The Come Alive Project

Category: Senior Fitness

  • Energy Bite 403 – Keep Your Cellular Batteries Charged

    Last week I wrote about the root source of your physical energy. Mitochondria and ATP, our “Cellular Batteries”. If you keep your Mitochondria healthy, your batteries will be charged. How do you do that? Exercise. Eating nutritious food. Sunshine. Rest and sleep. All these factors keep your Mitochondria strong, your energy up, and your susceptibility to disease down.

    But we aren’t upbeat and filled with positive energy all the time. Sometimes we get down. We get bored stressed out, anxious, angry, irritable, tense (physically and mentally) or depressed. Even when we wake up in the morning feeling alive and unbeatable, things happen during the day that just plain drain all that positive energy right out of us.

    What are some of these energy drainers and how do we combat them? Most of them fall into the categories of people, places and things. For example:

    • We get into silly arguments with spouses, friends or family members. Even simple arguments can drain the energy right out of us.

    • Resentments over long ago confrontations, situations, or events.

    • Clutter and mess. Many of us live surrounded by physical clutter or a messy environment. Based on all the “Marie Kondo” style books around today, we look at clutter as a major cause of stress.

    • Lingering illnesses like colds or flu, or simple injuries that are painful and irritating and seem to hang on forever.

    • Irritating or annoying people beyond those mentioned in the first bullet point above. Combine that with irritating situations that end up in “road rage” or similar untenable situations that can de-energize you for days.

    That’s just a sampling. Everyone has their own irritating and draining situations that are challenging and stressful. Remember that stress is the impetus for a lot of major physical problems, many of which are killers, or if not killers, at least a major threat to a comfortable aging process.

    Right now, a pandemic, major social and political challenges, social media abuse, overactive media outlets and other toxic de-energizers are causing an enormous amount of stress for most of us. How do we fight it off?

    We must keep our cellular batteries charged to live a long and energy filled life. We keep those batteries charged through plenty of physical movement, nutritious food, lots of oxygen through deep breathing habits, plenty of rest, and sunshine and nature.

    We will probably never be stress free. But if we keep our cellular batteries (Mitochondria) charged, we will  have a much better chance of reducing that stress, keeping our energy levels high, and living a long, happy, energy filled, purposeful life. I will be charting a weekly path through some of the best ways to keep the batteries charged as we move through the year.

    Thank you for reading.

  • Energy Bite 402 – The Root Source of Your Energy

    “What I want to share is that there’s a lot of Energy
     available inside if you know how to find it, fan it,
    and keep some oxygen on it.” 
    — Tim McGraw, from Introduction to Grit & Grace

    Energy production in the body can be a complex subject that uses a lot of technical language. I want to keep this as simple as possible so I will try and use only two technical words: Mitochondria and Adenosine Triphosphate which is commonly referred to as ATP. As for the use of the term Energy in this article, I will be referring to primarily as Physical/Biological Energy. This article is about the source of the physical energy available to you in your body.

    The field of study about the biology of energy transformations and exchanges within the body and between the body and the environment, is called BIOENERGETICS.

    Energy is your body’s capacity to do the things you want it to do. No matter how powerful your motivation or how strong your self-discipline, if you don’t have the CAPACITY to do those things you want to do, they won’t get done by you. So If you master your ability to produce energy, you will control your experience of aging and of feeling alive!

    So what is the process of producing energy? Your body has an incredible system that converts the fuel you give it into pure biological energy.

    In every cell of your body, there are tiny “furnaces”. These “furnaces” are called Mitochondria. You may have heard the term in High School Biology Class, and you may have heard the term in advertisements for supplements and other products that allegedly turn on your Mitochondria to fire up more energy.

    The primary role of Mitochondria is to break down nutrients to generate an organic molecule called ATP (Adenosine Triphosphate). ATP is produced by the conversion of the nutrients in your cells based on the fuel you have consumed. The ATP is a cellular structure that supplies the energy for many biochemical processes such as muscle contraction for body movement and other cellular processes.

    ATP is renewable based to some degree on the rate you use oxygen in your physical activities. It is continually being produced.

    Short Version

    Food > Digestion > Bloodstream > Cells (Mitochondria within cells) > Converted to ATP for Biological Energy storage and use for bodily functioning.

    Mitochondria and Aging

    According to Dave Asprey, creator of Bulletproof Coffee and author of The Bulletproof Diet, when mitochondria don’t make as much energy (ATP) as they should from food and air, it is called Mitochondrial Dysfunction. He goes on to say that if you are over age 40, you have Mitochondrial Dysfunction — He says it’s called AGING.

    But Asprey says that your mitochondria “listen” to the environment around you. He says that if you can “change the signal” they get by MOVING MORE, SUNSHINE, AND EATING FAT FOR FUEL, “you can change the way your cells make energy — which changes the energy you have to be you.” What a great way to say it. The FAT FOR FUEL part may not suit your nutrition mindset, but a balanced diet including lots of protein and some fats are certainly a consideration.

    I hope the above has helped you understand where your energy comes from. It should make clear the importance of moving your body, eating right, and otherwise taking care of that body that “is you”. If you have comments, questions, or even a differing opinion, feel free to email me at bob@thecomealiveproject.com.

    Thank you for reading.

  • Energy Bite 401 – Live An Awesome Senior Life

    “Live an Awesome Senior Life.” That’s an interesting title. What does it mean?

    To me, it means being healthy, having fun, doing a variety of different things. It means having a Purpose in life. It means sharing your life with others — family, friends or community. It means living without major pain or illness. It means being active. It means being able to go places and do things that make you feel good and feel alive.

    But there’s a catch. It takes health, fitness and personal energy to be able to do all of that and keep it up. It means you must fine tune your body all the way down to the cellular level in a way that gives you the physical energy to live the way you want — awesomely. Diet and Exercise are two major components of that energy production from the cellular level on up.

    When I suggest you need to fine tune your body, does that mean you must go to the gym every day, develop big muscles, or be able to run a half-marathon? Not at all. But it does mean you need to be able to do what your body is meant to do: Pull and push things, lift and carry things, twist and bend, and otherwise just plain be able to move and do things the way you want to.

    You need the strength and flexibility to be able to get up and down from the floor or comfortably get out of a chair or off the couch. That takes some training and consistent practice. So many seniors have a great deal of difficulty doing those basic movements.

    It’s also nice to be awe-inspiring to others just by the example of the energy others see in you. It shows up in your posture. It shows up in the way you move, and it shows up in your enthusiasm for living the awesome life you have built for yourself.

    Over the next several weeks, I’ll be writing about the what, why and the how of fine tuning the body, and easily (and not so easily) creating the energy you need as you get older. Next week I’ll be writing about how to get that mind-blowing energy boost all the way down at your cellular level.

    Thank you for reading.