“Boosting your energy” is an industry term for increasing your energy, but the reality is, when you boost your energy you are not really increasing it. It only feels that way in the short term. You are stimulating it, which means you are you are forcing your body to make a withdrawal from what some people call your reserves of life force, the amount of energy that you have available to you during your lifetime.

Yet, many more would say you have access to unlimited amounts of energy, only, if you don’t recuperate your energy and rely on boosting your energy, the wear and tear from all the stress will breakdown your body and ensure that you lose your power.

The problem is not that you are stimulating your energy, if you do it right that’s a normal function of life, but doing so without giving your body a chance to recover, causes your body to break down, excessive hormones to be released, toxicity to accumulate depending on the type of stimulant you use, and causes you to spend more energy than would be normal in a given 24 hour or other period of time.

All of this takes a major toll on your body, and your well being in the sense that you have to keep performing while living on the edge of exhaustion which negatively affects your emotions…

This is what happens when you rely on stimulants for energy, vs. proactively creating the space and time you need to make a healthy withdrawal and recuperate your energy.

You are not simply recuperating your energy when you recuperate, you are accomplishing soo much more.

1. You are recharging the nervous system
2. You are allowing the body to recover and heal from the prior stress
3. You are rejuvenating your spirit, your mindset.
4. You are maintaining homeostasis of the body and an alkaline environment.
5. You are giving yourself a change to refuel your body the proper way, with Nutrient Rich food.
6. You are giving yourself the chance to stabilize and get ready for what’s next…

When you just keep going, and rely on boosting your energy (stimulating) your energy to increase your energy, you are not in fact increasing your energy, it only feels that way. You are simply exhausting yourself, with a negative impact on your body and your personal power.

If you want to increase your energy, you have to manage it better, learn what that means and then recuperate (learn what that means) not only so that you increase your vitality but do it in way that helps you maintain your power, the very system that will utilize that energy, and convert it to performance and goal achievement.

At Manage Your Energy.com you will learn what it really means to increase your energy, manage your personal energy, and get your power back. Stay tuned.

John Allen Mollenhauer “JAM”.

Why are so many people tired, stressed and overweight? It seems the majority of people have a motivation problem; overeating and lack of exercise are implicated as the causes of the overweight condition.

You could say we are overweight because we eat too much and live sedentary lives and that both are causes of obesity and you would be right, at least in part, acknowledging the obvious.

But what is not so obvious, are all the hidden causes of obesity and overweight that are by far more influential in the rise of the obesity epidemic, that reinforce our food and fitness habits to begin with and many motivated people fall prey.

These are matters of lifestyle. How we manage time, spend and recuperate our energy, including but not limited to, the quality of the food we eat and our activity levels every day as we achieve our goals are things that factor into this equation.

Physical inactivity plays a major role in gaining weight, but the reason we are physically inactive most of the time, is exhaustion. How often have you said “I want to exercise” but you find yourself simply too tired throughout the day to get anything done. We’re overwhelmed and tired, lacking time, space and energy to do what we need for healthy bodies. Inactivity is a result, an effect, but not the original cause.

What about the claim that overeating is to blame? We are overeating, yet the primary reason, long before discussing a market saturated with addictive fatty foods, is that most people faced with relentless demands on their time and energy, are worn down and looking for a quick pick me up.

In that besieged state, not only do they eat more for the stimulation they crave and more of the addictive fatty foods that are extraordinarily convenient, but the combination of excessive stress and nutrient-poor food virtually guarantees they will overeat. Overeating is a result, an effect, but not the original cause.

Overwhelmed and exhaustion is the greatest threat to our wellbeing and our weight. They go hand in hand. Look at your life for a moment and think of the ways you feel overwhelmed or exhausted. How often do you feel this way? What makes you feel this way?

Where are you putting your focus - cause or effect?

Are you combating the negative effects of your lifestyle by eating less and exercising more? Or, are you addressing the lifestyle that is promoting over eating and inactivity…?

You can only deal with the primary causes of weight gain at the level of lifestyle. Everything else is an attempt at manipulating your current condition for a short term gain and the results of this approach are well documented.

Do you ever wonder why diets and fad exercise programs don’t work for you? Do you wonder why you start off good for a week or so but then the big plan fails and you feel even worse than you did before?

The high protein/low carbohydrate fad was the classic example of manipulation. Millions of overweight people, addicted to super stimulating junk foods, stopped eating refined carbohydrate and started eating no-carb animal protein to manipulate the storage of carbohydrate in their body to lose weight.

This so-called “solution”, while beneficial in the sense that less junk food was being consumed, replaced an already unhealthy way of life with another (consuming large amounts of high fat, nutrient poor animal protein) to lose weight. In the end, this does not lead to a healthier person. You are replacing one bad habit with another and this doesn’t really get you anywhere further into the downward trend.

