A nutritional counselor explains how you can use your diet to keep your energy levels up enough to keep up with the challenges of start-up life.

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As a busy entrepreneur you're probably going non-stop all day, but that doesn't mean your energy levels keep pace with your to-do list. Despite a consistently packed calendar from when the alarm rings in the morning to when we shut out the light at night, many busy professionals veer wildly from a post-coffee 11am energy buzz to a near catatonic post-lunch lull in the afternoon.

This can't be good for your productivity, but what's to be done about it? Afternoon napping has been suggested by many and seems to align well with humans' natural circadian rhythms, but if your customers or your kids make that option untenable, are their other possibilities for dealing with your daily energy rollercoaster?

On blog Dumb Little Man recently, nurse and nutritional health counselor Penny Klatell suggested busy professionals consider eating themselves to more consistent energy levels. "Food is both the culprit and the treatment for a big part of our lack of energy, muddled thinking, and mid-afternoon drowsy eyes," she writes, before offering advice on how to modify your diet to keep your mind and body on an even keel throughout the day.

Aside from solid-but-expected advice you've no doubt already heard from your mother ("Eat your breakfast!!!"), Klatell suggests several other dietary adjustments:

Complex beats simple, for once. We all know simple carbohydrates like sugary snacks, pasta and bread cause energy levels to spike and crash. Klatell nudges readers towards the alternative: "Complex carbs take longer to breakdown. Your body digests them more slowly so they supply energy at a slower and more sustained rate than simple sugars. You can get complex carbs from whole grains and cereals, beans, and vegetables."

Drink your way to more energy (no, not that kind of drink). "Dehydration causes fatigue. Even mild dehydration can slow your metabolism, drain your energy, and make you feel tired," writes Klatell.

"There's no easy answer to the question: 'How much water should I drink?' The answer really depends on many factors including your health, your age, how active you are, and where you live. For the average healthy adult who lives in a temperate climate, the Institute of Medicine recommends around 3 liters (about 13 cups) of total water intake a day for men and 2.2 liters (about 9 cups) of total water intake a day for women," she says.

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Diet Tricks for Entrepreneurs

AUGUSTA, Ga., June 2 (UPI) -- Adolescents who don't eat enough fiber tend to have bigger bellies and higher levels of inflammatory factors in their blood, U.S. researchers said.

Dr. Norman Pollock, of the Medical College of Georgia and the Institute of Public and Preventive Health at Georgia Health Sciences University, and Dr. Samip Parikh, an internal medicine resident at GHS Health System, said the study involved 559 adolescents ages 14-18 in Augusta, Ga.

The researchers found the teens consumed on average about one-third of the daily recommended amount of fiber.

Low-fiber consumers in the study were more likely to have more of the visceral fat -- belly fat -- found in and around major organs in their abdominal cavity, Pollack said.

"The simple message is adolescents need to eat more fruits, vegetables and whole grains," Pollock said in a statement. "We need to push recommendations to increase fiber intake."

The study, published in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism, found only about 1 percent of the young participants consumed the recommended daily intake of 28 grams of fiber for females and 38 grams for males.

The study appears the first to correlate dietary fiber intake with inflammatory markers in adolescents, the researchers said.

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Low-fiber diet as teen, bigger belly later

Have thoughts of summer brought a smile to your face or are you stressing that youd better lose some weight? This is the time of year when many people resort to crash dieting. However, extreme diets are a terrible idea because they are not safe and ultimately they never work because no one can walk around feeling hungry and exhausted for very long. The good news is, to get beach body ready, you dont have to. Heres a better way:

Dont: Skip breakfast Do: Start your day off with a hearty breakfast If you are trying to shed pounds, skipping breakfast to save calories is counterproductive. By mid-morning, hunger kicks in and sets you up to overeat. The right kind of breakfast, such as a parfait made with high-fiber cereal, berries and some Greek yogurt, will jump-start your metabolism early in the day and keep you feeling full right until lunch.

Dont: Go cardio crazy Do: Focus on weight/strength training Cardio exercise is great for releasing endorphins and getting your heart rate up, but numerous studies have shown that it does not help much with weight loss. People who engage in prolonged cardio exercise often wind up feeling hungrier, which can lead to overeating and poor food choices. Exercise burns calories, its true, but if youve eaten more calories than youve burned by days end you are going to gain weight. Far more effective for weight loss is weight training. Lifting weights builds up lean muscle mass, and for every pound of lean muscle mass you add to your frame you can burn an extra 35-50 calories per day. That means if you add an extra 10 pounds of muscle, youll burn nearly 500 calories more per day enough to lose about 1 pound of fat every week!

