The Hidden Tax of Poor Health

You track your revenue. You track your hours. You track every single KPI that matters at work. But what about the KPIs that matter at home?

This episode is an unfiltered audit of what your poor health is actually costing you: physically, mentally, emotionally, professionally. From your energy in 4PM meetings to the tension in your marriage... these aren’t random symptoms. They’re a slow bleed that’s robbing you of the life you built.

If you're tired of pretending it's just stress... or “just a busy season,” this episode is your wake-up call. Because this isn’t about six-packs or supplements. It’s about clarity. Leadership. Presence. And what happens when you finally stop managing chaos and start engineering calm.

DM me “DESIGN” on Instagram if you’re done guessing. Let’s build the system that holds up when everything else doesn’t.

If this episode hit home, make sure you’re subscribed. This is Fitness by Design, the podcast for high-performing men ready to stop winging it and start leading with their body.

For more stories, strategies, and hard truths:

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Let’s keep building your edge, one episode at a time.

Transcript

0:37

Welcome back to Fitness By Design. I'm Coach Spencer, and today I wanna run a little bit of an audit with you, not on your macros, not your step counter, not your MyFitnessPal data, or Fitbit. This is where we are actually gonna audit those quiet losses that we're not talking about. The ones hiding underneath your calendar, your inbox, your stress levels, your reflection, because every single high performing man who listens to this show, you already know how to solve complex problems at work. You lead your team. You hit your numbers, you landed roles most people envy, but the one that you keep pushing off, the one thing you keep hoping is just gonna fix itself. Is the one thing that's bleeding your energy, clarity, and leadership, and no one's telling you how bad that damage really is. So today I wanna talk about what that poor health is actually costing you. Let's get into this for real. Let's start with the excuse that's taken out more men than heart disease potentially has. I'm just too busy. No, you're not. You are just too undisciplined with your time to be honest about the capacity that you have. And I say that with complete and utter respect because I have lived it. I have said that I was too busy in the past because when your day is run by urgency and every single email is due yesterday, those high return habits get postponed. You push your meals to the side, you skip your lift for a meeting. That could have been a fricking email. You stay in the office late. You pick up fast food on the way home. You get home. You just have a drink to numb your brain for the day because it's the only time that you feel like you have a little bit of control. And it doesn't show up all at once. It shows up when you're sitting in a meeting and your brain's running at half speed when your wife touches you and you flinch a little because you don't feel comfortable in yourself. When your kid asks why you're always tired and you don't have a good answer, you just keep telling yourself, well, I'm holding it together, but barely. Let me be very blunt with you. You don't have a bandwidth problem. You have a prioritization problem because you can build agendas for a hundred person meetings. You can give presentations, but you have zero structure for fueling the machine that actually helps run those machines being your body. And when your body starts to break down, guess what else happens? You zone out halfway through the day, you start confusing stress for hunger. You start mistaking survival for success, and that's the cost of calling busy. Your plan, it steals away your clarity and it drains your presence because it blinds you to how much better you actually could feel if you just stop treating your health like it was a luxury item. You track everything in the office, your hours, your outcomes, your revenue, your projects, your team, everything. But have you ever thought to just track the number of moments you missed with your kids because you were too wiped out to play? Or the number of shirts that you've had to try on in the morning. Not'cause you're trying to find your favorite one, but'cause you're trying to find the one that hides the extra pounds that you've put on, or the number of opportunities that you didn't speak up in because part of you feels like you just don't really have the right to be there. And no spreadsheet is gonna capture that, but you feel it every single day. This isn't about the scale. This is about that emotional text of coasting through your health. So let's talk about what that actually looks like. Starting with your energy. I. You're chasing caffeine, like it's the thing that keeps you alive. The third cup of coffee before 10:00 AM isn't an option anymore. It becomes a ritual by midafternoon. Your brain is shutting down, your posture sagging, and you're white knuckling your way through that final push to end the day knowing you still have a four o'clock meeting, and then by the time you walk in the door at home, you have nothing left. You're just pretending that you're present, but