My Tips For Feeling Better The Fastest When Sick

My Father always told me “The best way to stay healthy is to stay healthy”. Basically, he was encouraging me to follow the basics we all know – eat good food, exercise regularly, get good rest, and avoid doing terrible things to our bodies like consuming alcohol, taking recreational drugs, or smoking. Following this advice will help us avoid many maladies and live a substantially longer and more productive life. However, try as we may, there are going to be times when our bodies don’t fight off whatever is going around. What are my bits of wisdom when we find ourselves fighting to get better after suffering an illness? Please, allow me to offer some tips:

• Rest – even the strongest immune systems get bogged down when we are not getting sufficient rest. Fighting back from an illness, rest is critical. We not only need to get adequate rest, but we also need to get extra sleep, extra stress-free periods and reduced workloads. Have the spouse take care of the kids and make the meals, sleep later, and get naps during the day and go to bed earlier than normal.

• Overdo the nutrition – hopefully we are eating very little junk food to begin with but cut out all junk food while recovering. Nutrition must be excessive during times of healing. Load up on vitamins C and D especially.

• Stop all bad habits – again, hopefully we don’t have many bad habits anyway but now is the time to cease them. Stop smoking, use our recovery as an excuse to stop permanently. Do not drink any alcohol while in a recovery mode. Remember, the focus is on feeling better the fastest, it just makes sense to stop doing things we know are not good for us.

• Stay extra warm – the bugs that make us sick are the happiest and healthiest at our normal body temperature. This is why our bodies naturally give us a fever when we are sick. Rather than take aspirin or other medications that will bring our fever down, we want to stay extra hot. Keep the fever going, wear sweats and sweatshirts to bed, wear thick socks to bed. Turn the thermostat up a few degrees while recovering. Make sure we keep drinking water and keep our hydration at an optimal level and sweat, sweat, sweat. The slightly higher body temperature will weaken the bugs that are making us sick, giving our immune system the advantage in killing the bugs.

• Eat no sugar – the hope is we are eating very little sugar anyway. However, the bugs that make us sick thrive on sugar in our blood stream. While we are fighting off an illness, it is paramount that we do not eat any sugar. We want very low blood sugar flowing through our body to give the bugs the most inhospitable environment.

Follow these tips and get back on our feet faster and with far less suffering.