Right now more than ever, it is important for you to make sure you are building up your Immune system so that if you become sick you will only suffer minor symptoms and recover sooner. Our body is able to produce its own medicine, and this medicine is custom made just for you. By eating the right food and exercising you are supporting a healthy endothelium (the lining of the blood vessels), which releases chemical messengers called nitric oxide, and in turn prompts the body to make its own medicine.
So to help our body start making its own medicine we need to make sure to:
exercise every day-you can go for a walk, do one of my YouTube videos, join one of my fitness classes, or do one of your own workouts
de-stress-practice breathing exercises, use meditation (I like the free app Insight Timer),
hydrate-drink 1/2 your body weight in ounces each day-here's a tip of how I get more water into each day
sleep-make sure you are getting 7-8 hours of sleep, if this is difficult it is ok to add 20 minute naps into your day to help you get the recommended amount of sleep
healthy eating-make sure you are getting enough fruits and vegetables into your diet; I try to eat 5-7 servings of fruits and vegetable each day and also take my fruit and veggie capsules to ensure I'm getting the antioxidants that I need.
By practicing these habits on a daily basis you will begin to build your immune system, decrease inflammation, and begin to feel better inside and out.
Build your Immune System with these foods everyday.
Smoothies-make sure to fill them with colorful fruits, veggies, seeds, and healthy fats like nuts, or avocado.
Salads-eat one for lunch or dinner everyday. Make sure to add some crunch for texture, and again the more colorful you can make it the more antioxidants you are getting.
Spices-play around with spices and herbs for different flavors. I l ove adding herbs into my salad and cinammon into my coffee. Get creative! Salmon-eat wild caught fish at least once a week for those healthy Omegas.
Eating more foods like this every day and less processed foods will allow you to build your Immune system, decrease inflammation in your body and live healthier.
Hi, I'd like to welcome you to raising healthy humans. I am your host Courtney, a personal trainer and health coach, and the founder of formfit. a community where I help busy moms move more. As a busy and sometimes overwhelmed mom of three myself, I understand that it can be difficult to find ways to live and raise Healthy Families. It is my goal to help provide you with the information and tactics you need to help raise healthy humans. Thank you for joining me today. This is Episode 21. And today I want to talk to you about supporting your immune system. And the reason I want to talk to you about it today is because recently, information has come out in some scientific journals regarding plant based diets, and COVID-19. So it speaks about how people who are eating more plant based foods, so fruits and vegetables are less likely to get COVID. And if they do get COVID, they're less likely to get severe COVID. And not that I want to talk about COVID. During this, I really want to talk to you about supporting your immune system overall. So if you think about any kind of inflammation in your body, think about the irises all of your irises, your arthritis, your cold lightest, those types of diseases are in regards to inflammation. So there are so many people I know who are suffering with autoimmune diseases or illnesses. And I wanted to be able to help you as much as possible to not only help you, but to ensure that your children don't come down with these as these are becoming so much more common today in our lives. So of course, I'm going to quickly go over some of the things I'm sure you've heard it a lot. But I want to go over a few things that you can be doing for your immune system. And I want you to understand that our body is able to produce its own medicine. And this medicine is custom made just for you. By eating the right food and exercising, you are supporting a healthy endothelium which is the lining of the blood vessels. And this releases chemical messengers called nitric oxide, and in turn prompts the body to make its own medicine. So that is what we want to make sure that we are doing is allowing our body the opportunity to work for us and use its own medicine to help us heal. So some of the things that you need to make sure that you are doing is moving every day. It does not need to be a workout. If I've said it once I've said it 100 times, it does not need to be a workout you can do just movement, finding ways to move throughout your day. That means getting up standing up walking around. It means sitting on the floor, finding yourself in different positions throughout the day, not just sitting and then standing and walking. Try to create different movement patterns. Reach up over to one side, lean forward on your bar top to kind of stretch out your hamstrings create different movements throughout the day. Of course we want to try to get our heart rate up. That's going to be what you need to do to help create more of that nitric oxide in the blood and you need to be trying to do this almost every day. But if you are struggling, start with movement. Also make sure to de stress and these are through different breathing exercises using meditation, things like that. Make sure you are drinking enough water. Make sure you are sleeping seven to eight hours of sleep every day. Or I'm sorry every night and then eating healthy foods and that's where I