Finding Energy

Are you tired of feeling tired and want more energy?  

If you have spent any length of time on social media, it doesn’t take long to start seeing fitness advertisements or videos showing you how to get thin and build muscle especially this time of the year.  

Are you finding yourself influenced or motivated to take action?  why?  What are you looking to achieve?  Strength, trim figure, a number on a scale, wellness and healing?  There is great emphasis on how you should look and those “standards” change like our fashion trends.    It can be down right confusing... big butts no, small butts.  Long lean figure no, muscular curvy figure.  Who decides these standards of beauty? 

A trim figure, and a low number on a scale may build your confidence, but it doesn’t necessarily mean you are healthy.

I’ve been there…chasing results that change the reflection in the mirror and thinking health was  equated with reaching the number on the scale.  This couldn’t be further from the truth.  True health starts from the inside and the outside will become a reflection of what is happening on the inside.

Energy:

I started reading The Fatburn Fix by Dr. Catherine Shanahan (also author of Deep Nutrition), and my ideals of what health should look like has been challenged and changed.  She has encouraged me to dive deeper… more foundational, if you will.

Consider this...

If you spend 60k on a new car, you expect that car to give you the best optimal performance, right?  You will only want to use the high quality fuel it requires.  Sure, it will run on the cheapest grade fuel, but you risk optimal performance and possibly longevity.

Dr. Shanahan is asking us to remove all our perceived ideas of health and focus first on Energy.  Most of us are exhausted.  In our modern world we are busy moving through the days non stop.  We wake up, get ourselves or children ready for work/school, maybe work through lunch,  pick up the kids, prepare meals, do home chores while supervising the children’s homework, eat dinner, and start bedtime routine just to do it all over again the next day.  Whew, I think I need a nap just thinking about it!  When we are so exhausted, we sacrifice quality for convenience. 

When I was raising my older girls I was working full time and going to school in the evening for my art degree.  Dinners became whatever could be whipped up quickly and quality wasn’t part of the equation.  Once I left my full time job to stay home with my third daughter, I began to learn more about health, and small changes started to happen in the kitchen.  They were very small…baby steps.  Dr. Shanahan understands that energy is what needs to be our first goal, and she is the first one to make it make sense for me.  I’ve read other books, but this book, her book, gave me the proverbial  “lightbulb” moment.

I’m only half way through the book, but feel like I have been given a wealth of knowledge already.  The things I'm reading is exciting and I feel the need to share with you.  Here are some of my early take aways that I hope you find just as helpful and valuable as I have.  I don't want to spoil the book for you so I won't explain these points.

Take aways...

1. Sustainable Energy = Fat burning
2. We were created to burn fat for energy.
3. Most people have reprogramed their bodies to burn sugar over fat.
4. Being fueled by sugar causes us to burn through fuel quickly then forcing us to refuel often with more sugar (processed food, sweets, starchy carbs)
5. Our Brain fuels on fat.  More specifically, Ketones. Our liver breaks down fat into “smaller pieces” called ketones so that the fat can pass through the blood brain barrier.
6. Not all fat is equal.  Seed oils should be avoided as our fat should come from animal sources. (Avoid what Dr. Shanahan calls “The Hateful Eight”)
7. Maintaining our bodies by using sugar for fuel will take us to symptoms of hypoglycemia to insulin resistance to pre diabetes to type 2 diabetes.
8. There isn’t a such thing as one person being blessed with a fast metabolism and another being cursed with a slow metabolism.  Our metabolism is the results from what is going on with our cells.

I will do a follow-up with more takeaways as I continue to immerse myself in Dr. Shanahan’s book, but you don’t have to wait on my takeaways.  You can buy your own copy of The Fatburn Fix where you will get more in-depth science based knowledge straight from the Dr’s mouth (words).

You can find this book new on Amazon or shop it used on Thrift Books.