Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
WHY ARE WE SO TIRED?
Life is supposed to be challenging, but it’s not meant to seem impossible. It surely feels that way sometimes, though, doesn’t it?
If I were to ask you whether or not you’d like more energy, I’m certain the answer would be an emphatic, nearly desperate yes! Then again, you’re reading this book, so that kind of gave it away. It’s not surprising, as having more energy and feeling more alive every single day is one of the most common desires I’ve noticed among all people. Even those who don’t say they crave more energy are probably fooling themselves. Some of them may say they want to lose weight, while others want to gain muscle. Some people say they want better-looking skin, and others want to be better performers in their sport or area of work. What’s the one thing that makes any of these goals so much easier to achieve?
Energy.
Not only does being more energetic allow you to get so much more out of life, it also allows you to contribute so much more to your friends, family, and community. For me, the latter is a biggie. As nice as it was to overcome many of my personal health challenges several years ago, the most important improvement in my life was my increased energy levels. Instead of sleeping 10 to 12 hours a night, my body only required 6 to 8 hours of sleep, and I woke up most mornings ready to conquer the world! I was focused and productive all day long, which meant I was able to help more people and get my message out to the world. It’s tough to do that when you’re sidelined on the couch feeling exhausted.
I was in peak condition for quite a while, but it didn’t last. With the arrival of my kids several years later and a more hectic lifestyle, I noticed my energy levels regressing. I wasn’t waking up as easily as I had just a few months prior, and I just didn’t have the lasting daylong energy I previously enjoyed. Exercise became a chore; I just couldn’t push myself to the same level of intensity that I had before. What made it more confounding is that I was eating well (according to the principles you’ll discover further along in this book), but something still wasn’t quite right.
Once again, I set off on a quest to figure out what was going wrong inside my body. After much research, visits with my naturopathic doctor, and several lab tests, I discovered that my adrenal glands were shot. (I’ll explain what this means in more detail a little later, but essentially, my body was no longer able to cope with stress very well.) Armed with this new knowledge, I was able to make some great progress in regaining my all-day energy and bringing my adrenals back to life.
The vital information I learned along the way can be found in the pages of this very book, and it can help you overcome the drain that you’re facing. Don’t you want to be able to jump out of bed in the morning and coast through your days with boundless energy? What if you could avoid that dreaded midafternoon slump every day, the one that leaves you completely spent after work, unable to play with your kids or go to the gym? Wouldn’t you like to feel downright awesome?
You can, but first you have to understand why your energy is being sapped away.
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Energy is life. An energetic body is a healthy body. Conversely, a tired and lethargic body is groaning and wheezing for help. Without sufficient energy we jeopardize our health, accomplish a fraction of what we’re truly capable of, and drag through our days like zombies grasping for quick fixes that offer temporary, if questionable, help.
What am I talking about? That would be caffeine, the number one drug in the world that’s consumed by more than 100 million Americans each day in the form of coffee and almost as often in the form of energy drinks. According to a report by Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada in 2008, 1.5 billion cans of Red Bull were sold in the United States in 2004. The U.S. energy-drink market alone exploded by more than 240 percent from 2004 to 2009, and is predicted to at one point reach an astounding $19.7 billion.
The irony is that hundreds of millions of people are still drained of energy. In fact, we are more tired than ever before. Do any of the coffee drinkers or energy-drink guzzlers you know—and you might be one yourself—truly seem pumped full of the energy they need to get through the day? We are overstressed and overworked, and in spite of being over-caffeinated, we are still struggling to get out of bed in the morning and take care of our to-do list. Obviously, what we’re doing is not working.
The reason is simple—culprit beverages (namely, energy drinks, coffee, and soda) hit our bodies with a strong dose of caffeine, which wears down our adrenal glands and wreaks havoc on our blood-sugar levels. Out-of-whack hormones and dwindling energy are the results. Aside from the short-lived pick-me-up we might experience from these stimulants, the long-term consequences are truly scary. We’ll investigate these consequences in more detail a little bit later.
