‘Tis the season for New Year’s resolutions. If you’re always tired, lacking energy, and feel run down before the 3pm slump even hits, don’t reach for bottles of 5 Hour Energy or cans of Red Bull in 2020. Instead, start transforming your eating habits next year. That’s the #1 method – and the greatest secret – of long lasting energy, vitality and health.
We are chemical beings and what we eat and drink matters. The energy of a 20 year old is easy to get but it doesn’t come from bagels, burgers and shakes. Just eat real, whole foods. That’s it. They – and they alone – contain the best source of every nutrient your body and brain need to function at optimal levels – and with loads of energy. Ditch them and your body breaks down and mind fogs. Poof go energy and vitality.
Jump Off the Wagon
If your food choices revolve around processed foods, I can guess that your energy levels are low and your health not all that robust. Probably your weight’s not where you want it to be either. Processed foods are killing our health – and us – and they’re also killing our energy levels. Sure, that donut might give you a boost of short-term energy but too soon you’ll have a sugar crash, followed by more sugar or refined carb cravings, then a short energy boost followed by another crash – and on and on. This cycle isn’t a natural indication of true hunger or how our daily meal rotation should go.
Real health – which grants abundant energy and a feeling of vitality – comes from real food. Real food contains live enzymes, fibers that feed our beneficial bacteria, vitamins and minerals, antioxidants and so much more that we just don’t get from processed foods. When 62% of the American diet is processed food – and 42% of it low quality carbs – is it any wonder that our bodies are sick, our minds less than alert, our emotions out of whack, and our immune systems failing? We’re not getting the nutrition we need and that has consequences for all aspects of our physical health – which consequently means our emotional and mental health too.
If our nerves, cells, organs and everything that make up our bodies aren’t getting the chemical building blocks they need – and instead are fed empty or useless calories – how can they function properly? They won’t. The result isn’t just sickness, it’s a host of ailments but also an inability to generate energy and vitality.
We have to charge ourselves properly if we want to have verve during the day, let alone all day. That means doing 2 key things:
- Consuming foods that are essential to providing all the nutrients we need
- Refraining from or minimizing the consumption of foods that will harm our bodies or inhibit their proper functioning
Putting this into practice requires jumping off the processed food band wagon our culture loves – and which has sadly going global. Instead, we should turn more and more to real, whole foods. That’s where energy, vitality and health await us.
Eat to Live
As a culture, we’ve forgotten what real food is. We think boxed meals and convenience foods loaded with sugar, salt, preservatives and unpronounceable chemical ingredients are fine to ingest. They’ve become so normal and ubiquitous that we don’t give a second thought to what goes into our grocery cart or we buy the marketing about “healthy” foods that are anything but. In essence, we’ve outsourced our knowledge about health and true nutrition to the food industry. Unfortunately, these companies are out to make a profit off us, not ensure our health.
In order to eat healthily, we must reeducate ourselves about food and we must return to eating real foods, not the processed meals we’ve adopted as normal and which are killing us every day. Processed meals aren’t just fast food and packaged snacks. They’re as common as microwavable meals, pasta and bread. Even yogurt these days comes loaded with additives and sugar, and many brands now no longer contain the live beneficial bacteria cultures that once made yogurt a “health food”.
Real foods are whole foods like fruit, vegetables, legumes, pulses, whole grains, nuts, seeds, and tubers. American’s only eat these whole foods as 12% of their meals. These are the foods that contain life and energy-nurturing nutrition. Again, is it any wonder that our health and energy levels are suffering when we’re only supplying our bodies and minds with such paltry amounts of necessary nutrients? Popping a daily vitamin is no substitute for real food – and not just because they tend to go through our systems unabsorbed.
Real food includes fiber and live enzymes, helps satiate us, empowers our natural chemical messengers to tell our brains when we’re full or hungry, and so much more. A multivitamin can’t do what whole foods do. Neither does fortifying our nutritionally lacking foods with a handful of vitamins. Those are just synthetic chemicals anyway and again they’re not accompanied with the other aspects of nutrition like beneficial-bacteria feeding fiber, antioxidants or the live enzymes our bodies need.
When we lack these aspects of nutrition, our health suffers, as do our energy levels.
Feel Alive in 2020
Energy and vitality are deeply intertwined with good nutrition. You’ll be shocked at just how full of life you’ll feel when you start eating to live rather than just eating for calories or to satisfy taste buds spoiled on all the worst foods for us.
But don’t think eating healthy means a life of tasteless, bland and boring food! A whole foods lifestyle is down right delicious. It’s a culinary adventure, with more recipes and dishes than you can imagine and which, frankly, you’d probably need several lifetimes to taste! Join the real food revolution in 2020 in order to take back your health and have the energy to run circles around your tired peers.
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