Increase Your Energy: the Key to Health
Do you find yourself tired and dragging through the day?
I don’t have any proof of this. But, I think if you were to ask people what they want most from their health, and took all those responses, and then tried to summarize them all with one word – I believe that word would be “energy”. And, that’s makes perfect sense since life is energy and energy is life. What can you do to increase your energy? The answer is plenty.
Steps to Increase Your Energy
Let’s look at four broad categories that will help increase your energy. Improving your lifestyle goes a long way in helping you increase your energy.
- Nutrition
- Exercise
- Maintain optimal hormone levels
- Rest
Nutrition
Increase your energy with better nutrition. If you want you car to run as best as possible you need to feed it the proper fuel. And so it is with the human body. Nutrition is the key to great health. One key to maintaining an ongoing stream of energy is to learn how to manage insulin levels. Insulin locks calories (potential energy) in our fat stores preventing us from using those fat calories for energy.
Too many eat too many high glycemic carbs which leads to high sugar levels followed by a precipitous drop in blood sugar from the secretion of insulin. So our energy level tends to wax and wane from eating too many unhealthy carbs. Carbs are OK but focus on eating “slow carbs” also known as low glycemic carbs. These mainly are fruits and vegetables.
Also, eat more frequent smaller meals. This provides for a relatively steady stream of calories to burn as energy. Besides food there are nutritional supplements that can increase energy by protecting mitochondrial function – see below. These supplements include CoQ10, alpha-lipoic acid, D-ribose, acetyl-L-carnitine, and others.
Exercise
Increase your energy with exercise. Exercise improves the body’s ability to utilize its energy. We become more efficient at burning calories. Exercise improves blood flow, and therefore, the flow of oxygen which is needed to burn calories or fuel. With exercise the body produces more oxidative enzymes and mitochondria or energy producing organelles in the cells. This enables muscles including the heart to extract more oxygen from the blood and produce more energy.
Optimal Hormone Levels
Increase your energy with ideal hormone levels. Not appreciated enough is the adverse effect that declining hormone levels have on our energy levels. These include our sex hormones, but also thyroid hormone levels. There are receptors for the many hormones the body makes throughout the body. Therefore, every organ-system benefits when hormone levels are at an optimal level. We can function somewhat with low levels of hormones. But, we can function much better with more optimal levels. Hormone levels naturally decline as we age.
If the couch looks more appealing than your spouse (men and women) then there’s a good chance that your sex hormone levels are low.
Rest
Increase your energy with rest. This may be the most important key to having great energy levels. While you are sleeping your body and brain are busier than you think repairing and restoring the body. We all know what it is like to wake up from a terrific night of sleeping. Our energy level is good and we are ready to take on the day. Many factors affect the quality of sleep. Sleep apnea is quite common not only preventing a good night’s sleep but also increasing the risk of heart disease and stroke. If you struggle with your sleep it is probably worth a visit to a sleep medicine specialist – there are a range of treatments available depending on the cause of your sleep disorder.
Also, to increase your energy get some sunshine like the photo above suggests.
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