How to increase your energy and motivation.

There are products galore to improve energy and motivation. There are energy drinks, exercise programs, self-help books, therapy, drugs, even coffee!

Here are two practical actions you can take to boost your energy, motivation, and general mood. Neither one will cost you any money, and they don’t take much time.

1. Smooth out your blood sugar:

Your blood sugar is the primary source of energy for your body, including your nervous system. If you eat in a way that creates low blood sugar, you may experience:

• Waking in the night and nightmares
• Brain fog and concentration problems
• Heart palpitations and anxiety
• Hunger, or the reverse: a feeling of aversion to food, even if you should be hungry
• Mood swings and nervousness
• Headaches
• Blurry vision
• Jittery, shaky feelings
• Lightheadedness, dizziness, and loss of balance and coordination

You can have low blood sugar from… eating sugar!

Eating sugar or refined carbohydrates (bread, chips, pasta, cakes, cookies) can put too much sugar into your bloodstream. Your body reacts to prevent high-sugar damage by flooding the bloodstream with a hormone (insulin) to bring the sugar levels down. The high sugar emergency caused too much insulin hormone to be released, and now the sugar drops way too low. You feel terrible and crave sweets, bread, chips—anything that will bring up the low blood sugar. But you overeat the carbs and sugar, and now your blood sugar goes too high. Your body has another sugar emergency, over-produces insulin again, and the whole cycle repeats. “Roller-coaster” blood sugar is a very common scenario and can cause chronic symptoms from low blood sugar. Solution:

1. Avoid eating sugar (cake candy, cookies, ice cream, soda, beer, wine) and limit your carbs intake (bread, pasta, rice, and white potatoes).
2. Eat protein (meat, eggs, cheese, nuts) with every meal and every snack.
3. If you feel jittery, like you have low blood sugar, eat protein and vegetables instead of chips, bread, and sugar. Keep eating protein and veggies (for example, no-sugar peanut butter on celery) until you feel better.

Another way you can have low blood sugar is not eating regularly enough:

Your body runs out of stored blood sugar about four hours after a meal. So if you skip lunch, by dinner time, your body can have to break down protein from the muscles to make blood sugar. This problem is worse if you have fatigued adrenal glands. Your adrenal glands prevent your body from being damaged by stress, so if you’ve been surviving through the stress of the past few years, maybe they’re not in wonderful condition. Solution: Eat frequently enough to prevent running out of blood sugar.

1. Eat within an hour of waking in the morning (you are running out of blood sugar from not eating since the night before).
2. Eat again four hours after a meal.
3. A snack will give you one to two hours to bridge two meals to avoid running out of blood sugar.

My patients often report remarkable improvements from eating this way. They can think more clearly, sleep better, and have more energy.

2. Stop feeling overwhelmed, and be more motivated! Do this simple exercise:

If you have too many jobs, responsibilities, deadlines, and things you are behind on—you may feel overwhelmed. It’s hard to be motivated to do more when you feel like you can’t keep up with what you’re already supposed to be doing. The problem: You are using up too many of your available “attention units.” You can feel irritable and at the end of your rope, or you may just feel tired and unmotivated.

The exercise:

1. Take pen and paper and write out a list of the things you have your attention on. List the things you haven’t finished yet, or need to do. The list can be any length, but try to make it complete.

EXAMPLES:

• Grocery shopping for this week
• Finish next phase of a major project at work
• Take the car in for maintenance
• Catch up on laundry
• Call and visit with a family member
• Buy a birthday gift for a friend
• Get the exterior of the house painted
• (Etc.)

2. Circle the items on the list that you could complete (finish all the way) in the next hour.
3. Get busy and do these tasks right now.
4. Notice any difference in how overwhelmed you feel—do you feel better now?
5. You can continue to work on your list. In general, do the tasks you can complete (finished all the way) first.

The reason that this exercise works: Every item on your list is using up some of your available attention units. If you free some attention units (regardless of the importance of the task), you will have more available for other tasks, plus you won’t be as overwhelmed.

Allergies Don’t Have to be a “Forever” Problem

If you have allergies, you are usually doing your best to live with them. You are trying to avoid the foods and environmental substances that trigger your reactions (in many cases, you might not know what they all are). Even after avoiding the allergens, many people often have reactions anyway.

Many allergies are challenging or impossible to avoid (like Georgia pollen in the Spring!).

Allergies Often cause other Health Problems

Many common health conditions are either caused by or prolonged because of allergies.

If you have hormone problems, migraines, skin conditions, depression, anxiety, brain fog, ADHD, thyroid problems, digestive problems (and many more conditions), they might be caused by allergies. What is common for allergy-caused health problems is that they don’t go away or keep coming back. Your body can’t heal because of continued stress from allergy exposure.

You might think, “But that’s not what is causing my health problems because I don’t have allergies.”

It is very common to have allergies and sensitivities, but not know this. Food sensitivities can be delayed up to three days, so you’d never connect the reaction to a food. You can react to invisible environmental substances that you would never suspect, like dust mites and roach droppings.

The health problems you suffer from could be caused by stress to your body and immune system from allergic reactions.

Here’s a list of allergy information and facts that you’d want to know:

• People can develop new allergies to foods and environmental items (pollen, dust, animal fur) at any time in their lives.
• An allergy is an over-response of the immune system to a substance. Your body decides that a harmless substance is a threat and mounts a defensive response to it.
• Many food sensitivities are delayed reactions (called IgG sensitivities) and can cause reactions up to three days after you eat the offending food. These reactions are often not recognized as allergic reactions and can be almost anything (headaches, itchy skin, constipation, gas and bloating, blurred vision, etc.).
• Often, people with environmental allergies have no clue that they could also have food allergies or sensitivities.
• Most IgG (delayed) food sensitivities can be identified with a blood lab and eliminated simply by avoiding the food for three months or so, then adding it back into your diet on a rotating basis. Many health problems can be improved this way even though you never suspected that you had sensitivities.
• Often, we can permanently eliminate sensitivity reactions with acupressure treatments (acupressure in our clinic is acupuncture technology using lasers instead of needles). Sensitivity symptoms can be reduced or even eliminated with specific acupressure therapies.

Many sensitivities can be permanently eliminated using acupressure treatments. (Acupressure is acupuncture technology using lasers to stimulate the acupuncture points.)

Here’s a video explaining this:

Help for Allergies?

Correctly identifying patients who are allergy cases and discovering what they are allergic to is the first step. Remember: You may have no idea that your problems are from allergies.

Next is developing a treatment program to eliminate or reduce sensitivities and help the body to recover from the damage caused by that stress.

Note that this is very different from the usual medical solution of taking drugs to suppress allergy symptoms. If allergies cause your health problems, suppressing the allergic symptoms will not help you heal. Your body would have to stop reacting to the allergens to recover.

Many sensitivities can be permanently eliminated using acupressure treatments. (Acupressure is acupuncture technology using lasers to stimulate the acupuncture points.)

Here’s a video explaining this:

I have targeted programs to help many different kinds of sensitivity patients:

• Sometimes, all that’s needed is a short course of acupressure treatments and some supporting supplements.
• Other patients with long-term chronic health problems need more detailed analysis, labs, and help over a more extended period to fully recover their health.

If you’d like to find out quickly if I could help you and what you would  have to do:

Would you please take five minutes to fill out a health assessment survey and send it to me? I’ll review your information, then have my assistant call you for any additional information. Then, I’ll let you know if your case might be a good fit for my clinic. This assessment is complimentary, with no strings attached. Either I can help you–or point you in the right direction to get help.

Don’t give up! You can recover your health if you persist.

Allergy Success!