Enhance your energy

ULTIMATELY, everything comes down to energy. Without it, the sun does not shine, life does not form from dust and fish don’t grow legs to evolve into guys with careers, relationship and mortgages. Energy is the ultimate commodity. When it become scarce bad things start to happen. On a large scale, an energy shortage looks like an oil embargo or a rice famine. On a personal level, it looks like missed opportunities, annoyed espouses and a sag in your couch where your body inevitably settles for the weekend.

Sounds depressingly familiar? Here’s the good news: From a strictly physical standpoint, you have energy to spare. We all do. Our bodies store tremendous reserves of all the enzymes, acids, chemicals and other stuff that make us go. Every couch potato has enough energy in him to get up and run a marathon. The question: “Why do we go wrong? Why is it that we feel as if our energy is depleted? It sounds good to hear that we all have enough energy to run a marathon. But this raises some serious questions. If we are all just brimming with untapped energy, why do we all wish we had more. Here’s why. In many ways we unwittingly rob ourselves of energy. Let’s use the time-tested metaphor of an automobile. say the gasoline stations claims you should get and pour six gallons of gasoline and head out of the city to go round south and back to the city. But lo and behold, you run out of gas right at the tip end of southern part of Cebu. Here are some reasons:

•You  need a tune-up you’re wasting energy.

•External problems—like traffic, fallen rocks and landslides

•Traffic accident. You passed by a car and bus accident.

•You have a leak in your tank.

You cannot avoid these circumstances to happened. So how can you avoid it. Here’s an energy maintenance program that will keep you running in high gear all day long.

Do-it-yourself tune-ups

What do you have in common with a sports car? Both of you run on the same two thing: oxygen and fuel. They are equally important but fuel  fill-ups you get maybe three times a day (well get that in a moment) while oxygen uptake is constant. Each breath of air enriches your energy mix feeding your 75 trillion regulate everything the body does moment by moment. One of the way to get more oxygen for your body is breathing. Make sure you’re properly inflated. Breathe in, breathe out. Breathing seems pretty simple but the fact is we could do it better. Our creator gave us free air so we live. Without the air that we breathe we cannot survive and die even if a few minutes we are deprived of getting enough air or oxygen.

Most of us take a manly suck-in your gut approach to respiration, expanding the chest with each breath. This is the least efficient way to get oxygen surging through the body because it does not put enough air into the lower lungs where blood flow is richest. The more blood that comes in contact with the oxygen, the more oxygen is delivered throughout the body. To breathe better:

First, exhale fully. You’ll take deeper breaths with empty lungs.

Breathe through the nose focusing on making your stomach move instead of your chest. This automatically expands the lower lungs letting you take in more air than with shallower chest breaths. Aim for four to six breaths per minute.

Optional extra: When you exhale suck your stomach in. Because this is not a natural movement, it will make you concentrate more on breathing. It will also give your gut muscle a mild workout.

Put power in your body

What you give your body to run on has a direct bearing on your energy. Here’s how to make the most of your fuel to fight fatigue.

•Use the right fuel. Carbohydrates burn fast, clean and pure like liquid nitrogen. Fats and proteins don’t. Fat is the lowest fuel around. It delivers virtually no energy to the body even though it is packed with calories. The reason is that the body would rather store fat than burn it, and in men it tends to get stored in the

under-carriage. That’s why you want carbohydrates to make up the greatest share, which is 60 percent of what you eat.

•Know your additives. There are plenty of things you can put  in your body to make it process energy more efficiently. Here are some of the best.

•Multivitamins. Even mild vitamin shortages have a draining

effect especially if you are exerting yourself. Studies in Netherlands found that men who are just slightly deficient in thiamine,

riboflavin and vitamin B6 and suffered a 20 percent decline in

athletic endurance.  A daily multivitamins not only ensures that you get enough of what you need, it also let’s you absorb more. The body takes up all the B vitamins together more readily than it does one at  a time. Look for multivitamins that provide zinc, magnesium and copper. Zinc helps with insulin is vital for the body’s energy uptake. Furthermore, low levels of zinc have been linked to

decreased sex drive. It is recommended that getting supplemental amounts of 10 to 15 milligrams per day especially during months of summer since zinc is lost through sweating. Sources include beef, oysters and wheat germ.

•Magnesium. One of the magnesium hundreds of jobs in metabolism is to package food into an energy form that the body can burn. In one study of patients with chronic fatigue, magnesium injections booted energy in half the cases. A man’s diet should include 350 milligrams each day. Good sources are seafood, spinach, brown rice, oatmeal, beans, avocado.

•Copper. Studies find copper makes you sleep better at night which improves daytime alertness. Good sources are avocados, bananas and mushrooms.

•Coffee. As a rule you should keep caffeine consumption moderate. Too much cause a surge of adrenaline but when the spurt is over your power levels plummet. A simple cup of coffee though can work wonders when you need it. One to two cups daily is advisable.

Knowing some of these basic and practical guide in keeping your body in good condition will give you a boost that even though you are in the midst of your life span you still have a lot of changes and chances to be fit and enjoy life to the fullest. We face a lot of challenges when it comes to caring for our own health. First these is the macho ethic that tells us to suffer in silence, tune out pain and consider our bodies as nothing more than vehicles to get us from one place to another. That’s one reason women visit doctors about 150 percent as often as men. There’s the second challenge. That’s the opinion on the part of the government, the medical community and society in general that men’s health somehow is not as important an issue as women’s is. For example, how many times have you seen television ads urging women to do breast self-exams and recommending regular mammograms? Ever seen one telling young men about the importance of testicular self-exams? This despite the fact that testicular cancer is 95 percent curable if caught early.

We can start taking charge of our own lives by watching what we eat, cutting down on stress and getting more exercise. We can even more prevent or stop disease from spreading if we act now. If for example you know that your parents have this kind of disease and you are vulnerable of having this disease too why don’t you do something now to prevent it. Again there’s always a saying: “An ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure.