Being sick is miserable, especially when you could be spending time with family and friends! With colder weather comes the usual maladies. Try these tips to maintain your energy and vitality.
1. Reduce Mealtime Stress: Add pleasure, not pressure, by relying on cooking aids like crockpots and pressure cookers. You’ll have more time for shopping or visiting with company all while your meal cooks.
2. Go Natural: If it can be picked or planted, it’s a good choice. Our bodies don’t do well with processed foods, so incorporating foods like pumpkin and hemp seeds, chickpeas, avocado, spinach, and mushrooms, which contain zinc, can be beneficial to your immune system. Vitamin C is also a must to help fight off illness. Indulge in oranges, grapefruits, kale, cruciferous vegetables, papaya, parsley, lemons, and strawberries. Use dried hibiscus flowers to make iced tea. (See recipe.)
3. Hydrate: Staying hydrated with water and electrolytes daily will help keep you healthy. The most important electrolytes for a strong immune system are calcium, potassium, sodium, chloride, zinc, and magnesium.
4. Increase Magnesium: Nature’s calming mineral. Flood your body with leafy greens. These are packed with potassium and magnesium. My daily go-to whole food supplements are AIM Barley Life (a concentrated real barley grass juice powder) and AIM Peak Endurance (an electrolyte powder with all six electrolytes.) There’s no caffeine, stimulants or ephedra, and they include all the B vitamins. I love how it improves my endurance. Find these at: www.aliveagainonline.com
5. Dessert Swap. Swap out heavy desserts for fresh fruit. Pomegranates which are in season are the best. Or, split that decadent dessert with someone special.
Bonus Tips:
- Reduce/avoid refined sugars. Once ingested, 20 teaspoons of sugar can inhibit the ability of the white blood cells to eradicate bad bacteria, compromising the immune system by 2-5 hours.
- Eat all the veggies and raw salad first, before eating anything else.
- Trade creamed-based soups for broth-based veggie soups.
- No more eating three hours before bedtime. When we sleep, our metabolic rate slows down and efficient digestion becomes harder. At night, we want to help the body rest – not digest.
- Stay active. It is a wonderful way to release toxins, help reduce stress, manage weight and keep our skin glowing.
Remember it’s all about balance. Enjoy your favorite treat now and then, but make your health a priority.
For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them (Ephesians 2:10, NKJV).
Spiced Hibiscus Iced Tea
Few people realize the potential health benefits of hibiscus flower tea. The benefits might include improved blood sugar levels, healthy blood pressure levels, improved digestion, and improved liver health. The tea is also rich in Vitamin C which is an antioxidant that keeps us looking youthful and also great to help support the body’s defenses.
Ingredients:
- 1/2 cup dried hibiscus flowers
- 2-3 fresh slivers of ginger
- 1 lemon rind, cut off with a knife
- 8-9 cups of water
- 1 orange sliced
- 1 cinnamon stick
- 2 whole cloves
Instructions:
- In a pot, add 4 cups of water and lemon rind, ginger, cinnamon stick, cloves and hibiscus flowers. As soon as it boils, remove from the stove and steep for 15 minutes. Any longer and the tea will be bitter.
- Strain the tea and let it cool. Add the remainder of the water and sweeten with desired sweetener. I use the monk fruit/stevia liquid sweetener.
- Add to a glass jug/pitcher, add orange slices, extra fresh ginger and ice.
- Serve over ice.
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