Where in this grand misdirected project was there any talk of the lifestyle that was giving rise to the consumption of junk food to begin with? Or talk about food quality? The discussion was about weight loss and was non-existent. Meanwhile millions of people struggled, got sick, including Atkins himself (who died) and gave up. This is discouraging to anyone who hopes they can break free of this downward trend. But there is hope out there- once you discover the real problem.

The Real Problem

What is the real problem? Most of us are not managing our energy well. We are overwhelmed, caught up and overcommitted and this excessive energy expenditure promotes the downward trend – exhaustion, over consumption, physical inactivity and being overweight.

The addictive, stimulating food and drinks all around then purport to give us more energy and they don’t. Over stimulation by its very nature is exhausting. These nutrient-poor foods then drive us to over consume in an effort to get our nutrient needs met and it doesn’t happen. Our now overwhelmed and exhausted bodies are no condition to be active. And the answer is eating less and exercising more? You could not assemble a better trap for staying stuck.

Countless weight loss programs are sold as lifestyles and what’s really being said is, “lose weight for life” and of course it just doesn’t happen. Human beings are not robots, we want the natural experience of life and living on a weight loss program is not natural. It’s not that these weight loss solutions don’t or won’t work; it is that they don’t work alone, forever or in some cases, at all.

And so the cycle continues…

Few solutions address the real problem; your lifestyle – why you are tired and overeating, and physically inactive to begin with and the downward trend stays in play. It is this trend, complicated by all the solutions that do not solve the problem that give consistent rise to obesity statistics, even though we spend billions of dollars per year on weight loss.

This graphic above illustrates the downward trend on a population basis and it makes the point that the weight loss industry is not working. Eating less of foods that don’t serve you and exercising a fatigued body even more does not work. You will not see success and any illusion of success will be short-lived.

How you look, feel and perform ongoing are the direct result of your lifestyle, not the result of “eat-less” diets or “exercise-more” workout programs created for the express purpose of losing weight. There are many different factors that go into this lifestyle and contribute to the “downward trend”.

Looking, feeling and performing better is about avoiding becoming overwhelmed, exhausted and overweight. The only way to do that successfully is to manage your energy, including the quality of the food you eat and your activity levels in the process of achieving your goals. That’s means live athletically!

When it comes to your weight, it comes down to your lifestyle and until your lifestyle reinforces your both your health and success, you will find yourself in an extended stay on the downward trend, wondering how to turn it around with the latest weight loss program.

John Allen Mollenhauer, known as John Allen or “JAM”, is the lifestyle coaching columnist for MyWeightLoss.com. He is a premier lifestyle trainer and coach, and is the founder of Performance Lifestyle Solutions, www.MyTrainer.com and www.PerformanceLifestyle.com, where thousands of people are learning how to achieve their goals in better, healthier more practical ways – like Pros!

Do you have a Performance Lifestyle? If not, it’s probably about time you get one!

Copyright © 2008 Custom Media Communications, Inc, All Rights Reserved Worldwide.

There’s no doubt about it, we are pushing harder, faster and longer than ever before, for a variety of reasons. We are doing it for weeks, months, and even years on end. Our jobs expect more of us, our families are involved in more activities, we join more and more clubs and committees; we are sick and tired of being sick and tired! The problem is that we are trying to get the energy we need from a cup of coffee, a can of soda, a sugary snack, or an energy pill. When your energy is low, everything else is slow: your metabolism, satisfaction and success. You experience only a fraction of the fulfillment you could – as a business person, artist, athlete or entrepreneur, even as a parent or partner. To get the energy you want, you don’t need to buy hundreds of dollars’ worth of nutritional supplements, you just need to learn how to live in balance and get the right recuperation at the right time – even in the face of relentless demand. Let’s face it… when you are worn out, how do you look and feel? You are continuously pushed to work at higher, and higher levels, but your fitness and energy levels aren’t even close to what they need to be. As you collapse at the end of the day, you are in no mood to go to the gym or to tackle complicated meal planning, and you wonder, “How can I stay on top of things and healthy under the pressure, like other people?” You know better than anyone that living in a constant overwhelmed and exhausted state causes the overweight condition. When you look in the mirror and see the dark circles under your eyes and the growing waistline – you also know that you need to do something about it. Most people don’t have a clue why they feel so exhausted; they just need to be educated as to how to get out of the melancholy that faces them everyday. Today is your lucky day!

• Become a higher-energy person.
• Don’t drag through your day, skip through it!
• Find out how to recharge your energy.
• You can change your situation… revive your life!

Personal time management is a precious resource. Once you understand how to recharge your energy, and stop watching all the high-energy people enviously; you can be more positive, active, strong and enthusiastic every day! Quit complaining about being so tired all the time and make a decision to move forward!