feel uncomfortable at first. Your to-do list will scream. Your inbox will pulse.
That is the sound of outsourcing fighting for control.
Good. That friction is the point.
Because the friction reveals what’s been true all along: you’ve been treating your own needs as the flexible part of the schedule. Everyone else’s urgency gets protected. Yours gets squeezed.
Here’s what the data shows:
Americans work nearly 1,800 hours per year—over 400 hours more than Germans, and hundreds more than the Nordic countries. We’re the only developed nation without federally mandated paid time off. We skip lunch, eat at our desks, and wear exhaustion like a badge of honor.
And yet: countries that work less consistently report higher productivity per hour, higher life satisfaction, and better health outcomes. The five happiest countries in the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation Development) work over 100 hours less than the average. Denmark ranks 2nd in world happiness. The U.S. ranks 23rd.
If you’re done losing afternoons to brain fog, upgrade to paid membership—Wednesday I’m giving you the exact system I use to make lunch a rhythm (not a fight): Morning Prep → Protected Lunch → 3 PM Performance Check → 9 PM Review.
They don’t have more time. They have different non-negotiables.
The French prioritize a later finish to protect a real lunch. The Nordics build restoration into the structure of the day. And their output doesn’t suffer—it often exceeds ours, hour for hour.
“But I live here,” you might say. “I don’t get a two-hour lunch or six weeks of vacation.”
Fair. But here’s what’s also true: the highest performers in American industries are already doing this.
A 2017 survey of North American employees found that those who took a real lunch break showed higher engagement, higher job satisfaction, and were more likely to recommend their company. 94% said they felt happier when they took their break. 91% said it helped them maintain mental focus.
The most successful CPA I know protects his lunch like a high-value client meeting. Morning workout, midday pause, focused afternoons. His clients don’t get less of him—they get the sharpest, most capable version of him because he’s not running on fumes.
I’ve seen this in my own life too—from the other side.
When I skip this practice, my rhythm breaks. And it’s not just a late lunch that’s less than ideal—it’s my entire afternoon. I’m tired. I’m overwhelmed. My ability to make clear decisions disappears. I say yes to things I should say no to. I interact with the people I love from depletion instead of presence—especially in the moments that call for a higher level of emotional intelligence.
Twenty years of this practice, and the lesson is still the same: when I skip the meeting, I pay for it everywhere else.
This isn’t luxury; it’s a competitive, strategic advantage.
This seemingly simple practice—one warm, on-time meal—changes the nervous system. And for those of us who’ve been running on fumes for years, it doesn’t just regulate. It restores capacity.
Your warm lunch ensures the CEO of your Body’s Boardroom is restored, focused, and ready to lead—instead of simply reacting.
What showing up actually means
Lunch isn’t fuel. It’s a non-negotiable meeting with your nervous system—the one stakeholder who’s been waiting for you to show up.
When you sit, breathe, chew, and stay—even for 15 minutes—you’re not just eating. You’re practicing internal authority.
You’re saying:
I decide when I eat. I decide how I eat. I don’t outsource this to my calendar or someone else’s emergency.
Your morning practice can inform your day. But lunch is the hinge. It’s the meal that shapes your afternoon, your evening, your sleep—and whether tomorrow’s morning even has a chance.
The power of warmth: the biology of agency
Your warm lunch is critical because heat is a cue for the Parasympathetic Nervous System—Rest and Digest.
A cold sandwich eaten standing up signals “fight or flight.”
A warm, seated meal signals “safe, stop, and repair.”
This isn’t metaphor. This is biology.
When you eat warm, your body downshifts. Digestion activates. Blood flow moves toward your gut instead of your limbs. Your breath slows. Your nervous system stops scanning for threats and starts restoring.
This is the biological foundation that allows agency to rise. You can’t make clear decisions from a body that’s still bracing for the next emergency.
Warmth is the signal that the emergency is over. That you’re safe enough to choose yourself. That the CEO is back in charge.
This is where the hours come back.
When your 3pm stops crashing and your 9pm stops spiraling, you stop losing time to recovery, decision fatigue, and the fog of depletion.
A protected lunch is at minimum 3-4 hours reclaimed during the work week. For those with flexible schedules, it’s closer to 10. Add weekends. Add the hours you’ve been losing to indigestion, food coma, and the mental fog of eating fast and furious in front of a screen.
For most people, that’s 15-20 hours a week they didn’t know they were hemorrhaging.
The person who shows up for this meeting daily—even imperfectly—builds a different relationship with themselves:
Clearer 3pm. Because the nervous system got its meeting.
Quieter 9pm. Because you’re not running on fumes and regret.
Fewer decisions made from emotional hunger. Because your blood sugar isn’t screaming over your intuition.
This is where the bottom line lives.
The person who shows up for this meeting doesn’t just feel better—they make better decisions. They stop saying yes to projects they’ll resent by Friday. They stop snapping at their partner because they’re running on fumes. They make decisions from clarity, not crash.
And over time, that compounds: better work, stronger relationships, fewer regrets.
You don’t need to believe me. You need to try it for one week and watch what shifts.
This is the short chain: warm food, eaten on time → calm belly → steady breath → clearer decisions → agency rises.
And here’s the part that matters most: when you make lunch non-negotiable, you start to see what else has been negotiable all along.
The busyness that felt immovable starts to shift. Not because you have more time, but because you’ve stopped treating yourself as the line item that gets cut.
What the meeting shows you
When you actually sit down and pay attention, lunch becomes a mirror.
It shows you:
Where you’re depleted. Do you inhale your food like someone’s about to take it? Reach for your phone mid-bite? Feel like you “don’t have time” for 15 uninterrupted minutes? That’s data. Your nervous system is telling you something.
Where you’re outsourcing. Are you eating what’s convenient, or what your body actually asked for? Are you grabbing whatever’s fast because you didn’t make a decision earlier? That’s not choosing. That’s defaulting to someone else’s design.
Where you need to adjust. Is your morning so packed that lunch feels like a disruption instead of a rhythm? Are you arriving at noon already behind, already frantic, already depleted? The meeting shows you what’s upstream.
You don’t need an app to track this. You don’t need a food journal or a macro calculator.
You need to show up and notice.
The meeting you’ve been waiting for
Here’s what I’ve learned after two decades of this practice:
The meeting isn’t really about lunch.
It’s about whether you’re willing to stop—mid-day, mid-chaos, mid-life—and say: I matter enough to sit down.
It’s about building a rhythm where your body becomes the authority. Not your mood. Not the clock. Not someone else’s urgency.
Showing up is the first step. But how do you embed this new agency into a life that is already chaos? How do you create this rhythm so that it sticks, even when a client calls or the kids are sick?
I’ve been running this exact rhythm—the one that creates the luxury of time—for over 20 years.
The full ritual: the system that gives you the luxury of time
Wednesday, I’m detailing the step-by-step system I’ve built over 20 years—The Full Ritual: Morning Prep to 9 PM Body Scan.
It’s the framework that makes your protected lunch feel like a rhythm, not a battle. This isn’t just about food; it’s about reclaiming hours every week—the ones you’ve been losing to brain fog, decision fatigue, and the slow bleed of running on empty.
If you’re ready to stop canceling the one meeting that matters and start leading your life with agency, join the paid community now.
You don’t need another diet. You don’t need a massive, life-disrupting reset.
You need to stop canceling the one meeting that actually matters and start running your own boardroom.
Your nervous system has been waiting.
Eat warm, breathe slow, keep a rhythm.
Savitree
I teach women to restore the cognitive capacity their work depends on.