Eating for Energy

If you were to view your body as a machine that required fuel what types of fuel would you put into it and at what intervals to get the optimum performance?  Have you ever thought about whether you are getting the optimum performance out of your machine?  It’s a question that fascinates me and one of the main reasons that I became a Nutrition and Wellness coach.  Once you start to think about how well you are fuelling your body, you start to think differently about the quality, quantity and frequency of the food you are eating.  That’s not to say that food should be for nutritional value only, I am a firm believer that your diet should be filled with foods that you enjoy, but we do need to ensure that we are giving ourselves enough of the right kinds of nutrients to ensure our machine runs well.
 
How do you start your day? After 7 – 8 hours’ sleep when our machines have been working at regenerating cells and healing us:  instead of rewarding it with a nutritious breakfast 50% of us start our busy days without eating anything at all.  If you are thinking about food as fuel, and our bodies as a machine, how do we expect the machine to run efficiently, if at all, without some good nutrition?
 
Then what happens throughout the rest of the day, do you supplement your lack of a good breakfast with a healthy mid-morning snack, or do you have something sugary along with caffeine?  Effectively putting nitrous oxide in your cars engine, yes you get a quick burst of energy, but that is soon gone, and you’ve run out of fuel again.  Sound familiar?  It’s strange isn’t it that we can understand how to fuel our cars better than we understand what damage poor fuel is doing to our bodies.
 
Our brains are a big part of that machine, and our brain function uses energy, it needs food.  Have you ever sat in a meeting or presentation where you feel you simply cannot absorb the information presented?  Think back to that time and when you last ate, and what did you eat?  Would you expect your computer to work properly if you were only giving it half the electricity power it needed?  And yet you expect your brain to!  The human body is amazing, and it will still perform pretty well on a pretty poor diet, but just imagine how good it would be if you gave it some good fuel.  We could all be budding Einstein’s!!
 
So now you are thinking differently about your body and your brain and you want to make sure you get the best performance.  Am I going to recommend a strict diet plan, where you measure and control everything you eat?  I don’t’ believe that is necessary. If we start to listen to our body and eat a sensible balanced diet, then we will soon learn to understand how we are feeling and know what fuel we need and when.  Good diet is about eating good food, eating regularly, and if you base your intake around quality ingredients cooked well, then you won’t go too far wrong.  You will feel the benefit immediately from just some sensible tweaks.
 
Want to know more? Contact me on wendy@hillstart.me.uk for information on my 1-2-1 packages or my Prime Leaders for business courses.