How to help prevent those pesky colds and what to do if you DO get one

Following on from my last blog post ...................

 

A few useful gardening tools to help prevent those pesky colds 

A healthy immune system can tell a pesky cold doing the rounds where to go – politely of course. Let’s have a look at how we can grow a healthy strong immune system ……..

Avoid stress – easier said than done, but essential if you want the best health and immunity. Stress switches off immunity leaving you wide open. Look into ways to de-stress. Meditation, Yoga, Tai Chi are all very effective, but maybe just sitting quietly with a book or taking your dog for a walk can do the trick.  Do what feels right for you. There is no point doing yoga if it stresses you!!

Sleep gives your cells a chance to recharge and cleanse. Think of them doing essential maintenance work whilst you visit the land of Nod. If you don’t get enough sleep, then vital repair and cleaning work is skipped, which has a big impact on your health and vitality.  Not getting enough sleep can also cause your body more stress!!   

Exercise and Fresh Air – a daily brisk walk helps keep things moving; an aerobic class for your cells. It stimulates circulation and lymph which in turn help to support tip-top immune function.

Water  Your cells want fresh water to cleanse. If they don’t cleanse, toxins can build up, then before you know it, your body is trying its best to clear up the unholy mess ……… voila – a pesky cold!

Tip-Top digestion – a digestive system in good working order literally feeds all the cells of your body including your immune cells. So think water, plenty of fruit and vegetables. Try to avoid sugar and other refined foods.  

Vitamin C: old hat but a very effective old hat. It boosts immunity. Try upping your daily Vitamin C intake during the winter months, and not just when you feel the first sniffle coming on. Stress (external or internal) depletes it. That’s bad news for most of us! Fruit and veg should contain lots but you need to be eating fresh, local and raw (and I don’t advise too much raw during winter) to maximise your daily intake. If, however, you eat non-organic, or produce with more air miles than you, or if you like to boil your veg to within an inch or centimetre of its life, then you’ll be getting way too little. Whatever your diet looks like, unless you are a rare species of lesser spotted stress-free human, I suggest a supplement as an insurance policy.       

Echinacea: great for boosting immunity. It’s best to take for short spells at a time – say 6 weeks followed by a 4 week break.

Pre/probiotics. These are your digestive system’s helpmates. In exchange for food and shelter they help to keep your digestion in good working order. You can get a certain amount of healthy bacteria from fermented food, but I recommend a regular boost of pre/probiotics in supplement form. If you want advice on which to buy, drop me a line.

And if you do get a cold …. What then?

It’s not a case of beating yourself up – but a chance to go gentle on yourself. Start by clearing your diary for at least a day. Cut the martyr act, soldiering into work, Lemsip and Kleenex in hand. Firstly, you won’t be popular, but more importantly, precious energy needed to deal with the cold is being used on STRESS. Late trains, tricky bosses, customers, you name it. Result: the cold lingers. How many people have you heard tell of a cough that won’t shift for weeks? Rest and sleep are great healers. A couple of early nights and perhaps a lazy day in bed can work wonders.   

Keep up your fluids (by that I mean water; not tea and coffee!). Hot water with fresh lemon and ginger is an old favourite and, if your throat has joined in, a little honey is nice and soothing.

Go easy on eating. You want your body to use its energy on working through that cold rather than digesting a hearty three course meal.  It’s a myth to “feed a cold”. The old saying is actually “if you feed a cold, you have to starve a fever”. A little warm home-made soup is nourishing without putting too much strain on digestion.

Resist the urge to suppress with painkillers and other over-the-counter cold “cures”. A cold is a sign that your body is trying to cleanse, and by suppressing you are holding stuff in that needs to come out – a bit like brushing stuff under the carpet.

Upping your daily Vitamin C (to perhaps a few grams a day) and Echinacea can also help give your immune system a helping hand.

A well-loved internal garden. Why you get a pesky cold but your friends don’t

 

A well-loved internal garden. Why you get a pesky cold but your friends don’t !! 

 

A while back, when visiting a friend in Spain, we popped into the local supermarket and I noticed her donning a clear plastic glove whilst picking her fruit and veg so I asked her why. It was a rule of the shop, she said, no doubt to avoid people passing on germs to others!! I had to smile as the area of Spain where she lives is heavily agricultural, with an emphasis on pesticides!! I would have thought that a few germs were nothing compared to the level of harmful pesticides in every mouthful!!

This got me to thinking how paranoid we have become about germs. You only have to watch adverts for cleaning products to see that germs are viewed as the enemy, the reason why we become ill, something to be avoided or eradicated. The truth is, however, that they can do us little harm if our personal “environment” is healthy. Just think about when a cold is doing the rounds. Not everyone “catches” it. So, why is that? When you see flies buzzing around some dung, we cannot blame the flies for making it. They are there simply to clear it up.

Nowadays, our medical thinking is very much based on the “germ theory of disease” which was proposed by a French chemist, Louis Pasteur (1822 – 1895). What it suggests is that we are innocent bystanders, and when “attacked” by germs can become ill.  It’s pretty much a mindset of “it’s nothing to do with me”.

A contemporary of his, also a French chemist, Antoine Bechamp (1816-1908), thought otherwise. In fact Pasteur, on his death bed, renounced his germ theory, but by then it was well embedded into Western thinking, and remains today as one of the foundations of our medical system.  

 

What Bechamp believed was that we manifest disease. If our internal environment is really poor, he said that we could literally “grow” disease. Not a pleasant thought. If, on the other hand, we tended our internal environment, as we would a well-loved garden, then we could literally grow and maintain health. Sound good? The only drawback (if you can see it as such) to accepting Bechamp’s theory is that we can no longer simply blame exterior things for our illness, but instead have to take personal responsibility for our health.  

I believe in a combination. There are germs, but if our internal environment is robust, we shouldn’t succumb to a lot of these things, at least not as frequently or as severely.

The conventional view of disease is very much on being a war against external forces, and is probably one of the reasons why nutrition (which helps to build a healthy internal environment) does not play a part in medical thinking.

Tending our environment, like a garden of beautiful flowers, should be a joy. Eating healthily to nurture our bodies, thinking positively, nurturing loving relationships and friendships, and trying to neutralise our stress all help to grow our personal environment.

So, what would you prefer? Would you rather sit in fear of this germ and that germ, then probably “catch” it anyway? Fear puts a stress on our internal environment and makes us more susceptible to becoming ill. Better by far to tend your internal garden and stay healthy. J    
So next time a pesky cold is doing the rounds and you catch it, use it as a gentle reminder that perhaps you haven’t been tending your internal garden as well as you should and start to look after yourself a little better. 

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