Sarah’s own health journey began with years of chronic digestive issues and inflammation. It wasn’t until she discovered the power of nutrition that her life completely changed. This revelation inspired her to turn her personal health crisis into a life-changing career. Referred to as the “Bill Belichick of nutrition,” Sarah has profoundly impacted the health of thousands by shifting their approach to food, fostering life-altering results, and instilling lasting behavioral changes. Along with her team of Registered Dietitians and Clinical Nutritionists, Sarah is on a mission to help people live better through education and personalized programs.
High-performing women are often very good at ignoring the signs.
The headache that arrives every afternoon. The coffee that has replaced breakfast. The workout that leaves you more depleted than energized. The feeling of being completely exhausted while lying awake at night.
For someone used to operating at a high level, these things can feel like part of the job. A full calendar comes with fatigue. Leadership comes with pressure. Success requires sacrifice. But Sarah Wragge and Annie Dixon see it differently.
“Eventually, it’s this physiology that’s going to put a ceiling on your performance,” said Dixon.
Her five-step framework offers practical strategies for supporting energy and resilience, from starting the day with hydration and creating a more sustainable rhythm around food to prioritizing protein, preventing the afternoon energy crash, and making recovery part of the strategy.
Cortisol has become one of the wellness world's favorite villains, but neither Sarah nor Annie believes the goal should be to eliminate it. Cortisol is essential. It helps regulate alertness and energy and follows a natural rhythm, rising in the morning and gradually declining toward the end of the day.
The problem begins when that rhythm is disrupted. Annie described the first stage of prolonged stress as the anxiety phase, when cortisol remains elevated and the body stays switched on. You may feel tired but unable to relax. Sleep can suffer. Digestion becomes more difficult. Your mind is still working long after you would like it to stop.
Over time, that state can give way to exhaustion. Energy drops, motivation disappears, and your tolerance for stress narrows. You may sleep for eight or nine hours and still wake up tired.
Sarah's advice is to pay attention before the body is forced to make the decision for you. “The body says what words cannot,” she said. “It’s our jobs to listen to the whispers before they turn into screams.”
For women who pride themselves on being able to push through, that can be a difficult habit to change. But the afternoon when your focus disappears, the exercise class that leaves you unusually depleted, or the night when you're exhausted but can't sleep may not simply be problems to overcome. They may be useful information.
Sarah is not interested in taking away anyone's coffee. She just doesn't want it to be the first thing your body receives.
The first step in their framework, Alkalize, begins with hydration. Sarah recommends starting the day with water or an alkalizing drink before reaching for coffee, then continuing to hydrate consistently throughout the day. The target they discussed was roughly three to four liters of water daily, depending on individual needs and activity.
It sounds basic, which is perhaps why it gets overlooked. High-performing people are often drawn to sophisticated solutions while moving quickly past the fundamentals. Dehydration can show up as fatigue, headaches, cramps, joint pain, and even hunger. For women moving through back-to-back meetings, flights, workouts, and long workdays, it is often one of the first things to fall away.
Their approach is less about adding another task to the wellness list and more about building hydration into routines that already exist. Drink water before the first coffee. Keep it visible during meetings. Make hydration part of your travel routine. Small habits may not feel transformative in the moment, but they can prevent small physiological gaps from accumulating throughout the day.
The second step, Elevate, focuses on strategic fasting. Sarah and Annie recommend a 12- to 16-hour fasting window, often achieved simply by “closing the kitchen” after dinner and allowing some time before eating breakfast the following morning.
But they were careful not to present fasting as another form of discipline or restriction. “More fasting is not necessarily better,” Annie said. For women who are already stressed, exercising intensely, and not eating enough, longer fasting windows can become another demand placed on the body rather than something that supports it.
Their approach is about creating a rhythm, not following a rigid protocol. The same principle applies to working out on an empty stomach. Some people feel great doing it. Others perform better with a little food beforehand. If a date, half a banana, or another simple carbohydrate helps you feel stronger during your workout, Sarah's advice is uncomplicated: eat it.
The best routine is not necessarily the one that looks the most disciplined. It's the one that supports your actual life and allows you to perform consistently.
