Blue Monday and a Full Moon !!!
Amazing Monday hahahah
Be positive, keep smiling and try and be kind to all !!
I cycled to work this morning doing howling at the moon. Started at 8am.
I read something online this morning that I thought might help some on here.
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Chemical cheats aside, the obvious place to start with any attempt to boost energy is in the metabolism: the process by which chemical energy is harnessed from our food and used to power everything from the basic functions of our cells to our every movement and thought. This happens in the mitochondria, which as anyone who did biology at school will know, are the “powerhouses of the cells”, creating ATP, the chemical that powers everything our cells do.
We don’t fully understand how the workings of our mitochondria affect how energetic we feel, but we do know that people who have rare disorders of the mitochondria feel pretty lousy. “Tiredness and fatigue is their number one symptom,” says Martin Picard, who studies the links between mitochondria and mood at the University of Columbia in New York. Mitochondria problems have also been seen in people with depression and chronic fatigue.
Which suggests that we can feel it when our bodies are running on empty. Even so, boosting your energy levels can’t be as simple as just adding more fuel to the furnace, says Herman Pontzer, who studies energetics and metabolism at Duke University in North Carolina and is the author of Burn: The Misunderstood Science of Metabolism. “If you’re starving you’re likely to feel lethargic, but it’s definitely not the case that eating more calories or having a faster metabolism means you’ll feel more energetic,” he says. “If it were like that, people with obesity would be the most energetic. I don’t think that’s the case.”
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Picard agrees, and also points out that there are signs that too much fuel actually backfires, making us feel worse. “If you overfeed people you would think – oh, more energy, they are going to feel better. But no, it actually taxes the body… physiologically the body becomes less efficient,” he says. So, strangely, less fuel may equal more power. In particular, avoiding refined sugars, which studies suggest disrupt the mitochondria, making them less efficient. “Not eating too much is probably the best, most concrete thing we know that can promote mitochondrial health at this point,” says Picard.
Getting the recommended seven to nine hours a night is a good idea for anyone who feels depleted CREDIT: tommaso79/ iStockphoto
Another is reducing stress. Picard’s research shows that the stress response puts a huge strain on our mitochondria, which not only need to provide energy for the raised heartrate and other physical responses to stress, but also produce and pump out the stress hormones that keep the response going. For reasons that aren’t fully understood, stress makes cells age faster, perhaps because they are being forced to work harder than they should.
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Nevertheless, Pontzer remains unconvinced that “boosting” the activity of our mitochondria to get more energy out of them is possible. His research suggests that our bodies adjust the rate at which the mitochondria burn calories to keep the total within a narrow range. If we exercise more, for example, the body adjusts the overall metabolic rate to spend less energy on other things, such as the stress response or inflammation. So, any attempt to tinker with your mitochondria is likely to be pointless, and “wouldn’t necessarily increase vitality”, says Pontzer.