Right now, we citizens of “Caffeination Nation” face an extreme fatigue epidemic. The number of those affected reaches into the hundreds of millions. This is a problem of cataclysmic proportions, and it is robbing everyday people (perhaps even you) of the happiness, productivity, libido, and fulfillment that they deserve. It has to stop.
It’s for this reason that I’ve written The All-Day Energy Diet.
The food most of us eat doesn’t help, either. Since mass food processing began in the 1950s, we have traded our health for convenience by relying on fast food and packaged, processed foods devoid of nutritional value. They may taste great, but they’re no good for the human body. They’re dead foods, and since we become what we eat, we feel dead and drained of life and energy. Instead of nourishing us, this commercial “food” often compromises our digestive and intestinal health, acidifies our blood, and demands more energy from our bodies’ inherent processes to do so.
We are sicker, fatter, and more tired than ever before. Thankfully, the solution has nothing to do with eating more protein, cutting out carbs, or jumping on the latest Hollywood diet fad. The solution involves getting to the root of the problem, cleaning up our bodies’ internal mess, and reconsidering what we put into our mouths. It may sound like a nearly impossible task, but it’s actually quite simple when done correctly. It’s this time-tested solution that I reveal in the chapters to come.
We’ll soon explore the major players that are robbing you of the energy you deserve (for instance, “dead” foods, poor lifestyle factors, and the like), but in order to understand them, we need to first have a better grasp of how your body works.
How Your Body Works and Copes with Stress (in a Nutshell)There are countless processes that take place in the amazing machine that is your body. Let’s take a look at a few of the most important ones that directly impact your energy levels. In explaining these to you, I’m going to leave my lab coat at the door and discuss them in very common terms so that they actually make sense to you.
The first thing you need to understand is how your body handles stress. That function begins in your adrenal glands, two walnut-size glands that sit above your kidneys. Although they’re very tiny, the adrenal glands are responsible for one of the most important human behaviors, the fight-or-flight response. Chances are you’ve heard of it before, although you might not quite be familiar with what it involves. Here’s what happens:
Your brain perceives a threat. Within milliseconds, nerve impulses are fired from down your spinal cord and your sympathetic nervous system is activated. This results in dilated pupils, increased heart rate, opened airways, and other reactions that instantly prepare your body to fight or flee. Seconds after this initial neural response, hormonal and nerve impulses are sent from your brain to your adrenal glands. Their message? Secrete adrenal hormones—cortisol and epinephrine—to quickly break down stored fuel into blood sugar for immediate energy. This brain-to-adrenal-gland communication is known as the hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal axis (HPA axis).
Without this incredible mechanism, humanity probably wouldn’t even exist anymore. Why? Well, imagine for a moment that it’s 10,000 B.C. and you and your tribespeople are roaming the plains of the midwestern United States. Let’s assume you’re the alpha male in the tribe, the one responsible for “bringing home the bacon,” if you will. This is quite a task. After all, it’s not like you have the ability to pop open the fridge whenever you’re hungry. Nothing less than the survival of your entire tribe is dependent upon you (and perhaps your hunting buddies) successfully hunting an animal for dinner. While you’re doing this, the women and children are out gathering fruits and vegetables; firewood; and materials for your tools, clothes, and shelter, assuming vegetation is available.
As you scan the plains for a suitable kill, you notice what looks like a bison in the distance. Immediately, you crouch low into the nearby shrubs and ready your spear. Like a lion tracking its prey, you wait patiently in silence to avoid scaring off the animal. This is especially important, as animals have the same fight-or-flight response humans do.
The anticipation of what’s about to happen automatically primes your heart to start beating faster. Blood is diverted away from your digestive organs and sent to your muscles. Your body is wonderfully efficient; you’re on the hunt, so you don’t need to worry about digesting food, right? Your pupils dilate and your vision becomes tunneled, similar to a fighter jet zeroing in on its target. You may even begin to tremble slightly and feel the need to urinate. These are classic signs that your body has entered into the fight-or-flight stress response.
