It’s the cold and flu season, so what a perfect time to feature this article about how to fight off sickness, before it strikes.
It’s amazing that we aren’t sick every day of the year. We live in a veritable soup of viruses, bacterial, fungi, and other nasty invisible bugs. It’s only because of our amazingly effective immune systems and billions of specialized cells throughout our bodies, that we stay well most of the time.
However, in wintertime, we’re exposed to higher levels of infective agents (other sick people spreading their germs around) while our immune systems are often compromised by a variety of factors. These factors include psychological stress, the environment, ‘running on empty’ lifestyles, and poor diet. Here’s how to boost your immune system and avoid having to take all those sick days again this winter:
1. Lighter exercise
When you feel a sickness coming on, a super-high intensity workout is not a good idea, as hard training forces the body to do a lot of recovery. This is counterproductive at a time when your body needs all of it’s efforts on trying to fight off the oncoming sickness.
Although I usually recommend high intensity training, when sickness might be coming on, it’s just a good idea to get some lighter exercise instead.
Personally, I like to get outside for some fresh air and go for a bike ride or jog. These aren’t very strenuous for me, so they won’t cause my body to be forced to do a lot of recovery. But just getting out in the fresh air and getting the circulation going I feel is good to help the body fight off the sickness.
2. Loading up on antioxidants
We already know how important antioxidants are to overall health as well as immune system support.
For this reason, I make sure to really load up on antioxidant-rich fruits, berries, and veggies to help prevent sickness.
The top twenty antioxidant rich foods, as determined by the United States Department of Agriculture, are as follows:
- Small red beans (dried).
- Wild blueberries.
- Red Kidney beans.
- Pinto beans.
- Blueberries (cultivated).
- Cranberries.
- Artichokes (cooked).
- Blackberries.
- Prunes.
- Raspberries.
- Strawberries.
- Red Delicious apples.
- Granny Smith apples.
- Pecans.
- Sweet cherries.
- Black plums.
- Russet potatoes (cooked).
- Black beans (dried).
- Plums.
- Gala apples.
3. Green tea, Chamomile tea, and Kombucha tea
There is evidence that these three teas can help aid in strengthening the immune system.
Even if the effect is small, you can’t go wrong because they are loaded with powerful antioxidants unique to each tea.
For that reason, I try to drink a couple cups of green tea with a small bit of raw honey early in the day, and then at night, I have a couple cups of chamomile tea.
Kombucha tea is a fermented tea (naturally effervescent) that contains billions of friendly gut organisms (probiotics) that help to strengthen your immune system by bolstering your levels of good organisms in your gut.
Remember that 70 to 80 percent of your immune system lies in your gut.
You can find bottles of Kombucha tea at health food stores.
When I feel any sickness coming on, I start loading up on Kombucha tea, drinking it throughout the day. It has a strong taste, so I mix it with my normal teas at 1/3 Kombucha and 2/3 regular tea.
This isn’t a bad idea even for a regular habit, but it’s even more important when I feel a sickness possibly coming on.
4. Avoid ALL processed foods and soft drinks
If you’re serious about your health and getting lean for life, this should be an everyday rule for you anyway (except maybe for cheat meals). 
However, when you might have a sickness coming on, this is no time to bombard your body with processed foods, inflammatory omega-6 oils (soybean oil, corn oil, etc), fried foods, high fructose corn syrup, refined sugars, and chemical additives.
All of these force your body to do extra work to deal with all of this junk and the internal inflammation that they cause in your body.
Instead, this is a time that you need to give your body only wholesome unprocessed foods that are only 1 ingredient…fruits, berries, veggies, eggs, nuts, seeds, grass-fed meats, etc.
It will go a LONG way to helping to ward off that sickness that is trying to get a hold of you.
5. Get enough sleep
This is vital.. I cannot stress it enough.
Lack of sleep, even for a single night, will dramatically impair the activity of a key immune system component known as ‘natural killer cells.’
Most Americans do not sleep enough; nearly everyone needs seven to eight hours a night. Few actually get that much. Turn off the TV and go to sleep. If you think you may suffer from Insomnia, please read Unplugged.
6. Keep warm
You don’t catch a cold from being exposed to cold air, although there is ‘some’ anecdotal evidence that exposure to extreme cold can lower your immune system, increasing the chance you’ll pick something up. Cold air may constrict the blood vessels in the mucosa, while the low humidity level of indoor winter air dries nasal passages, leaving them more susceptible to infection.
