How to Get More Energy

I remember when I experienced debilitating fatigue…

I was laying on the couch…

Not because I was lazy…

… but because I had worse than zero energy…

No amount of sleep would restore my energy…

I’d get exhausted from the smallest amount of exertion…

Doing dishes – or just the thought alone – would exhaust me…

It was depressing…

I desperately wanted my energy back so I could live an active lifestyle…

Spend time with family…

Friends…

Go hiking…

Paddleboarding…

So I started doing research to learn how to get my energy back…

Here are the 5 things that helped me get my energy back…

#1 Vitamin D

#2 Food for hormone production

#3 Ionic Minerals

#4 Gut health

#5 Sleep

Vitamin D for energy…

I was getting sick easier than normal…

Fatigued…

Bones and back started to ache…

Had depression…

My body was slow to recover from injuries or exercise…

I was losing my hair…

I found that vitamin D is what strengthens the immune system…

It functions like a hormone…

Boosting my vitamin D levels was key to balancing my hormones…

… and getting my energy back…

I got tested for vitamin D levels and found that I was at 22ng/dL…

That’s low…

Normal range is supposed to be 30-55 ng/dL

I picked up a copy of the book The 4-Hour Body by Tim Ferriss…

On page 258 he talks about how to boost testosterone…

I followed his protocol by taking fermented cod liver oil and noticed that my energy levels started going up…

My immune system got stronger which improved my vitality…

No more “getting sick easily”…

… and since I started producing more testosterone I started to balance out my hormones…

This led me to the second thing I did to get more energy…

Foods for hormone production

As I was reading The 4-Hour Body… I became intrigued by one sentence…

Here I was being told that I had low hormone production…

Low testosterone…

Low thyroid…

… and never once did I ever think that I needed more cholesterol in my diet…

I thought it was bad…

Not only that… but vitamin D is derived from cholesterol…

… and vitamin D is a fat soluble vitamin along with vitamins A, E, & K…

So I went from thinking that eating healthy meant eating a high protein, low fat diet to eating more healthy fats…

When I started to incorporate cholesterol into my diet along with healthy fats, I started to produce and balance out my hormones…

What kind of healthy fats?

Coconut oil…

Avocado…

Hemp seeds (hemp seed oil)…

… and others that you must use if you are planning on increasing your cholesterol intake…

This gave me more energy and more than anything…

It gave me hope that I was on the right track

Ionic Minerals for Energy

So I was “fueling” with vitamin D, healthy fats and cholesterol…

I think of that as charging my batteries…

… but now I needed to be able to use the energy stored in my batteries…

Every cell of the body is a battery and it stores energy…

Just like a double AA battery… you use the energy when you connect positive to negative using a conductive material like copper…

Ionic minerals are the conductive materials the body needs to be able to use the energy it’s storing…

My two main sources of minerals are from

#1 Celtic sea salt & pink himalayan salt….

#2 Ionic magnesium with trace minerals

Adding this to my diet was another layer I added to increase my energy and vitality…

Gut health for more energy

This is where things really started to change for me…

When I understood that hormones are produced by your gut flora…

It then started making sense that boosting my Vitamin D was helping my gut flora…

The minerals were also helping my gut flora…

… and so my focus turned to improving gut health…

I started doing intermittent fasting using green juice…

… and I started taking probiotics and eating more foods using traditional cooking methods to add probiotics to food…

Gut health helped me produce hormones, which gave me energy…

… but also, hormones that helped me feel good like serotonin, dopamine, and melatonin…

Not only did my anxiety and depression started to go away…

I started to sleep better thanks to melatonin… the sleeping hormone…

This is what completed the circle that got me out of debilitating fatigue…

Getting good sleep for more energy

I found the biggest challenge I faced was that I was not getting enough good sleep…

By “good sleep” I mean to say deep, relaxing, energy-restoring type of sleep…

I was sleeping a full eight hours, but I’d wake up feeling like I hadn’t slept at all…

… and the reason was because I had hormone imbalance…

If everything was working normal… here’s how you would normally get energy…

Good sleep = Good Hormone Production & Balance = Energy

During deep, relaxing sleep, you boost your immune system (meaning your gut health improves), and you produce and balance “energy” hormones…

“Feel good” hormones like dopamine, serotonin and melatonin will get you to a state of deep, relaxing sleep

Now… Here’s the dilemma (and the challenge)…

If you are not getting good sleep, then your body won’t produce and balance hormones properly…

This puts you into a vicious cycle…

Poor sleep = poor hormone balance & production

Poor hormone balance & production = poor sleep

If you don’t produce enough “sleeping” hormone melatonin, then you won’t get good sleep…

