Your body can be its own renewable energy source if you know how to keep it humming. Here's how:

• Trade in the Band-Aids. If you blow a fuse in your house, you can't expect to get power back by lighting a few candles and searching for food with a flashlight. You've got to find the bad fuse, replace it, and reset the system. Same with your energy. The first step to getting it back is to accept that a not-perfect fix might get you through today's energy crisis, but not tomorrow's.
• Get over the hump. One of the greatest things about your body is that it responds to what you're doing through mechanisms called feedback loops. You tell your body you want to watch House reruns all night, and it responds by downshifting energy production. That's why you can be too tired to exercise just from sitting around all day. But tell your body you need to walk around the neighborhood, and it responds by giving you the energy you need. And then your body teaches your brain that it wants to walk. That's how healthy behaviors become automatic habits. The first few times, you may have to coax yourself out the door. It gets easier.
• Do a sugar sweep. A sugar-filled diet gives you about a birthday candle's worth of energy, while a healthy diet is more like an eternal flame. Scrub simple sugars (they end in –ose, like glucose, sucrose, maltose, dextrose -- but ribose is OK), syrups, and any grain that's not 100% whole.