Foods and tips on improving your energy throughout the day
Key Takeaways
Nutrition and lifestyle factors are important for having sustained energy throughout the day.
Foods with a low glycemic index, like protein, fats, and fiber, provide your body with longer-lasting energy.
Foods with a higher glycemic index, like sugary and starchy foods, will lead to a quick energy boost followed by a crash.
Dehydration leads to low energy levels, so it’s important to make sure to take enough fluids throughout the day, and to take extra fluids after you work out.
You can also help to stabilize your energy levels by controlling stress, prioritizing sleep, and reducing your consumption of caffeine, cigarettes, and alcohol.
For optimal well-being, it’s important to have sustained energy levels throughout the day. Many people experience fluctuating energy levels, with one or more “crashes” during each day. This impacts your focus and performance, as well as your mood and social interactions. Keeping your energy at an even level helps you to be at your best all day long.
There are many different lifestyle factors that are important in keeping your energy levels more sustained and even throughout the day. What you eat has a huge impact on your energy levels – the food choices that you make can either give you sustained energy or lead to a huge crash after a meal. Other factors, like your fluid intake, sleep, and stress levels, also have an impact.
Keep reading to learn more about how to have sustained energy levels throughout the day.
Types of food that help increase energy
If you’d like to keep your energy levels more steady throughout the day, it’s important to consider the foods that you’re eating. Some types of foods provide longer-lasting energy, while others offer a quick energy boost that’s usually followed soon afterwards by a crash.
The most important factor to pay attention to is a food’s glycemic index, or GI. This is a measurement of how quickly that food raises your blood sugar. When you eat a food with a high GI, it causes a large spike in blood sugar. By contrast, a food with a low GI causes much less of a blood sugar rise.
Foods with a low GI are generally better at providing you with long-lasting energy. Proteins and fats generally have a very low GI – almost zero, meaning that they cause virtually no rise in blood sugar.
Many high-carbohydrate foods have a high GI. Sugary or starchy foods generally have the highest GI, meaning that they cause a large spike in blood sugar. This provides you with a quick energy boost, which can feel good initially. The problem is that the body very quickly metabolizes all of that sugar. As the sugar is metabolized, your blood sugar drops just as rapidly as it spiked, and the energy boost quickly turns into a crash, usually about an hour or two later.
If you want to have sustained energy, it’s best to avoid foods with a very high GI. Foods that contain a lot of fiber, such as whole grains, fruits, and vegetables, have a somewhat lower GI. This is because the fiber slows down the digestive process, so your body absorbs the carbs from the food more slowly. These foods provide you with more sustained energy, and will generally not provoke a crash. Research has shown that eating foods with a high GI is associated with fatigue, depression, and mood instability.
If you do eat a sugary or starchy food, consuming it along with protein and/or fat will help to lower the overall GI of your meal. For example, white rice has a very high GI, because it’s made up mostly of starch. If you combine your white rice with a good source of protein, like fish, eggs, tofu, or chicken, this will help to slow down your body’s digestion of the rice. Adding some healthy fats, like avocado, will further slow down digestion and help to keep your energy levels more stable after the meal.
Everyone’s body is a little bit different, so each person will react a bit differently to particular foods. Pay close attention to how you feel after you eat various types of foods. If you tend to experience a crash about an hour or two after you eat a certain type of food, consider swapping out that food for something else – preferably a food that’s rich in protein, fat, and/or fiber.
Water
Sometimes people think that they need a snack when their energy levels are low, when the problem might actually be that they need fluids. Even mild dehydration has consistently been found to lead to low energy levels, along with other issues like slower cognitive processing, headache, and mood changes.
To help keep your energy levels more stable, it’s important to ensure that you’re getting enough fluids throughout the day. Many people find it helpful to fill a two-liter bottle with water at the beginning of the day, and ensure that they’ve finished it by the end of the day. If you don’t like plain water, you can drink flavored water or herbal tea instead. Try to make sure that you’re consistently taking fluids all day. If you find that your energy levels are dropping, try taking a glass of water to see if that helps.
Be particularly mindful of your fluid intake around the time that you exercise. Take some fluid before you start working out, to ensure that you’re not dehydrated when you start. After your workout, you’ll need to ensure that you replace the fluid that you lost. The general recommendation is to take 150% of the amount of fluid that you lost through sweat – the extra fluid replaces the fluid that you’ll lose through your urine in the period following your workout.
The average person will lose about 1 to 1.5L of fluid per hour of working out, meaning that you’ll need 1.5 to 2.25L of fluid to replace what’s been lost during each hour of exercise. However, this can vary a lot from person to person, depending on factors like the temperature of the environment and the intensity of your workout. If you’re sweating more, take more fluids afterwards to help prevent dehydration.
Recommended Reading: Water and its effect on blood glucose
What other changes can you make to improve your energy levels?
In addition to paying attention to your food and fluid intake, there are also other lifestyle factors that are important for keeping your energy levels stable.
Reduce stress. Stress causes your body to produce a hormone called cortisol. This increases energy immediately, but then leads to a crash later on. Over the long term, high stress levels are strongly associated with fatigue. Finding ways to control your stress, such as taking time off from work and doing relaxing activities like meditation, is crucial to help keep your energy levels more stable.
Prioritize sleep. In our modern society, many people don’t make sleep a priority. You need around 7 to 8 hours of high-quality sleep every night in order to have enough energy to get you through each day. Make sure to go to bed early enough to get this amount of sleep before your alarm goes off in the morning. To help you sleep better, make sure your bedroom is dark, and avoid all screens for at least half an hour before bedtime. You can’t make up for a lack of sleep at night with a nap during the day. Instead of napping, go to bed earlier at night, allowing you to get enough sleep to get through the day without feeling tired.
Watch your caffeine intake. Caffeine gives you energy, but as your body compensates and metabolizes the caffeine, you’ll often experience a crash later. Experts generally recommend a maximum caffeine intake of 400mg – this is about 4 cups of coffee, or 8 cups of green tea. Some people may still experience spikes and crashes in energy even when they stay within this limit, and may need to take less caffeine than this in order to stabilize their energy levels. If you need to reduce your caffeine intake, do this slowly, rather than going “cold turkey” and quitting all at once – otherwise, you’ll likely experience very low energy for a few days.
Smoke less. Similarly to caffeine, nicotine is a stimulant. It increases energy, but then leads to a crash later on. If you’re a smoker, then your smoking habit is likely causing fluctuations in your energy levels. It’s best to quit altogether, but if you’re not willing to do this, then reducing the amount that you smoke will help to keep your energy levels more stable.
Reduce alcohol consumption. Alcohol directly inhibits your cells’ ability to produce energy. It also interferes with sleep, which can lead to fatigue. The less you drink, the more stable your energy levels are likely to be. If you do choose to drink, try to leave at least four hours between your last drink of the day and bedtime, to allow your body time to process the alcohol before you go to sleep.
Recommended Reading: The importance of sleep
A health coach can help you to discover the factors that might be causing your energy levels to fluctuate. Through personalized nutrition and lifestyle coaching, they’ll help you to create a plan to achieve more sustained energy throughout the day, so that you can feel great and perform at your best.