How to Get More Energy and Look Better

In "YOU: Being Beautiful," Drs. Mehmet Oz and Michael Roizen write about improving the outward signs of beauty by caring for your skin, hair and body.

Being healthy and energetic play a huge role in your appearance, so the doctors focus on how to power up your energy levels in order to look and feel your best.

Read excerpts from "YOU: Being Beautiful: The Owner's Manual to Inner and Outer Beauty" below.

YOU Test: Zapped

When's the first time you feel tired during the day?

a. When I awaken, even after sleeping a full eight hours every day for a week.
b. Morning, or at the latest midafternoon.
c. Whenever I move.
d. Whenever I have to deal with my boss.
e. Not until after a day of working 12 hours or more.

Results: If you answered anything other than E, it could be a sign that the energy systems in your body are either slightly or completely out of whack— causing you to tire even at times when you should feel vital and energized.

So what starts the process that steals your energy? What sets up the dominos, and what causes your first domino to fall? We don't know all the answers for sure, but we do know a few things that make your cellular energy plants—those mitochondria—inefficient.

Insulin Resistance: We become inefficient in getting the sugar to our production plants and distribute it into fat storage rather than into cells that need to use it to produce energy, such as muscle cells.

Viruses and Other Infections: Acute infections as well as chronic, low-grade infections can eventually cause the fuse to blow. We often see the buggers invade and fray the wires from your fuse box, reducing the amount of energy that can be supplied. Or the lines get frayed from lack of nutrients to keep them repaired (for example, lack of the healthy fat DHA).

That starts the "out of energy" cascade after a pregnancy or after an injury, when your immune system is vulnerable. Viral particles have been identified in the nuclei and mitochrondria of many cells of folks with serious energy deficits like fibromyalgia. Once one area feels less energetic, you put more demand on another area, furthering that cascade, so a little wire fraying by viruses can make you feel exhausted much of the time.

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Sleep Problems: Many people always have trouble falling asleep. Additionally, many of us (yes, we are guilty here at times) develop less than optimal habits that worsen our ability to sleep or obtain full sleep time and then we have to fight a vicious cycle. And when your immune system needs all the energy it can get—such as when it's fighting an infection for you—not resting your energy supply adequately acts to overheat those wires and worsen your energy problem. That weakens the energy your immune system can borrow from other parts of your energy stores. So you feel more tired.

When your body gets too little sleep or poor-quality sleep (not deep enough or not enough dreaming), you tend to have more pain (the lack of sleep doesn't allow you to refresh fully the neurotransmitters you have that normally suppress pain). And that extra pain drains the line of energy, too—so you feel wiped out very near the start of the day. Sleep is important to feeling beautiful.

Hormonal Imbalances: Your hormones are like the dimmers on your headlights—when you need bright lights, you turn on certain hormones to increase the energy sent to that area (for example, your immune system) and to decrease usage elsewhere. This fine-tuning starts in your hypothalamus and pituitary. Thus, there's a strong association between hormonal issues and energy issues.

We see these changes primarily with slow-functioning adrenal and thyroid glands, but small, important changes happen minute to minute. Stress causes increases in cortisol, which increases sugar in the bloodstream and insulin resistance—and that wastes energy in distributing sugar into fat instead of where it is needed to produce ATP.

The tough part here is that it's not always clear what the best ways are to deal with hormonal issues. Case in point: We physicians aren't sure whether to treat the numbers or to treat the symptoms patients have. We often try to "normalize the numbers from blood tests" even if we're not eradicating the symptoms.

The so-called normal range of blood levels for many hormonal levels is defined as the middle 95 (95!) percent of people with those levels; the top 2.5 percent are considered high and the bottom 2.5 percent are considered low. Unfortunately, that's just not good math for the individual. It's like saying that if the number that is normal is size 6 to 11 in shoes, then a 6 shoe will be okay for you, even if you have a size 4 foot. Not a good fit, but you'd be wearing a "normal"-size shoe.

Instead, we docs can choose to treat the symptoms as long as the treatment doesn't cause levels that are very abnormal on blood tests. Here's one example of why treating the symptoms (it's what docs learn to do—most important, listen to the patient) and not just getting a number on your blood test in the 95 percent range is important.

If a T3 (free thyroid hormone) level up to 1.4 is normal but we have to get up to 1.5 to eradicate your symptoms, we think we should listen to you and do that, periodically backing off to see if you can be symptom free with less thyroid hormone. Because when hormones aren't regulated to levels that are right for you, you've got a dimmer that keeps flipping from producing power full-time to producing power half-time. So that lack of thyroid hormone means your energy factories can't use the food you've eaten to produce those ATPs efficiently. That makes you feel tired.