Wearing several thin layers of clothes will help you stay warm in cold weather. The warmth from your body will get trapped in the air pockets between the layers.
7. Focus on Vitamin D (but not in pill form)
You need to be careful about artificial forms of vitamin D in many vitamin pills, as artificial vitamin forms are almost always either ineffective or possibly even detrimental compared to natural forms.
For this reason, you need to get your vitamin D naturally. The sun is the best source, and leads to a powerful strengthening of your immune system when your body can naturally produce Vitamin D from moderate sun exposure. See tip #10 below for more details.
Since you may not be going on a tropical vacation this winter, how can you still keep Vitamin D levels from falling dangerously low in your body?
Well, the best food sources of natural Vitamin D are egg yolks, fatty fish, organ meats, and some mushrooms. I also like to take a SMALL dose of cod liver oil daily in the deepest months of winter to make sure my vitamin D levels don’t fall too low. Make sure to take only small doses of cod liver oil, as large doses can give you an overdose of Vitamin A. I’d say I take half of the recommended dose on the bottle.
FYI – The synthetic version of Vitamin D is ergocalciferol (vitamin D2), while the natural form is cholecalciferol (vitamin D3). Fortified milk has added D2, not D3… so that’s not a good source.
8. Up the garlic
Used for centuries as a natural antibiotic and antiviral, modern formulations are now available in pill form.
Odorless garlic remedies also are available, but some nutritionists recommend that in odorless form the essential ingredient has been removed, and so recommend enteric-coated garlic. The enteric coating helps the pill dissolve deeper in your digestive track to directly combat the flu virus…and doesn’t result in garlic breath.
9. Keep stress in check
Your body will have a much easier time fighting off a winter cold without stress weighing you down.
Researchers estimate that 75 to 90 percent of all visits to primary care physicians are for complaints and conditions that are, in some way, stress-related. Every week, 112 million people take some form of medication for stress-related symptoms. This statistic is not surprising, given the wide-ranging physiological changes that accompany a stress response. Stress affects just about every bodily system or body part. Stress can play a role in exacerbating the symptoms of a wide variety of other disorders and illnesses as well.
Eliminate stressful activities from your schedule and make time for things that relax and calm you down. Yoga, reading, watching a comedy and listening to peaceful music are all great options.
10. Get some sun
Is sun exposure really as ‘deadly’ as the media would have you believe? Or can regular sunshine give you a better body and health?
One thing that never made sense to me over the years was how the media and other sources have always tried to portray sun exposure as ‘the sun’s deadly rays’. It’s as if they would have you believe that we need to live in caves and never see the sun to prevent cancer and stay in good health.
But this is absurd if you think about it. the sun is THE provider of all life on earth. Without the sun, everything on earth would die.
Throughout the majority of human existence (with the exception of the last few decades), humans have always spent more time outdoors than indoors. Nowadays however, most of us are trapped inside offices all week long and might only get out into the sun once a week, if that.
I’ve been doing a lot of reading and research over the last couple of years regarding sun exposure, cancer, vitamin D levels, etc. This subject of the sun and natural production of vitamin D can fill entire books, so I’ll try to summarize my opinions and what I’ve learned in the past few years through a lot of my reading.
Don’t worry, I’m not ignoring the fact that overexposure to the sun CAN cause problems, including cancer… but we need to also consider the fact that underexposure to the sun can have problems as well.
Let’s look at a few points to consider:
1. Non-consistent sun exposure and infrequent SUNBURNS is the major cause of damage to the skin and increased risk of cancer… Think about your typical person that sits inside an office all week long without ever seeing the sun, and then gets FRIED at the pool or the beach on the weekend. THIS is where the damage occurs.
2. Regular consistent small amounts of exposure to the sun (without burning) can actually have a protective effect on the skin, increases healthful Vitamin D levels in the body, and can improve mood, help depression, and dozens of other benefits.Each individual’s skin pigmentation determines what amount of sun exposure they can safely obtain without doing more harm than good. For example, a very fair-skinned person with a far northern heritage might only be able to get 10-15 minutes of sun exposure over the majority of the body during peak hours before it does more harm than good. However, someone with darker skin and a heritage that originated closer to the equator might be able to get much longer periods of regular sun exposure without doing more harm than good.
