Solving My Own Energy Crisis: Better Diet and Sleep Strategies

My get-up-and-go has escaped, and I’m doing all I can to get it back. I’m smart enough to know that I can’t rely on quick fixes like drinks or pills. To solve my own energy crisis, I’ve got to drill-baby-drill down the basics: better food and more sleep.

I’ve been so busy these past two weeks, I feel like I could crawl into bed and hibernate for a week. I know when my energy drain started: I did a marathon in the Sierras last weekend, and I had to travel before and after the race. Talk about a complicated training schedule—and a tough recovery too. I’ve been skimping on sleep, jetting across time zones, slacking on nutrition, and subjecting my body to all sorts of physical extremes.

Now, I’m en route to New York and then to Chicago for some nutrition conferences. To try to eke more energy out of my weary body, I’ve decided that I’m going to serve as my own research project to see if what I eat really does impact how energized I feel. Here are the terms of my experiment.

Eat every three to four hours—period
The busier I get, the longer I go between real meals; even snacks go by the wayside, as empty Diet Coke cans stack up by my computer instead. When lunch doesn’t roll around until 2 p.m., that’s a problem. I’ve decided regardless of how many deadlines I’m under, I am eating breakfast when I wake up, a snack at 10 a.m., lunch at 1 p.m., an afternoon snack around 3, and dinner around 6 or 7 p.m. While research is sketchy about whether eating smaller, more frequent meals is better for energy levels, I know that, personally, it keeps me from binging on junk food just because I’m ravenous.

Stop overeating
When you overeat, you feel lethargic. It’s no wonder that after holiday dinners, most of us just want to roll to the couch for a nap. This is a vicious cycle that I find many overweight people suffer from: They overeat, it zaps their energy levels, and so they exercise less and get heavier. A dietitian colleague says it’s “like a snowball rolling downhill that just keeps getting bigger as it rolls.” So by eating small meals and snacks, as detailed in my first point, I’m hoping to avoid this unfortunate side effect as well.