How eating healthy can cut fatigue
Feeling tired sometimes is okay, but if fatigue or lethargy follows you everywhere and interferes with your normal life activities, it’s time to take a closer look at your food choices.
Fatigue is often a reflection of our lifestyle, and is actually a symptom – a sure sign – that the body is screaming for certain modifications in the way we live our day-to-day life. Very often this involves taking a closer look at your diet and making healthier food choices.
What makes diet the most common reason for fatigue is the fact that most of us are either eating too much of something or too little of something, and these imbalances mess up our body’s energy forming process big time. It’s important to understand that almost all vitamins and minerals play a role in the creation of energy and that is why a balanced diet is absolutely essential for getting your energy levels back on track.
What not to eat?
Do you drown yourself in cups of coffee to stay awake while working? This effort to combat fatigue with caffeine progressively actually worsens your body’s ability to create optimum energy. Stimulants like coffee and other strongly caffeinated beverages act as a “metabolic distraction” to an already tired-out body that is desperately trying to cope with stressful day to day challenges. The quick but false sense of alertness these deliver has a dehydrating effect that tends to further deplete the stressed energy reserves.
Alcohol also places an extra burden of detoxification on the liver, a vital organ that may already be very busy processing other toxins (from foods, chemicals you may be exposed to, pollution etc). It behaves like a high glycemic index food which releases food energy very quickly resulting in large changes in your blood sugar levels – and this exhausts the already challenged body further.
Similarly, you need to trim the fat from your diet too. Eating large portions of fat makes the meal difficult to digest and stresses out the GI system and thus the entire body. This is precisely why you feel heavy and sluggish after a fat filled meal. Avoid fats, especially towards the end of the day, as they can mess up your sleep too, and further add to the feeling of exhaustion. Ideally, stick to just good fats and that too in moderation.
Eat these
You need to fill up on fibre. Our obsession with fast foods and processed foods ensures that our diet stays low on fibre. And enough fibre is indispensable for priming up the energy "bank" of the body. Include whole grains, fruits and vegetables in your diet.
Also eat enough good quality protein every day, stick to low-glycemic index carbohydrates, go easy on sugar, muscle up with magnesium (it is involved in the cells’ energy production so its deficiency sometimes surfaces as constant fatigue), get enough B vitamins (as these help support the adrenal glands, which are involved in energy production), get in Vitamin C as it plays an important protective role for energy-producing cells and systems in the body, and don’t get deficient in iron (as it is essential for normal blood cell formation and function and its deficiency results in anaemia, fatigue, decreased immune function).
The fact, how tired you are feeling often boils down to what you are eating. So eat carefully.