Dont: Cut out carbohydrates Do: Eat more high fiber carbs Its a myth that carbohydrates make you fat. Your body needs carbs for energy and cutting carbs from your diet will leave you weak, irritable, and even nauseous. For healthy weight loss youll definitely want to eat more high fiber carbohydrates such as vegetables, fruits, and whole grains. Dietary fiber has zero-calories so the more fiber a food has, the fuller youll feel after eating it. Not only will you eat less during the day, fiber helps stabilize blood sugar levels by slowing digestion, which in turn puts an end to sugar cravings.

Dont: Be unrealistic Do: Set realistic short-term goals Thinking you can lose 20 pounds in a month is unrealistic and trying to lose that much that quickly is dangerous. A healthy rate for weight loss is about 1-2 pounds per week, and you can achieve this by eating a balanced diet thats satisfying and easy on calories and fat. Add moderate exercise to the mix, like yoga or a resistance workout, and youll see results even faster.

Dont: Ignore those between-meal bites that really add up Do: Write down in a food journal what you plan to eat and then stick to it Planning meals and snacks in advance leaves nothing to chance and journaling makes you accountable for what you put into your mouth. A study of nearly 1,700 dieters from Kaiser Permanentes Center for Health Research found that those who kept track of their food, drinks and exercise everyday lost twice as much over six months as people who did so occasionally or not at all.

Remember, just as it takes time to gain weight it takes time to take weight off. Depriving yourself of food to lose weight is bound to backfire because in the end being hungry just isnt sustainable. Eating well will get you slimmer this summer, and youll hit the beach looking and feeling great too.

Tanya Zuckerbrot MS, RD, is a nationally known registered dietitian based in New York and the creator of a proprietary high-fiber nutrition program for weight loss, wellness and for treating variousmedicalconditions. Tanya authored the bestselling weight loss bookThe F-Factor Diet, and she is the first dietitian with a national line ofhigh-fiber foods, which are sold under the F-Factor name. Become a fan of Tanya onFacebook, follow her onTwitterandLinkedIn, and visit her websiteFfactor.com.

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Do's and don'ts for getting beach body ready

Jun 1, 2012 7:00am

For decades, medical experts have been concerned that high-protein, low-carb diets like Atkins could be damaging to the kidneys, but a new study found that this isnt the case in otherwise healthy patients.

Researchers from the Indiana University School of Medicine compared the effects of such a diet to that of a standard low-fat diet in 307 obese people who did not suffer from kidney disease or other chronic illnesses.

After a two-year period, they found that the high-protein, low-carb diet didnt cause noticeable harmful effects on healthy obese patients kidney function compared to obese people who followed a low-fat diet.

Despite decades of concerns about low-carb, high-protein diets that may cause kidney damage in healthy people, there were no signs that this would be the case after a 2-year period, said Dr. Allon Friedman, lead author of the study, published in the Clinical Journal of the American Society of Nephrology.

Protein in the blood contributes to important protective benefits to the body, including fighting infections, blood clots and improving circulation in the body. Normally proteins are too big to pass through the kidneys filter into the urine, but proteins from the blood can leak into the urine when kidney filters are damaged, according to the NIH.

Abnormal amounts of protein in the urine, known as proteinuria, usually point to some sort of kidney disease, regardless of diet. But, researchers found that the most important way to reduce protein in urine did not have to do with the type of diet was the actual amount of weight lost, not really how you get there, Friedman said.

The results are relevant to the millions of healthy obese adults who use dieting as a weight-loss strategy, researchers noted. More than one-third of American adults are obese, according to the CDC.

Despite the promising results, Dr. Joseph Vassalotti, chief medical officer of the National Kidney Foundation, cautioned people to take the findings with a grain of salt.

The population studied does not apply to most patients with or at risk for chronic kidney disease, since the study participants had no evidence of chronic kidney disease or other illnesses, said Vassalotti.

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High-Protein, Low-Carb Diet Safe for Kidneys

Lets say you believe in God (most Americans do). Lets say youre deeply religious (most Americans say they are). So what does God want for you? You can be pretty sure God wants you to be happy, to be charitable, to be honest, to be kind. You can be pretty sure God doesnt care if youre rich, beautiful, famous or thin, right? Well, that thin part may take a little explaining.

With the U.S. tottering under an obesity epidemic that has left two-thirds of all adults and one-third of all kids overweight or obese, public health experts are despairing of finding new ways to get Americans off their duffs, away from the fridge and back into at least nominally healthy habits. Fad diets are useless; gym memberships do nothing at least if they go unused; public service ads get ignored. But, as we explore in this weeks issue of TIME (available to subscribers here), where all of those efforts have failed, faith could succeed at least according to Pastor Rick Warren.

