How To Boost Your Immune System And Reduce Your Risk Of Getting The Coronavirus

The Coronavirus is making headlines across the world. Things are changing on an hourly basis. Fear and anxiety is starting to set in, despite your best intentions.

You’re wondering what you can do to protect yourself and your family. Surely, there’s more you can do beyond the general recommendations from the World Health Organization.

The good news is - there are actions you can take right now to boost your immune system. This is the time to get committed to your health. To the things you know you should be doing to improve your general health and well-being.

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

Benjamin Franklin

Take this concept and use it as motivation to take action now. This way, if you do contract Coronavirus, it will be less likely to become severe or even fatal.

As you take a hard look at your current state of health - as you take a good hard look at yourself in the mirror, you aren’t happy with what you see staring back at you.

You feel frustration and even a little shame. Because you’ve been procrastinating your health. After all, your life is busy and you’ve been under a heavy stress load and quite frankly your health has been at the bottom of your priority list.

Now, you find yourself more than ready to make a change and do anything you can to prevent sickness.

So, what can you do to quickly build your immune system?

3 Simple Steps To Boost Your Immune System

Today, I’m going to share 3 simple steps to boost your immune system and reduce your risk of getting the rapidly spreading Coronavirus. These tips all have one theme - to reduce the inflammatory load on your body to build your immune system and help you feel better in your skin.

#1 Ditch The Sugar

oday’s Standard American Diet (which is really the standard worldwide diet these days) causes high amounts of inflammation in our body. According to the American Heart Association, the average American consumes an average of 77 grams of sugar each day. That’s 19.25 teaspoons of sugar each day.

Why is this important? Well, sugar is harmful to our immune function. Studies show that sugar interferes with the way our body fights disease. And, even worse, the excess glucose in our body feeds bacteria and yeast which can lead to worse infections. 

Next time you pick up that soda or sugary coffee drink - take a hard look at it. That sugar you’re ingesting is directly compromising your immune system and making you more susceptible to illness.

Need more reasons to ditch sugar? 

Every time we eat sugar, a blood sugar spike occurs. When blood sugar spikes, our body releases the master hormone insulin. Insulin immediately turns off lipolysis (fat burning) and turns on fat storage. When we repeat this process often, it leads to insulin resistance and inflammation in our body. 

Insulin resistance is described as “starvation in the face of plenty”. Basically, the receptor sites for glucose energy on our cells starts to shut off. Our body can’t get energy from the circulating glucose so it pumps out more insulin to try and lower blood sugar. This is called insulin resistance and is how Type 2 Diabetes is caused.

Studies show that people with insulin resistance have higher levels of inflammation in their body. ¹ Inflammation, in turn, is a contributor to chronic disease.²

What Can You Do?

Swap sugar for healthier sweeteners such as allulose, Bocha Sweet, monk fruit , erythritol or stevia. Challenge yourself to use less and less sweet in your foods. Over time, your taste buds will change. You’ll be amazed at how good healthy food starts tasting to you.

#2 Swap Out Unhealthy Fats

Unhealthy fats are just as harmful as sugar on our body causing inflammation and an increase in oxidative stress.

Fortunately, this is easy to rectify. Swap out unhealthy fats with healthy alternatives shown in the infographic below.

#3 Get Moving

Our body's were designed for movement. But, these days many of us have desk jobs and end up sitting for 10 or more hours each day. Over time, this lack of movement throughout the day can have a detriment on our health leading to chronic disease.

Set a goal for 20 minutes of exercise each day to improve your overall fitness level and boost your immune system. Take a brisk walk, join a gym or do a free Youtube workout video.

Choose something you enjoy and while you’re working out focus on the benefits for your body instead of letting that running script in your mind about how you hate exercise. Think “I’m making my body strong, I’m adding time to my life, I’m creating the health I want” instead of “this is the worst part of my day”.

If you’re at a desk all day, set a timer for 50 minutes and get up and move around for 5 minutes for every 50 minutes of sitting. Movement can be simple such as walking around your office, walking up and down the stairs for five minutes or marching in place for 5 minutes. 

This time getting your blood flowing will re-energize your body, boost your mental clarity and assist in decongesting your lymphatic system.

These three easy tweaks to your lifestyle, implemented daily, will do wonders to boost your immune system in the short term and especially in the long term. The thing is, our immune system is a vast system that is still being studied and understood. Supporting this system is multifaceted and complex. There are a lot of other ways to support and build your immune system such as focusing on sleep quality, giving up smoking, cutting back on alcohol intake, minimizing stress and taking steps to avoid infection (hand washing, wearing masks, etc). 

But there’s one more tip I want to give you today…

#4 Start The Keto Diet

The keto diet is one of the most powerful anti-inflammatory diets on the planet. By omitting foods which result in blood sugar spikes, we drastically reduce the glucose load on the body. 

In fact, the goal of the keto diet is to get the body to change fuel sources. As you reduce your carbohydrate intake, you move away from being a glucose burner and instead break down free fatty acids to create an alternate fuel source called ketones. This is why it’s called “The keto diet”.

Remember earlier when we talked about how sugar wreaks havoc on our body? Well, consider that the carbohydrates you ingest are directly converted to glucose in your body. 

This makes a high carbohydrate diet one of the best ways to feed disease and suppress our immune system.

My #1 Recommendation is to start the keto diet. 

Use this motivation you have right now to get healthy to avoid getting the Coronavirus or other disease… and turn it into motivation to create the body you long to live in. 

Think about the future… What is possible if you implement these steps each day?

What will your life look like five years from now if you take steps to improve your overall health and boost your immune system?

What would additional energy, mental clarity and physical wellness add to your life?

If you’re ready to get started, click here to get my Keto Foods List and an email series on How To Start The Keto Diet.

Isn’t it time you made your health a priority?

Click here to get started.

Selected References

1. de Luca C, Olefsky JM. Inflammation and insulin resistance. FEBS Lett. 2008;582(1):97–105. doi:10.1016/j.febslet.2007.11.057 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2246086/
2. Tsoupras A, Lordan R, Zabetakis I. Inflammation, not Cholesterol, Is a Cause of Chronic Disease. Nutrients. 2018;10(5):604. Published 2018 May 12. doi:10.3390/nu10050604