The modern diet is one of the biggest contributing factors our low energy state.

Our prehistoric ancestor ate a diet that provided us with tons of energy and that fueled us to chase down prey and perform at our optimum. Our bodies evolved as they did because of the food available to us through thousands of years of evolution.

Today we are surviving on a diet that contains none of the energy-rich foods from our past (or at least barely any). The modern diet has outpaced our ability to adapt.

Our Modern Diet

If you’re like a lot of people, you’ll come home from work after a long, tiring day.  Then you’ll throw on a pizza or a microwave meal. Add some chips and soda, and you have more than half of your daily recommended caloric intake in just one meal.

It is this scenario that’s making us fat.  Lugging all that extra bodyweight around with you is draining your energy.

Dumping that much food into your stomach at once is a bad idea. You’ll have all that food to process, including low-quality protein, which will slowly move through your digestive system robbing your other functions of requisite energy.

Also, the calories you just took in were ‘simple carbs.’ The pizza crust, the chips, the soft drink – all of these are simple sugars that spike your blood sugar immediately. And that’s all before you even factor in the added sugar masked in most processed foods.

Your body’s insulin response uses up the sugar and removes it from your blood, but because you’re not using it that quickly, it just gets stored as fat (a process called lipogenesis). At the end of this process guess how you will feel?  Exhausted! And you get a sudden energy slump of equal magnitude to the spike and want even more sugar!

Worse of all, those calories and simple carbs have done you zero good.  All you’ve accomplished is pumping your body full of low-quality food to process and in vast quantities.

The Perfect Diet

Avoid the ‘simple’ carbs. That’s anything that tastes sweet (like cake) and anything white (like pasta or rice). Instead, eat brown rice, sweet potato, vegetables as a substitute for your chips (as a rule, try to avoid processed food by sticking to the outer parts of the grocery store for tour meal selections).

This will release energy much more slowly and provide you with a steady supply throughout the day. Don’t be afraid of fat either – it contains more calories (9 calories per gram versus 4), but it’s slow release too. My go-to healthy fats are avocado and grass-fed butter for cooking and in my coffee with coconut oil.

Try to eat smaller portions, more often and don’t over-stuff yourself.

How do you go about cooking nutrient dense, fresh meals when you’re so pushed for time? Using a supplement stack can be a good head start, but another tip is to prepare your meals at the beginning of the week. Sunday is my meal prep day. Cook up a few meals you can dip into throughout the week and freeze them in a container (BPA free of course!).

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On Going too Far

If you’ve read much on diets before, then you might have noticed that this recommendation is somewhat close to the paleo diet and the slow carb diet.

We are getting too much of our carbs from processed foods. And if we ate less of those carbs, we’d feel much better and have the energy we need on demand. I am not saying go carb-less.  We still need carbs. They’re still an important food group in our diet, and if we get the right kind and in the right quantities, they boost testosterone production and aid with our general levels of energy.

Restrict carbs too much and you’ll feel tired. Just be mindful of the source of your carbs.  Getting carbs from broccoli is much better than from processed foods.

You can perform just fine eating a relatively ‘normal’ diet. And actually, the modern lifestyle places different demands on our body, so it’s natural our diet should adopt. In other words, don’t focus on only eat specific foods.

Stick to a healthy approach to cutting back on the simple carbs and injecting more nutrients.  If you can’t, smart supplementation, as well as other techniques such as intermittent fasting, to meet your body’s needs is the sure way to maximize your energy.

Next, we will look at lifestyle changes that can drain or enhance our energy.