subject: Where do We Get Our Energy? [print this page] Where do We Get Our Energy? Where do We Get Our Energy?
Go watch a little kid play. He'll be bouncing off the walls, careening from room to room, screaming and yelling and waving his arms. He'll fall down, jump up, climb on things, fall down, jump up, and run some more. We can't help but shake our heads and wonder, where does he get all that energy? How does he have so much energy, and why do we have so much trouble getting off the couch? How, in fact, can we become as energetic as that little kid? In order to figure this out it might help to actually look at energy, from where it comes and how we acquire it on a chemical level.
On the most basic level, our bodies use something called adenosine triphosphate (ATP) to fuel our cells. But where does ATP come from? The answer is simple: it comes from burning glucose or fat, both of which we derive from food and tend to store in our body as reserves. Sometimes our body can even derive ATP from protein in our bodies, but that is usually under extreme situations of starvations or carbohydrate absence. Basically, every single cell in our body uses either carbs or fat for energy through ATP.
How do your cells determine whether to use fat or carbs to fuel themselves? This is usually dependent on what kind is most available. If there is plenty of glucose in your blood and glycogen in your liver and muscles, than your cells use that. If there are none of them, it turns to fat and protein. Therefore, if your diet is rich in carbs, you will burn less fat because you will have plenty of glucose in your blood. When you eat less carbs, you will burn more fat.
That is why it is important to realize that the amount of energy we display when running and jumping around is directly correlated to how much ATP we are able to derive from our glucose and fat supplies. It is not enough to simply eat plenty of food; I'm sure you have met plenty of overweight people who are absolutely lethargic. Rather, the trick in having high amounts of energy lies in our ability to mobilize that energy, to derive ATP most efficiently from those stores, which is where being in great shape comes in. The healthier you are, the more you will want to jump around.