Two years ago, Warren, the author of the ber-bestseller The Purpose Driven Life and the leader of the Saddleback mega-church in Lake Forest, Calif., was struck by how out of shape his 20,000-strong congregation had gotten and, he readily admitted, he was no better, tipping the scales at 295 lbs. or a full 90 lbs. too much for his 6-ft.-3-in. frame. He suspected he had a way to fix all that one that might work in the wider world as well and the secret, he believed, lay in Scripture, specifically in the Book of Daniel.

(MORE: The Book of Daniel: Is It Really About Diet?)

Theres a lot that happens in the Book of Daniel, but the critical passage occurs when Daniel and three other Jewish boys are brought to the court of the conquering King Nebuchadnezzar, where they are to be fed and trained so that they may serve in the royal circle. But as the Biblical passage recounts, the boys resist at least in part, refusing the rich foods of the kings table and choosing a more spartan fare instead:

Daniel resolved not to defile himself with the royal food and wine, and he asked the chief official for permission not to defile himself this way Please test your servants for ten days: Give us nothing but vegetables to eat and water to drink. Then compare our appearance with that of the young men who eat the royal food, and treat your servants in accordance with what you see.

What the chief official saw, of course, was that Daniel and his friends had grown fitter and stronger than the other servants. It wasnt vegetarianism or vigorous exercise that had worked that magic though those were part of it. Instead, it was a belief that it was impossible to serve God fully if you were out of shape or unwell. For Daniel, getting fit was a triumph of faith and Warren was convinced his church members could find motivation the same way.

With that was born the Daniel Plan, a sweeping program of smart eating (and yes, lean meats are included), workout classes, small-group support meetings, walk and worship sessions and more, much of it made available both in person and online. Warren recruited three marquee names from the world of medicine Drs. Mehmet Oz, Daniel Amen and Mark Hyman (all of different faiths) to help spread the good-health message, and the Saddleback members fell in love with the plan. More than 15,000 of them have signed up so far and in the past 18 months alone, they have lost a collective 260,000 lbs.

(MORE: Dr. Oz: How Faith and Health Go Hand in Hand)

The bigger question about the Daniel Plan is whether it could work in other churches both evangelical and non-evangelical not to mention in synagogues, mosques and other houses of worship. Warren is betting it can, and, according to Hyman, is considering rolling out the program to 1 billion people worldwide over the next decade. Non-believers may grumble at the religious component of the plan, and Warren himself has stirred controversy over time with the strictness of his evangelical teachings. But this mission may transcend all of that. We all get sick, regardless of religion, says Hyman. When it comes to getting well, he and others argue, we cant be choosy about where we get our answers.

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Rick Warren's Diet: Does God Want You to Be Thin?

Overweight hedgehog Roly Poly (right) pictured on scales at Secret World Wildlife Rescue in Somerset next to a regular adult hedgehog (left).

Bethan Evans, Reporter Thursday, May 31, 2012 10:00 AM

A HEDGEHOG, aptly named Roly Poly, has been declared obese and put on a strict diet at Secret World Wildlife Rescue Centre in East Huntspill.

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The hungry creature has grown so big he is now twice the normal size of his companions and was found in a garage, by a Minehead couple, wrapped up in an old Father Christmas jacket.

At that time he was too underweight to hibernate safely and was kept warm on a heated pad. But Rolys downfall was his love of cat food and staff at the centre found he now weighs 1kg 950g, and is so large he cannot curl up into a ball.

Visitors will also have a chance to see a host of animals and birds at Secret Worlds wildlife babies open weekend from Saturday to Tuesday.

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Roly Poly put on a diet!

Obese hedgehog put on diet

10:30am Thursday 31st May 2012 in News By Kirsty James

A HEDGEHOG taken in by Secret World wildlife rescue has been declared obese.

Roly Poly has been put on a strict diet by staff at the East Huntspill rescue centre after he weighed in at a whopping 1kg 950, twice the size of his companions.

A retired Minehead couple found Roly in a garage wrapped in a Father Christmas jacket. He was too underweight to hibernate safely so they put him in their conservatory where he was kept warm on a heated pad.

His weakness for cat food meant he put on so much weight he could not curl into a ball.

Secret World founder Pauline Kidner said: Weve had to house him in an otter box because a normal hedgehog one is far too small and his intake of cat food and cat biscuits has been reduced to 150g per day so hes gradually losing weight.

For a chance to see orphaned or abandoned animals and birds go to Secret Worlds Wildlife Babies Jubilee Open Weekend from Saturday June 2 until Tuesday June 5.

Doors open from 10am to 4pm. There is no admission charge but donations are welcome on the day.

The charity is also asking for donations of tinned kitten and puppy food to help with a recent influx of orphans.

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Obese hedgehog put on diet