How to Eat Right for Success and Energy During Finals

This is a list of foods and actions that can help you stay energized and motivated during stressful times like finals week in college.

Get 8 - 10hours of sleep each night.

First thing in the morning, drink a big glass of water. Your body dehydrates during the night.

Stretch and do some deep breathing before you do anything else.

During your day, take a moment to stop and take a deep breath.

Eat copious amounts of the following foods: apples, salads, miso soup, celery, broccoli, hemp seeds, sunflower seeds, almonds, any kind of dark green leafy vegetable like chard or kale.

Live this proverb: Breakfast like a king, lunch like a queen, and dinner like a pauper. (You need need need breakfast because you need to fuel your day somehow. it's better to eat breakfast and lunch, but to skip dinner if you're going to skip something, because in order to get adequate rest, you shouldn't have anything in your stomach.)

Tips

• Buy a water bottle and ALWAYS have water to drink throughout the day.
• Remember to breathe!for you to be calm
• Trust yourself and all the work that you've already done.
• Stay away from processed sugar like corn syrup or even cane sugar. Not only are these harmful to your liver but they spike your blood sugar content, then you crash and need more. This is empty food and starves your brain!
• Instead, eat good oils: hemp, flax, or olive oil. These feed your brain, and insulate your nerves.
• Also, eat GOOD FATS, which are UNSATURATED FATS. These include almonds, sunflower seeds, avocados, fish oils (omega-3 fatty acids), and all of the above oils. Again, these insulate your nerves.

Warnings

• AVOID COFFEE!! The caffeine in coffee goes right to your adrenal glands and causes them to secrete cortisol. Cortisol is your flight or fight response hormone. So the charge or buzz you feel when you take caffeine is actually just your cortisol raising. After an extended period of this, your adrenals can actually become permanently damaged. (In case you don't know, your adrenals are the energy generators for your body. So in the long run, coffee doesn't give you energy, it really defeats your body's own way of generating energy.)