If you don’t get good sleep, then you won’t produce enough “energy” hormones…

… and your immune system won’t recover… so you’ll continue with poor gut health…

If you don’t have good gut health, then you won’t produce enough “sleeping” hormone melatonin so you’ll end up with poor sleep…

… and this vicious cycle will repeat itself until you interrupt the pattern and reverse the cycle so it’s a positive cycle where:

Good hormone balance & production = good sleep

Good sleep = Good hormone balance & production

So my goals were simple…

#1 Improve gut health so I could produce melatonin and get good sleep

#2 Get good sleep so gut health improves, and so it produces and balances hormones…

How to improve your gut health for hormone balance and production

My gut healing journey started when I became aware that I had “leaky gut” and yeast overgrowth causing havoc in my gut…

Yeast candida is known to create bowel irregularities like constipation and diarrhea…

This lead to poor digestion which meant I wasn’t digesting food properly…

Especially proteins like gluten and whey protein from dairy…

Not digesting protein meant that the protein was not being fully broken down into amino acids…

Here’s where problems started for me…

Your body needs amino acids for hormone production…

#1 it needs the amino acid tyrosine for converting the inactive thyroid hormone T4 into the active thyroid hormone T3…

#2 it needs the amino acid tryptophan to produce the “sleeping” hormone melatonin…

So not being able to digest protein properly meant I wasn’t getting the amino acids I needed from food… and it gets worse…

The body has a back up system to get amino acids…

It begins to prompt your adrenal glands to release cortisol to break down muscle to get the amino acids it lacks…

Too much cortisol led me to adrenal fatigue…

Adrenal fatigue led me to low adrenaline, which is the hormone that keeps you alert, focused and ready to act…

Without adrenaline, I was waking up with horrible brain fog, poor memory & concentration…

Too much cortisol, low adrenaline, low thyroid hormone, low melatonin… that’s what hormone imbalance looked like for me which led me to experience debilitating fatigue, brain fog, hair loss, dry skin, poor gut health and more…

I felt miserable…

Lucky for me, I understood yeast, dare I say quite well…

I was a home brewer and knew that yeast eat sugar…

So I came up with a plan to fix my gut enough to produce and balance hormones so I could enter the cycle of getting good sleep to produce more hormones and get my energy back…

Here’s what my plan looked like…

#1 I eliminated gluten, dairy and sugar from my diet…

#2 I did Intermittent Fasting with green juice to lower the quantity of yeast and other bad bacteria from my gut…

#3 I started taking probiotics to restructure my gut flora

How to use “Fasting” to heal your gut

There is no faster way, that I know of, to heal your gut than fasting and hydration…

There is only one caveat…

Fasting is like flipping a switch that tells your body to burn fat as a source of fuel…

This sounded amazing at first because having low thyroid function made me gain weight…

It felt like I gained 32 pounds almost overnight…

So burning fat sounded appealing, except that body fat serves a purpose in the body…

Remember the yeast overgrowth?

Poor gut health means that bad yeast and bacteria in your gut produce endotoxins…

Your body creates body fat to encapsulate toxins and protect you from them…

When you begin to fast, you burn fat meaning, the toxins get released back into the body…

Your liver can get overloaded with toxins and if you can’t flush out toxins then you’ll feel the effects which could be weakness, nausea, headaches or migraines…

… and more body fat production…

In other words, your liver determines how fast you can detox…

Your liver is the governor that determines the speed at which you can burn fat safely by flushing out toxins from your body…

So my protocol started with these goals in mind

#1 Clean my entire digestive tract

#2 Balance out hormones

#3 Improve sleep

How to clean your digestive tract

#1 Intermittent fasting

#2 Drink more clean water and mineralized water

#3 Cut out gluten, dairy and sugar

#4 Use a colon cleanser like Oxypowder

How to Balance Out Your Hormones

#1 Turmeric (helps lower cortisol) and other ayurvedic herbs

#2 Supplement with L-Tryptophan (an amino acid needed to produce melatonin to get good sleep)

#3 Clean out your gut (Follow the 4 steps above)

This is just the beginning of my journey…

As I move along further, I will continue to clean my gut, detox, and balance out my hormones…

Intermittent Fasting is a mild, entry level way to burn fat and detox a little at a time…

To speed up the process of healing my gut, I need to do a liver detox and liver regeneration protocol so I can do advanced fasting and other detox cleanses to heal my gut, produce hormones and take control of my health…

I’ll be sharing more about the next phase soon…

Stay tuned…

PS I put together a training on how to jumpstart your hormones for more energy… click here to learn more about how to get more energy…