want to talk to you today is what we are doing to ensure that we are eating healthy. If your body is unable to fight a disease, or if you have one of these irises or are dealing with auto immune disease, the number one cause inflammation. I will say that again, the number one cause of inflammation is our diet. It's our diet. So we have got to start there. If you want to start working on getting to the root of your problems, you need to fix your diet. So what we're going to do today is I'm going to talk to you about the things that will help you to have a stronger immune system and hopefully will help to fix your diet. One, you want to make sure that you are having 10 fistfuls, 10 fistfuls of fruits and veggies each and every day, if you're not sure about your children, it's the same thing. Look at their fist, they have a smaller fist than you. So theirs is 10 fistfuls and this can be very difficult. So we want to start thinking about how we can incorporate more fruits and vegetables into our everyday life. The first one is through smoothies. smoothies are great for helping with getting more fruits and vegetables into your diet each and every day. I like to have a smoothie for breakfast in the morning. But feel free to have one instead in the afternoon, you can use it as a snack, you can use it as if you're starting to get that sweet tooth, you can have a smoothie than try not to fill it up with lots of fruits as it will increase your blood sugar. And we don't want you on a blood sugar roller coaster because increased blood sugar can increase that tire effect around your midsection, so we want to steer clear of too many fruits in our smoothies. So you want to look at doing one to two fruits, and then vegetables and I love to add broccoli stems, zucchini, cauliflower, all of these things have very mild flavors and are great for you to use in a smoothie for some of your veggies. And then obviously, your spinach, your kales, your romaine lettuce, your cucumbers, your parsley, things like that, those will start to add a little bit more flavor, but are also great options as well. So if you think about eating smoothies, having smoothies daily or throughout the week, a few days throughout the week, that's going to help. You also want to think about having salads every day. salads are obviously a great way to get greens in and play with the different greens. So we're not just consuming iceberg or romaine lettuce, play with different greens. And if you have children who don't like certain greens, then you chop them up finely and add them in, you know the mix just a little bit. So you can have a Caesar salad with romaine, and then you'd find chop up some spinach for added greens. But they're not going to taste them as much and they're not going to be at you know, they're not going to be as many in there because it's mostly their romaine lettuce so salads every day and also know that you can add different herbs into your salad. So try with different greens, try with adding some herbs, maybe a little bit of parsley or cilantro on the top. Again, if you have little ones that you know aren't comfortable or don't enjoy the flavor, then you just chop them up a little bit finer, and maybe not add as many. The next thing is seafood. Make sure that you are working seafood into your weekly meals. I shoot for one once a week for dinner, and then I also shoot for once during lunch so we have a lot of tuna for lunch and then dinner. So I'm trying to work on getting mine in that way and I would recommend you work on it the same. There are natural, powerful antioxidants in your seafood. Obviously your wild Alaskan salmon and things like that are going to be your better options. And then spices adding fun different spices in thanks cinnamons thing. cumin think coriander, all fun turmeric, ginger, all of these fun, different spices that adds so many different levels of antioxidants into your diet. So feel free to play with that. I like a little bit of cinnamon in My smoothies, and I also like it in my coffee in the morning. So try some different things like that. You could even make yourself a latte. Those turmeric lattes are great. But you know, try different spices, adding different spices into your meals, try not to just do your basic salt, pepper and garlic powder on your chickens. Try to add different spices in regards to that as well. And those are the four S's for supporting your immune system. So that's going to be smoothies, salads, seafood, and spices. If you want, you can also bring in some supplements. And you would do this to help get those areas that maybe you're not eating enough omegas for the fish, there's fruit and vegetable concentrates, vitamin D, spirulina, things like that for supplementation. And if you have questions or are interested in learning more about supplementations reach out to me and I can help you with that as well. Those are the four S's to help support your immune system. And I hope that helps you and your children. I do want to make sure that you know that we have an upcoming five day challenge in our forum fit mom community, you can join us there we are going to be doing a fall into fitness challenge. But if you happen to be listening to this later, we do monthly challenges their five day challenges always at the beginning of the month. So join us in our form fit mom community for our five day upcoming challenge. You'll get information also in regards to a 30 day challenge that we are doing, and you're always welcome to try a week of free classes with us. Hope you have a wonderful day.