One of the most effective ways to get more energy is to improve your sleep… improving your sleep isn’t a matter of going to bed earlier or staying in bed longer… neither helps when you toss and turn all night…
When I was first trying to understand what I could do to get my energy back, I was going to doctors who never once asked me about my vitamin D levels… when I brought it up, they started questioning what was I “reading online”? and even said that they could test me, but it wouldn’t reveal anything important…
I insisted on getting my vitamin D levels tested and sure enough I came in low at 22ng/dL.
This is what triggered my initial research into vitamin D, which turns out that it is actually a pro-hormone… this interested me because here I was being told that I was going to have to take hormones for the rest of my life and I was getting closer to understanding how the body goes about producing hormones…
They then tried to give me a vitamin D3 supplement, but I turned to probiotics instead… here’s why…
I do not take Vitamin D3 Supplements that measure IU’s!!
I started diving into how the body produces vitamin D and found essentially two ways… sunshine and diet.
Sunshine goes through a process that eventually ends up with the liver storing Vitamin D3. This is an inactive form of vitamin D that needs to be converted into the active form of vitamin D. In order for this conversion to happen, you need to be well hydrated, you need to have good kidney function and a strong immune system….
The problem is that if you have low vitamin D levels, then you inevitably will have a low immune system (weak probiotics) and that’s why vitamin D levels begin to drop because vitamin D3 in the liver struggles to be converted into the active form of vitamin D that the body can use…
This is why I don’t recommend taking vitamin D3 supplements… because you will fill up your liver with an inactive form of vitamin D that it won’t know what to do with… this is how people end up with vitamin D toxicity…
Labs measure vitamin D3 levels so your lab numbers may look like they’re going up, but that’s not indicative that your body is actually getting any more vitamin D in the active form it can use.
Everything started to point towards improving the health of the probiotics living in the gut…
Good vitamin D levels are best measured by the quality of your sleep
Since vitamin D is a pro-hormone, it means that many other hormones are derived from vitamin D. Hormones like thyroid hormones, serotonin (feel good, happy hormone), melatonin (sleeping hormone).
Knowing this, I started looking into boosting my vitamin D levels in a natural way… better question, what probiotics do I need to get good vitamin D levels?
There’s a very important lesson I learned from brewing beer about probiotics and fermentation… that is that probiotics make vitamins through the process of fermentation… This means that anytime you find yourself deficient in any vitamin, you have to start looking into what probiotics make the vitamin and what food do they ferment to make the vitamin.
Need vitamin A? Look at carrots… carrots don’t have vitamin A, but they have beta-carotene. When you ferment carrots like with kimchi, you get vitamin A…
Knowing this, I started looking for fermented foods that would have vitamin D and I came across fermented cod liver oil and fermented skate liver oil!
This is what I call a real energy booster!!
When I first added fermented cod liver oil, I was mostly looking for more energy… but I was pleasantly surprised at how it improved my sleep…
It was crazy to think that I was tired all day, but when I tried to sleep at night, suddenly my anxiety would kick in, my mind would start racing and then came the insomnia…
Others who started with the Better Sleep Challenge, also started to experience the same improvement in sleep…
Take that all you people who say “there’s nothing you can do about this…”
Truth is, you can improve your energy levels and you can improve your sleep…
I didn’t understand how fermented cod liver oil worked when I first started, but now that I understand that it helps with overall hormone production, I can see why doctors don’t seem to know about it or want to talk about it… it competes with the vitamin D3 supplements and hormones they want you to take for life…
Fermented cod liver oil is great, but remember that it will not work nearly as effective if you are dehydrated… if you have gas, bloating, or constipation… or if you have dry skin, then please start with the 5-day hydration challenge…
There’s more to this, but honestly, just these two steps alone can take you from thinking you can’t do anything about this and feeling hopeless to knowing that you are in control of your health…
Once you complete a hydration challenge, then move forward to the better sleep challenge and incorporate this amazing energy booster….
