Food Hacks for Better Energy: Avoid Burnout and Stay Motivated with Vicky Rolfe
Would you like more sustainable energy? Are you looking for a way to release unwanted weight without counting calories? Are you ready to reclaim your confidence? Burnout is often attributed to poor eating habits and sleep deprivation.
Today's guest shares expert advice on how to avoid burnout and boost energy by eating the right food.
In This Episode, You Will Learn About:
How food affects our energy
Power foods to boost energy
Energizing snacks for on-the-go
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Importance of Food Intake
Would you like more sustainable energy? Are you looking for a way to release unwanted weight without counting calories? Are you ready to reclaim your confidence? Burnout is often attributed to poor eating habits and sleep deprivation. Today’s guest shares expert advice on how to avoid burnout and boost energy by eating the right food.
Let’s talk about what food to eat. One of the challenges that we run into is we’re a busy society, we’re constantly on the go, whether we’re running to work, we’re eating in between meals or in between meetings. Then we come home, we’re trying to scramble to make dinner for the family, and we’re constantly on the go. What are some foods that we can eat that are going to help boost our energy? And why is it important that we eat these?
First of all, let me say that it depends what kind of energy you are looking for. We have to understand that carbs is not bad. Carbs is the number one source of energy for your body. Whenever you want to boost your energy, automatically you’re going to look for carbs. The problem is that we look for carbs that are fast and easy, and are classified as junk food, like chips and highly processed chocolate and stuff like that, which gives us a boost of energy immediately. But the problem is maybe 30 minutes or an hour later, it crashes, we crash it because that energy is just gone because it was just sugar.
When we are looking to boost our energy, we are looking to eat something that is more sustainable and will give you energy in the long term. It’s still carbs, but just more complex carbs. We are looking at something like fruits. Bananas are very good. Apples, any berries or any citrus fruit. You can have water with lemon in it. Most people just put the juice of the lemon in it, but you have to put the lemon itself in the water because it’s really the oil on the peel of the lemon that is beneficial, not just the juice. So it’s very important to put a piece of the lemon in the water to boost your energy.
Anything as well as beans, lentils, fatty fish, like salmon are really good because the omega-3 is going to help you with that boost of energy. You have the classic coffee as well. Coffee is not bad. Overdoing coffee is not a great idea and putting too much sugar in your coffee is going to do the complete opposite effect. So you’re going to crash an hour later or two hours later, and you’re going to need another coffee to keep going. Black coffee is really the best one. If you’re not a coffee drinker, go for green tea. It has a lot of antioxidants in it, and also dark chocolate. Natural dark chocolate is really good and I know a lot of people who will be happy about that, right? But dark chocolate is really good for boosting energy. A little piece. Again, everything in moderation, but a little piece of diet chocolate.
We can still drink our coffee, we can still have our chocolate, we can still have our carbs. It’s just all in how we eat it, when we eat it, and how often, all in moderation. The quantities are very important, and also the timing when you eat it is very important.
When is the best time to eat and what are possibly some foods that we want to avoid eating that might do the opposite effect when it comes to our energy? You eat when you’re hungry normally, that’s a natural process of your body. Your body signals you: you’re hungry, you eat. However, in the society we live in, we’re so bombarded by images of food all the time that we don’t really listen to our body. We go with, “Oh, I saw a burger. I want a burger.” But in reality, you’re not really hungry. You just saw it and just stimulated you and you wanted it, pay attention to what your body is signaling you. You should have a hunger feeling before you eat, that’s a normal thing. If you don’t feel that hunger feeling, that’s probably because you’re not hungry and instead of going for food, just drink water. The foods to avoid are the highly processed food, high in sugar, high in starch. That will give you a boost of energy immediately, but will make you crash an hour later.
One piece of advice that was shared with me that has not only helped in eating and choosing the right foods, but also has cut down my shopping time at the grocery store is just shopping at the outer perimeter of the grocery store. You’ve got the produce, you’ve got your fish, your meats, your eggs, your milks all the way around, and never going down the aisles. I’m much more efficient when it comes to shopping, but I’m also eating everything that’s really healthy. It’s all of the items that are going to go in my fridge, never my pantry. It’s almost as if I want my pantry to be kind of bare. Yes, but again when you look at beans and lentils, those are important in your nutrition and those you cannot find in the perimeter. That’s true of the grocery store. And it depends also, I mean, it’s a good tip because the produce are always on when you enter the grocery store. However, in my groceries, if I go with the perimeter at the end of it, it’s ice cream and processed foods, it’s not the good stuffs. Focus on produce for sure, and fruits and vegetables, plenty of it. Meat, if you’re a meat eater, meat is good. My recommendation is to look for grass fed meat, because then you avoid having a lot of chemicals in your emat, even if it's not raised with antibiotics. Most of the time the animals are fed with grains that contain soy, and soy can challenge your body, your hormones, etcetera. Look for grass fed meat, avoid the aisle with the chips and the crackers and all of that stuff for sure.
I can definitely tell I’m a creature of how, but I only know my own grocery store, and that’s how it is. It is a matter of just paying attention and ensuring that you’re eating the foods that are less processed. That’s what is going to help as much.
Balancing Our Food Consumption
Now as I’ve mentioned, we’re always on he og. We’re constantly going from a meeting even, a lot of times we’re out at restaurants. We enjoy going out. We enjoy eating. Is there any tii you can share with us, where we eat delicious foods at these yummy restaurants or on the go, but without compromising anything that’s going to put weight on or affect our energy in mood levels?
