Boosting your Immune System

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Your immune system is a complex network of cells and proteins that defends your body against infection. It is essential for your survival, as without it, your body would be open to attack from bacteria, viruses, parasites, and more. Essentially, it keeps a record of every germ that it has ever defeated so that it can recognise and destroy it more quickly if it enters the body again.

Your immune system works hard every day to protect you from getting sick, so why not give it a helping hand with the following immune boosting tips. Although none of these will measure will prevent you from contracting a virus, they will help your body to fight it off quicker and reduce the severity.

1. Get enough sleep

Getting good quality sleep is the single best thing that you can do to help strengthen your immune system. All of the other things mentioned can assist, but sleep is where the individual war against any virus is really won. Sleep deprivation makes our body susceptible to many infectious agents.

While you sleep you get a boost in the chemicals that help you regulate immunity. Once these chemicals are produced, they can then create a variety of immune defenders that are ready and waiting to attack if a virus or infection enters. This then creates a defence system that is able to recognise a virus better the next time it enters to respond even faster.

To keep your immune system healthy and strong you should:

• Aim to get a good 7-8 hours sleep of sleep every night
• Work on getting as much unbroken sleep as possible

2. Eat well

Amongst a host of other health benefits, maintaining a well-balanced nutritional diet rich in vitamins is essential for building and maintaining to strong immune system. Get your body functioning at its best with these tasty tips:

• Eat lots of plant foods – such as fruits and vegetables - the more variety the better, legumes, seeds, and nuts
• Include lean proteins – such as lean meat, fish, poultry, eggs and tofu
• Get into the omega 3 rich foods – such as salmon, tuna and olive oil
• Add in some good quality whole grains – such as brown rice, oats, quinoa and wholegrain pasta
• Drink plenty of water

3. Drink less alcohol

When it comes to any aspect of your health and wellbeing, including your immune function, alcohol is never a good mix! When you consume high amounts of alcohol, your body is busy trying to detoxify, and is therefore unable to properly tend to its other critical functions, like fighting off a disease.

If you do drink, try to do it in moderation. Aim to limit yourself to no more than two standard alcoholic drinks a day for men, and one standard drink per day for women.

4. Get into the sun

The vitamin D that you can get from a little bit of sun exposure each day can really help your immune function. Vitamin D deficiency has associations with autoimmune diseases and increased infection rates. Be sensible with it though, don’t be in the sun too long.

5. Exercise

Get out and go for a walk. Don’t go too hard though as this may cause a short-term lull in the immune system for those that are unaccustomed to exercise. If you are already a regular exerciser, then continue on but maybe eases off on the high intensity sessions.

If you don’t regularly exercise, then maybe start off with something small. For example: get a skipping rope and skip for 1 minute, do a few step ups on a step, get on the ground and do some push ups, or a wall squat. Then build on it from there.

 

Note – None of these will prevent you from developing COVID-19. Social distancing and practicing proper hygiene are your best defence from contracting any virus including COVID-19.