Increase your energy
While we frequently look to our weight or the lack of illness as a measure of health, we can easily overlook energy levels as a marker for health or dismiss our lack of energy as the natural result of our busy lifestyle and consider it as something we simply need to put up with.
Great energy levels, waking up like you’re ready to take on the world, is a much better reflection of our total health, letting us know that our body is operating the way it should be.
If you’ve been focusing on losing weight to get healthy, start focusing on getting healthy and let your weight take care of itself.
Take consistent small steps to improve your energy levels:
Improve your sleep quality: getting a good night’s sleep is important for a range of healthy body functions like mental and physical healing and repair and efficient immune system and organ function. How much sleep we need varies from one person to the next, but generally we should be asleep from around 10pm to 6am. If you feel your sleep quality needs improving, try the tips here.
Improve gut health: The gastrointestinal tract is where our body absorbs the nutrients it needs from the food we eat and gets our energy. If its not functioning well, its easy to see how this affects our energy levels. Improve your gut with good nutrition focusing on unprocessed wholefoods, a wide variety of fruit and vegetables and high fibre to boost your energy. Read more here.
Move every day: When you’re tired it can seem that getting more exercise might be counterproductive, but instead of forcing your way through a high intensity, hard workout, think about just moving your body and doing something at a lower intensity like walking, swimming, yoga or stretching. You’ll encourage blood and lymphatic circulation and help your body’s detox pathways.
Drink enough water: Aim for 1/30 (in litres) of your body weight (in kg). That is, if you’re 60kg, aim to get 2 litres of water, if you’re 90kg, aim for 3 litres. Our body is around 60% water and being well hydrated can have a real impact on digestion and elimination, nutrient absorption and transportation, concentration and energy.
Take time to relax and rebuild: We live in a world that values being busy all the time. Being ‘on’ all the time, leading to chronically raised cortisol levels, affecting our sleep quality, concentration and ability to switch ‘off’, affecting our energy levels over time. Take time to do things that help you to switch off and rebuild your energy. Meditation, breathing exercises, getting out in nature and slow walking can all help to relax and unwind.
While there are a number of more complicated things that can affect your energy levels like thyroid or adrenal dysfunction, liver function and hormonal dysregulation, try these simple steps first and if your energy doesn’t pick up in the first 4 weeks, get in touch to discuss how I can help with epigenetic profiling and blood chemistry analysis.