What I tell all of my clients is whenever you’re out at a restaurant or on the go, make sure that you eat protein. That’s very important because that’s going to help sustain you feel full when you’re eating, so you will not reach out for the dessert that you want or the junk food that you’re looking for. So protein is one. We can find protein in nuts and seeds. I say always have nuts and seeds in your bag, you can have protein bar in your bag as well. Protein shake if it’s something that you can carry. If you’re at the restaurant, look for the meat, of you are a vegan look for tofu, for example. It's a good one with a lot of vegetables. Why vegetables? Because it’s going to make you feel full as well, because of the fiber in the vegetables. Protein and fiber are the two things that you want to have when you’re at the restaurant or whenever you are.
Also being mindful of kind of those hidden sugars in some of the meals that we eat at the restaurants. We were talking earlier and I had shared with her, I had just completely changed our whole household, changed our eating habits. My husband’s lost a lot of weight. I’ve lost a lot of weight and we’re just eating differently. It’s a lifestyle choice, but what we found is the surprising amount of sugar that is in salad dressings, ketchup, barbecue sauce, all of these go-to items that add a lot of flavor, but there’s so much sugar in it and that’s what adds these necessary calories. So we started to gravitate towards salad dressing like Walden Farms, which has zero calories, zero sugars. There’s no sugar ketchups that are out there. This PB two fit peanut butter, which is a powdered peanut butter that you add water to and it’s got high in protein, but those little changes can make a big difference. Just like going to a restaurant and putting the salad dressing on the side and then adding as much as you want it.
Yes. And you said it well, small changes. Often we start with, you want to change everything? I’m going to change everything and I’m going to throw everything that is in my pantry and I’m going to start anew. That’s not the way to go because as you said, it’s a lifestyle. One little step at a time, one little change at the time, and eventually you will reap the benefit of those minor changes that you don’t think make a big difference, but in the long run, it does.
Impact of Foods on Hormones
I want to dive a little bit deeper into how certain foods affect our hormones. Because our hormones change a lot as we age, and we just recently had our hormones checked as a family, and looking at as we’ve aged, how certain homes have been depleted, whether it’s because of our age or it’s been high levels of stress, husband that’s deployed all contribute towards that as well.
How can food affect our hormones and what might you suggest food we can eat to help balance ourselves out?
Hormones are really interesting and there’s a lot there. You have a bunch of hormones in your body, but the most important ones are estrogen, testosterone, cortisol, and insulin. Those are the ones that are the most common ones that we know, and all of them are affected by stress. And the lifestyle in terms of eating habits that you have. As we age, we produce less hormones. Which is a normal process, but the problem is when we reach a certain age, we think, “Oh, it must be just the andropause or the menopause and there’s nothing I can do about it.”
But this is so far from the truth. The first thing to do in rebalancing your hormones is to look at your diet. Food is the number one thing that can rebalance your hormones, it depends on which hormones. It depends on the issue you have with the hormones. So it’s hard for me to tell you which food specifically because it’s a case to case basis, but the basics is less junk food, for sure. Less sugar, processed food, and go for what we call the whole food. The food that is very little processed or not processed at all. And just by doing that, those little things with time, you will see a difference in your mood. You will see a difference in your energy level. You will see a difference in your weight. You will lose weight, burn fat, and you will feel more confident in your body without knowing really what happened. The food is the number one thing. We often talk about hormone therapy. Hormone therapy should be the last resource. Because there’s so much that can be done prior to boosting yourself with hormones that are natural for your body, then I’m not saying that I’m against hormone therapy or it’s bad, but I’m saying before looking for hormone therapy, change your lifestyle first.
Factors Affecting Our Lifestyle
All very sound advice, and what I’m hearing from you is it’s a lifestyle. I talk about the weekly body scan in ways that we can prevent burnout, which is standing in front of the mirror every week and looking, is our hair brittle dry thinning? Is it falling out when we look at our skin, is it dry, dull? That’s a sign of lack of hydration. You had mentioned drinking a lot of water, drinking water with lemon in it. Also are you bloated? Are you nauseous? Are you anxious or is there tension in your shoulders? And I got into the book and I talked about this weekly body scan and really being in tune as to what signals our body is communicating to us when we are burnt out, stressed out. And a lot of that is tied to what foods we can change in our diet to offset any of that, to overcome it, and creating a lifestyle where we don’t need to be living in this constant burnout phase. It’s making these minor adjustments that you’ve talked about. Not completely changing our whole life, but these little tweaks in what we eat that can have big outcomes in the long run on the energy that we want in our lives.
There’s so much more than just food. Food is only a part of the story. Things like sleep are especially important, the stress level that you have, your environment, where you live, what’s happening around you. All of those are to be taken into consideration when you feel this way, when you feel depleted, when you feel you’re about to burn out. Food is super important, but keep in mind that it’s not because you’re changing your diet, and you’re still super stressed. You’re still not sleeping at night, that everything will change by magic. No. It’s a group of things. It's a group of changes that we call lifestyle that will make a difference for you. There’s an episode that we did a couple episodes back where we talked about different ways that you could boost your energy, by getting better sleep. And we talk about even how often you change your mattress, how many hours you need, and different ways to fall asleep faster.
What are the three expert tips that you want to share with other people? What can they do to change their lifestyle that they’re looking for?
I just want to remind everybody that there are three things to take into consideration when you really want to see a change in your body and the way that you feel is the three “S”: your surroundings, your stress, and your sleep in addition to the food. But those three, make sure that you pay attention to it as well.
