Increasing Energy For Improved Productivity in My Business

Continuously moving forward is best when you want to grow your business, but there are also times where stepping back may be necessary.

After realizing I had a prioritization issue (see my last post on productivity here), I knew I needed to step back for a bit and get my priorities in order. It turned out health was at the top of my priority list, and I was neglecting it. I needed to work on me and my family’s health.

So, I took a mini break. I don’t know if break is the best word, and I can’t say it was a break from my business because I believed what I was doing would help me move forward better in my business.

Improvements Needed For Energy

The situation was that my weight had ballooned up to 200+ and my body fat was at 30%. My energy was erratic, and I didn’t feel all that healthy. When I did exercise, I was feeling weak and much more exhausted than I thought I would. I think because of my energy issues and lower productivity, I was not cooking as much, and we were eating out more.

When I cooked vegetarian meals for me and my daughter, she found them unappetizing. My other daughter eats meat and cooks for herself and doesn’t eat that bad, but I wanted to help her make some better food choices. Also, the last two winters, I had life-threatening illnesses, one hospitalizing me. As a contrast, before that and after I first became a vegetarian and was eating and exercising better, I barely got sick at all for several years.

I would prefer to be between 170 and 180, decrease my body fat to 10%, and be significantly stronger and more flexible.

Human Knowledge Combined with AI

I have amassed years of knowledge, including written notes on health, eating, and exercise. That has come in handy as I have regularly kept an updated 2-week menu for me and my family. I had all I needed, but I did not want to spend the next two weeks trying to come up with a plan. Then it hit me: we now have AI, which is supposed to help with things like this.

So, I gathered all the notes I had taken and typed them into a document. I came up with specific goals, including the ones I mentioned. I did the same for my vegetarian daughter. Any output from AI combined with my knowledge would help my other daughter. Through prompts, I asked AI to provide meal plans, exercise routines, and general health advice based on our situations, including the girls participation in athletics. And to help AI a bit and have it utilize some of the knowledge I had gained, I fed it the data from the typed document I had put together.

The output was not perfect, and it took awhile for me to get AI to provide something useful, but it ended up being a productive conversation with AI with impressive results.

My vegetarian daughter and I worked together to tweak the meal plans (that AI helped with) to her satisfaction, and now she is eating healthier by choice. We still tweak things when necessary, but it is 100x easier than it would have been just a year ago.

Path to Success

I started going to the gym again and was able to make it through a month of lifting and running. I am at the end of a suggested active 2-week exercise break. I’m older, so my body didn’t respond exactly the way I would have liked. But the important thing is, now, I can adjust and continue to exercise.

The exercise sometimes zaps my energy, which is the opposite of what I wanted. So, I researched and realized that for someone 50+ like myself, with limited time, I must continue to shift my mindset and workouts to be more geared towards fat burning and longevity as opposed to elite athletic training for competition. But now I know and I will continue to tweak.

I have the means now to tweak quickly and with less inconvenience than before. Having gone through this process and improving but not conquering my issue says to me that other things like lack of sleep, increased stress from my day job, overwhelm, and impatience in my results contribute to my periodic dip in energy and will have to be addressed.

Time to get back to it.

If you have any tips on how to increase energy, please feel free to share.