3. Increasing Vitamin D levels from regular small doses of sunshine can actually decrease cancer risk. Vitamin D itself seems to have a protective effect through various processes in the body.
4. This one is interesting and deserves some thought — According to Dr William Grant, a Vitamin D researcher, cancer rates in those living at high latitudes such as Iceland are approximately 4 TIMES the cancer rates of those living at lower latitudes in the tropics. Hmm, yet those people living in the tropics are getting MUCH higher levels of those so-called ‘deadly sun rays’… but they are also producing higher levels of Vitamin D on average too.
5. Vitamin D is actually produced into a hormone in our bodies and regulates hundreds of processes in the body, and is WAY MORE important to almost every single aspect of your health than most people realize. There is even evidence that due to the regulation of so many hormonal processes in our bodies that can be affected by Vitamin D, producing enough Vitamin D in your body can even help with fat loss, muscle building, blood sugar control, and hundreds of other factors.
6. It is hard to obtain enough Vitamin D from dietary sources alone (egg yolks, organ meats, and fatty fish are good sources, but still relatively small). The best utilized source of Vitamin D is what we produce in our bodies from moderate regular sun exposure without burning.
7. An antixodant-rich diet can help to protect the skin (to an extent) from damage if you get too much sun exposure. This means that getting lots of antioxidants from things such as various teas (see tip #3), various berries, fruits, vegetables, beta carotene, nuts, olive oil, etc, can help to protect your skin.
8. Another point that proves that irregular burning is the major cause of damage and not regular small doses of sunshine… Rates of skin cancer are typically higher in areas of the body that get irregular sun and occasional burning as opposed to areas of the body that have received consistent sun for your entire life. Notice how more cancer is often found on the back and chest (places that get irregular sun and more burning) vs the back of the neck or the forearms (which get consistent regular sun for most people our entire lives). There are exceptions to everything, but this seems to be a common trend.
9. I’ve come across studies over the last few years that indicated skin cancer rates are higher among indoor office workers compared to outdoor workers. This is yet another interesting trend… it basically supports the conclusion that being underexposed to sunlight most of the time (working inside an office all week long) and then getting infrequent overexposure to the sun is a lot more problematic compared to an outdoor worker that gets regular daily sun exposure. Of course, the indoor worker can always avoid this problem by getting outside for 10-20 minutes daily during breaks to get those protective small daily doses of sunshine that we’ve been talking about here.
10. Think about this issue in terms of common sense — Don’t you feel a heck of a lot better and more energetic when you’ve at least gotten out in the sun for 20 or 30 minutes in a day rather than being stuck inside all day?
So what’s the best way to do this in a healthy way while minimizing sun overexposure risk?In the spring, try to start with just small periods in the sun such as 10-15 minutes/day. Make sure to try to NEVER get a sunburn! Gradual small doses of sunshine over a large part of your body almost daily helps your body produce the most beneficial and protective Vitamin D levels.
Avoid extended periods of overexposure to the sun on large portions of your body… If you’re going to be out for several hours or an entire day in the sun, you’ll still need to make sure to cover up appropriately (based on your individual skin pigmentation and sensitivity) to prevent burning and skin damage… remember that we’re talking about regular small doses of sunshine that is beneficial, not entire days out in the sun without covering up.
Load up on antioxidant-rich foods daily to help prevent free radical damage and protect your skin.
So here is my little ritual that I’ve been using for a few years now and really seems to keep me from getting any colds, flu, or any sickness at all.
As a matter of fact, I can’t remember the last time I was legitimately sick. Every time I feel a cold or something starting to come on, I follow the tips above, strengthen my immune system, and my body always fights it off before I actually get sick.
Lastly, I’m not a doctor, so many of the points in this article are my opinions based on years of reading and research. Make sure to consult with your doctor on your individual characteristics and how this relates to sun exposure and vitamin D.
What methods do you use to prevent or fight off the winter cold?
Share it. Leave a comment below.
Suggested Reading Material:
- Vaccine Epidemic: How Corporate Greed, Biased Science, and Coercive Government Threaten Our Human Rights, Our Health, and Our Children.
- Prescription for Nutritional Healing.
- How to Eat, Move and Be Healthy!
- Fight for Your Health: Exposing the FDA’s Betrayal of America.
- Enzyme Nutrition.
- Vaccines: The Risks, the Benefits, the Choices, a Resource Guide for Parents.
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