I visited a restaurant with my fried the other day. I don’t go to restaurants very often, mostly because the food they offer is just a garbage. Yes, it is tasty, but it’s tastes are not natural, they are enhanced by too much salt, sugar, fat, trans fats, processed flour and flavor enhancer MSG – mono-sodium glutamate.
Restaurant food is meant to taste good, not to be good for you.
Anyway, food was “great” – tasty, actually very tasty. No wonder people get hooked on to a restaurant food.
We finished our meals and 1 hour later around 6 PM I started to feel very sleepy and tired – completely out of energy. Getting tired in the middle of the day is very unusual thing for me. I can work with a shovel all day long plus I can help move couple of my buddies in the evening and I am fine. I never nap and I hope I will never get to that stage of needing a nap everyday, but that afternoon after a fantastic tasty restaurant meal, it felt like a nap time.
In short, my body was poisoned by carbohydrate overload, sugar, salt and other chemicals.
Diet
Your diet is most responsible for your energy levels, alertness and performance. Food these days is a powerful drug you have to manage well. It will either give you energy or it will take it away. By making sure, that you are eating only the right stuff, you will avoid daily drowsiness and energy level drops.
So how do you eat right? Eating right means eating foods that come straight from the nature, not from the processing factory. Does apple and chicken come straight from the nature? Yes, most of the times. Does apple sauce and fried orange chicken come straight from the nature? No. Apple sauce is loaded with sugar and conservatives and orange chicken from the Chinese restaurant at the corner of your block has more salt in it than your grand mother consumed in her entire life.
Other great way to describe a good diet is: If it gets bad fast it’s good for you. If it lasts forever it’s very bad for you.
You can read here more about healthy, performance diet.
Exercise
To feel great and energized everyday, you have to exercise every day at least 40 minutes. You should perform your aerobic exercise on most days of the week and adding 2 nonconsecutive days of strength training exercises to your overall routine.
If you are a regular exerciser, you know what I am talking about. If you are not, you are missing a lot. For a person who exercises regularly, it is almost impossible to go through the day without it. That’s why fit people always find time to exercise.
I am encouraging you to start exercising regularly. If you are just starting, 30 minutes of fast walking every day is a good start. Just start and you will find a way to increase intensity and ad some strength training to it. Check some of my workouts here.
Alcohol and coffee
I personally don’t have anything against coffee as long as it is without sugar and you don’t have more than one in the morning.
I drink black coffee with little bit of milk, ground cinnamon and ground unsweetened chocolate powder in it.
If you drink more than 1 coffee throughout the day, you probably need something to keep you going. And drinking coffee in the afternoon seems to be helping. The problem with this is that, usually energy crush fallows making you drink even more coffee. And caffeine in coffee prevents you from having a deep restful night sleep, because it stays in your blood stream for a very long time.
Alcohol is a huge energy killer. Yes, I know, it can make you do a head stand on the party or dance for couple of hours without stopping, but that’s just the beginning. What fallows is, sleepiness and not being able to rest while you sleep, upset stomach and huge energy crush.
Alcohol is just a plain simple sugar that enters your blood stream very fast, causing insulin level to rise sharply. Plus that alcohol will keep floating in your veins for another 48 – 72 hours, causing disruption of your body’s biochemistry and preventing natural quick body recovery.
I am not saying, that you shouldn’t have a drink here and there. Just don’t overdo it and count with a certain energy drop some time not too long after having it.
Sleep
Bad diet, not enough exercise, coffee and alcohol can seriously make your sleep suffer. And guess what, you really need deep restful sleep for keeping your energy levels high throughout the day and not feeling tired.
But there are some rules that you should fallow for restful sleep. You should go to sleep only when you are very tired, so tired, that you can’t keep your head up anymore. You should get up at the same time every day – plus, minus 30 minutes. It is not that important when you go to sleep, but it is very important to get up at aproximatelly the same time.
I usually get up at 5 AM or 5: 30 AM almost every day. But I go to sleep at different times, usually around 10:30 PM but sometimes at 11:30 PM or other times at 9 PM. I seem to do just fine with 6 hours or less of sleep some days and than my body requires 8 hours the other days. Your own body will tell you in the evening, when to go to sleep, how much of it it needs, because it knows you’ll be getting up at the same time as the days before. Make sure you listen to it.
Other important think to remember is to not eat heavy foods before you go to sleep. Heavy dinner can seriously interrupt your sleep. A tiramisu dessert will do the same thing. You want to have something natural and light before you go to sleep like for example salad with some walnuts or piece of fruit with a spoon of peanut butter.
I think, fallowing these simple principles is really worth it. There is nothing better than burning through your day like a perfect Roman candle without even a little sign of stopping. Go, keep you energy high all day.