As the bison approaches, it smells your presence. You try to pounce, but it quickly skitters away. Both you and the animal are in full stress mode now. Your sympathetic nervous systems and cortisol and epinephrine levels are sky-high. Both of you have been primed for action. Your body has broken down stored energy (carbohydrates and fat) into fast-acting blood sugar that can now supply the muscles with the necessary fuel to hunt or run. Sadly for you and the tribe, this bison has escaped. What’s worse, there are no other potential meals in sight. Hopefully the rest of the tribe was able to gather some plant foods to keep you going in the meantime.
As you can tell, this existence was not easy or luxurious. In those days, this stress response would mean life or death, literally. At this point, however, you might be asking yourself: How is this relevant to me?
As we’ve seen, when faced with stress, your body either readies itself for battle or turns on the afterburners to run as fast as possible in the opposite direction. And that’s important in the very short term—it could mean life or death.
The danger, though, is that when your body is continually subjected to stress, its ability to deal with it wears down. The more vigorously and frequently stress calls your adrenals into action, the quicker they will burn out. The more inflammation there is inside your body (from a poor diet, for instance), the more troubled the communication between your brain and adrenals becomes, and the latter may start to malfunction. And remember, since nothing happens independently of anything else inside the body, those worn-down adrenals can then affect other key glands and organs, like your thyroid.
What’s the problem with all of this, you might ask?
Well, your adrenals are responsible for producing and secreting some pretty important hormones that are essential to keep your body functioning. Here are just a few:
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Cortisol: In moderate amounts, this hormone helps your cells deal with stress.
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Epinephrine: Commonly known as adrenaline, this helps ready your body for “fight or flight.”
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Aldosterone: This hormone plays an important role in balancing the amounts of water and sodium in your body.
If these hormones are compromised by faulty adrenals, then your body will have much more difficulty coping with stress. Over time, as the stress builds, your adrenals become weaker and weaker, until one day they enter full-blown fatigue. That’s when things start to get ugly.
From Adaptation to ExhaustionThese days, it’s generally accepted that chronic stress can pave the way for more serious health conditions. It’s a gradually destructive process that the famous endocrinologist Hans Selye christened general adaptation syndrome, or GAS. In a nutshell, this is how it works:
1. Alarm reaction. In the first stage of GAS, the body releases epinephrine, cortisol, and a variety of immediate nerve impulses to deal with a perceived stressor (fight-or-flight response). Your muscles tense and your heart beats faster. Next, your breathing and perspiration increase as your eyes dilate and blood is diverted from your digestive system to your working muscles. Once the cause of the stress is removed, your body returns to its eased state.
2. Adaptation phase. If the cause for the stress is not removed, GAS goes to its second stage, called resistance, or adaptation. This is how your body copes with chronic stress. Astonishingly, this phase can last for years or even decades. Here, your adrenal glands secrete more cortisol and epinephrine to increase blood-sugar levels to sustain energy and raise blood pressure. High cortisol levels are a hallmark feature of this phase.
If this adaptation phase continues for a prolonged period of time without periods of relaxation and rest to counterbalance the stress response, you become prone to fatigue, concentration lapses, irritability, and lethargy as the effort to sustain arousal slides into negative stress.
3. Exhaustion. In this final stage, your body has quite simply run out of juice. Mental, physical, and emotional resources suffer heavily. Your body experiences a feeling of exhaustion because its coping mechanisms (that is, adrenal glands) have been exhausted. Unlike the previous stage, you’re experiencing low cortisol levels because it has been completely tapped out. Now, fast-acting epinephrine overcompensates, and your blood-sugar levels become difficult to stabilize.
Whether this situation arises from overworked adrenal glands or a combination of other factors that impair communication between your brain and your adrenals, the end result is the same—low cortisol, impaired blood-glucose tolerance, weakened thyroid function, and an overall inability to deal with stress. The result? You feel tired almost all the time.
If you weren’t tired all of the time, you probably wouldn’t have picked up this book, so I’m going to assume that you’re most likely now into the exhaustion stage. The only way to know for sure is to get tested. I’ll show you how in just a moment.