mentally you're not even remotely there. That fog that you joke about with your coworkers, that's your system breaking down and you know it. And then your mood. You used to be very levelheaded grounded, but lately you're snapping a little bit faster. You're barking answers, you're rolling your eyes more often, and you can feel it in the tone at work and in the tension with your wife. She says, what's wrong? And you say nothing, I'm fine. But you both know that's not true. You're carrying all this stress in your body and you have nowhere to put it, and it leaks into every single interaction that you have because leadership starts with emotional regulation and you are losing your grip on it and sleep. Let's be honest, you're not getting enough of it. You either can't fall asleep or you wake up in the middle of the night, you're completely wired. You start scrolling through your phone. And not'cause anything specific is wrong, but because your nervous system just can't shut itself down, you close your eyes, but your brain keeps scrolling. Your teams messages, your emails, the project you forgot to finish or need to finish tomorrow. By the time you finally fall asleep at like one in the morning, you wake up groggy, irritated, and you keep hitting snooze. Scroll for 20 minutes before you get outta bed, and then pretend like you're fine. As you climb into the shower, you're not recovered. You're just surviving another day. Or how about your focus? You're reading the same team's message three times before you can respond to it. You're forgetting meeting agenda items, mid meeting, you're spacing out during important conversations, and then you beat yourself up for missing them. You don't feel sharp anymore, and it's not because you're getting older. It's because your body is under fueled, overstressed and completely out of rhythm. Your mind used to feel like a weapon, and now it just feels like a glitchy tab on a laptop that needs to be restarted. how about your intimacy? You want to feel close to your wife. You really do, but you're exhausted. You feel like you're not attractive anymore. You hate how your stomach feels when she lays next to you. So you make a joke, you change the subject. You say you're tired and you are, but it's not just tired. You're detached, disconnected, and you feel like you've lost that version of yourself that used to make her look at you like you actually enjoyed it, and it absolutely eats at you. And then the last piece is just your self respect. There's a time when you worked in a room and didn't have to say much because your posture, presence, and energy spoke for you. And now you're tugging at your shirt every time you have to turn your camera on during a zoom meeting, and you second guess how you look before you leave the house. You stopped posting pictures or even taking them for that matter. You started talking more to compensate. But deep down, you know the truth. You don't feel like the man you used to be, and you're scared that if you keep ignoring it, this version of you is gonna become permanent. You keep telling yourself it's fine, but it's not. And the longer that you pretend, these are just small sacrifices. The more they become permanent losses. So let me flip the table for you.'cause I've seen what happens when men like you stop tolerating that slow leak from their life and finally design a system that just fits for them. They don't become shredded gym rats. We're not talking about six pack abs and chicken rice and broccoli forever. But they become better leaders because instead of managing chaos, they start engineering the calm. They know what they're eating every day. They've blocked their workouts into their calendar, just like a meeting with their supervisor. They've got wind down rituals to actually recover. Not scrolling. Fricking Instagram with blue lights on at 11:00 PM and then when they walk into a room, they don't need to posture because they are the posture. Now, I've had clients who have closed bigger deals because their clarity came back, gotten promotions because their confidence finally matched their roles and reignited relationships, not through grand gestures, but simply by showing up consistently in those small moments. And when you get your health back on track, everything gets lighter and easier. It's not because life changed, but'cause you did, the body became an asset again, and you're no longer holding it together with duct tape and hope you're operating clean, deliberate, sustainable, and that edge. It doesn't feel like an old memory anymore. It's yours again. So let's go back to the original question. What's your poor health actually costing you? Not just physically, but professionally in your relationships, your emotions, your mindset. If you've been carrying that quiet, shame, fatigue, and frustration, this is your call to stop paying for it. You've built the life, the income, and the leadership. It's time to build your body to match it. So DM me the word design on Instagram, and let's map out a system that holds up when everything else doesn't for you. This is fitness by design and this. This is the moment where you stop pretending this is just a phase and we build a system for you. So with that, I'll see you in the next episode.