Sarah's position on protein is direct: most people need to pay more attention to it. Her recommendation is approximately 30 grams per meal, a target designed to support muscle, satiety, and steadier energy throughout the day.
“We need to think about our protein like we’re professional athletes,” she said. “I mean, we kind of are, but we’re not on a field.”
The comparison makes sense. We understand that an athlete cannot perform at a high level on caffeine and adrenaline alone. Yet many executives expect exactly that from themselves. Breakfast becomes coffee. Lunch is grabbed between meetings, if it happens at all. By the end of the day, the body is depleted and demanding what it did not receive earlier.
Sarah encourages clients to think beyond the immediate meal. Before a long meeting, a flight, or a particularly demanding afternoon, consider what your body will need three or four hours from now. Real food is the foundation, but protein powders can also be useful when schedules make a proper meal difficult. The objective is not to become obsessive about macros. It's to stop underfueling and expecting consistent performance anyway.
One of the simplest ideas from the session may also be one of the most useful. Many women consider it a success when they make it from lunch to dinner without eating. Sarah and Annie see a potential problem.
By the time dinner arrives, hunger can become so intense that it is difficult to feel satisfied. Sarah calls it “the black hole,” that point when you start eating and nothing seems to satisfy you because you have waited too long.
Their answer is the bridge meal: something small and substantial around 4 p.m. that carries you into dinner. Turkey with hummus, coconut yogurt with berries, or another combination of protein and whole foods can stabilize energy and prevent you from arriving at dinner completely depleted.
“You fuel,” Sarah said. “The fuel is the answer.”
For women with late dinners, corporate events, evening networking, or unpredictable schedules, this can be particularly useful. The goal isn't necessarily to eat more. It is to stop waiting until your body is desperate for food before responding to it. Being able to ignore hunger is not necessarily the same thing as having stable energy.
This may be where the conversation became most relevant to high-performing women.
“You know how to work. You know how to push. You know how to accomplish,” Annie said. “But do you know how to recover?”
For many ambitious people, recovery is something that happens when everything else is finished. The workday ends. The inbox is cleared. The project launches. The travel slows down. Then, perhaps, there will be time to rest.
But there is always another project.
Sarah and Annie's point was that recovery cannot be what is left over when life finally slows down. It has to become part of the operating system. A body that remains in a constant state of activation eventually has less capacity to adapt. Energy becomes less reliable. Your tolerance for stress narrows.
Sarah's preferred recovery tools are deliberately uncomplicated: a hot shower or bath, journaling, meditation, reading, breathing, or simply putting the phone away. The point isn't to create another elaborate routine to perfect. It is to create a transition between performance and rest.
For Sarah, sleep is a learned behavior. Just as children respond to familiar bedtime routines, adults need cues that tell the nervous system that the day is over. That could be a walk, a shower, ten minutes without your phone, or another simple ritual that becomes a boundary between the demands of the day and the body's need to recover.
Recovery is not what happens once the important work is done. It is part of what allows the work to continue.
The Q&A moved through many of the topics currently dominating wellness: protein powders, fasting, creatine, collagen, infrared saunas, and cold plunges. Sarah and Annie were open to many of these tools, expressing support for infrared saunas, creatine, and collagen while cautioning against adding more extreme stressors, such as cold plunges, when the body is already under significant pressure.
But perhaps the most useful part of the conversation was their resistance to the idea that wellness itself needs to become another high-performance project.
There will always be another protocol. Another supplement. Another expensive device promising better sleep, sharper focus, or more energy. Sarah's version of wellness was considerably simpler.
“Sleep, eat protein, meditate, move your body, love, go to the beach.”
The list is almost disarmingly basic. But for women who have spent years becoming experts at doing more, the challenge may be learning to treat those basics with the same seriousness they give everything else.
Hydrate. Eat enough. Don't wait until you're starving. Pay attention to your energy before you crash. Build recovery into your life before your body demands it.
Sustainable success is not about finding a way to maintain maximum output at every moment. It is about understanding what allows you to keep going.
Your body is not an obstacle to your ambition.
It is the infrastructure that supports it.
