My blog focuses on Health/Wellness. One of the most critical parts of your health is your immune health which is linked to your lifestyle choices. The following guest post is entitled, Empowered Living: The Connection Between Lifestyle Choices and Immune Health.
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Your lifestyle choices, or your daily habits, have a significant impact on your overall wellness, including your immunity. Therefore, if you are trying to improve your immunity and increase your health, it’s important to determine what is and what is not a healthy lifestyle choice. Read on to learn more about how to improve your current habits, leading to a more healthy lifestyle with greater immunity.
What is Immunity?
Before delving deeper into improving your immunity, it’s helpful to first define what immunity is in the first place. Your immune system is designed to limit or prevent infections within the body. If our immune system is not properly bolstered by the body due to improper diet or other factors, then our immune system can fail us and lead to more severe health issues. Therefore, ensuring that our immunity is guarded through healthy lifestyle choices is imperative to continued good health.
Eat Right by Consuming Good, Nutritious, and Clean Food
When your lifestyle does not include an adequate or healthy diet, your immune system can suffer. Ideally, you want to aim for a balanced diet, featuring meals and snacks with healthy nutrient-rich food and little processing. Remember, food is your basic and most consistent source of energy, and it’s the way your body gets the minerals and vitamins it needs to maintain a healthy function. Therefore, to create a lifestyle of wellness and healthy immunity, ditch fast food and overly processed items and aim for clean, vitamin-rich dishes. Try to include fresh fruits and vegetables in every meal. Also know that certain vitamins and minerals, like vitamin C, play a large role in your immune system’s health, so supplementing with specific vitamins can also be helpful.
Get Plenty of Shut Eye; You Likely Need More Than You Realize
We all know we need to sleep more, yet Americans remain some of the most sleep-deprived people in the world. In fact, one in every three adults is currently not getting enough sleep, according to numbers from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. This can have several negative ramifications, including a reduction in overall immunity. Our bodies typically need between seven and nine hours to properly recharge and ensure our immune system stays strong. Consistently sleep is important, which makes it a needed lifestyle habit you should adopt to boost your immunity. Think of sleeping like you do putting your phone on the charger. You would never expect your phone to keep going day after day with inadequate charge time. In the same way, your body and your immunity system also require a recharge in the form of healthy sleep to properly work. Therefore, do what you have to do to adopt a better sleep schedule and ensure that your body is getting enough quality and consistent sleep.
Get Moving, Creating Movement, Not Stagnation
Many of our jobs force us to be sedentary for hours every day. Unfortunately, we know that lack of exercise or physical activity can cause a jump in sickness and promote poor health. In fact, if you add regular moderate exercise into your routine, you will effectively cut your risk of swelling and respiratory infections in half. Exercise also improves other health factors like your blood pressure, cardiovascular health, and overall body weight, and even helps reduce stress. Therefore, incorporating a good exercise routine into your lifestyle, even a low-impact one, can greatly benefit your overall health, as well as boost your immunity. Even walking a few times a week or lifting weights can make a difference in your overall health. Remember, exercise doesn’t mean you have to suddenly start training for a marathon.
Drink Lots of Water, Hydrate, Hydrate, Hydrate
Chances are, if you evaluated your current water intake, you are lacking. This isn’t criticism but more-so a statement, as most Americans are not hydrated properly. Even if you aren’t sweating constantly or feel like you are losing water, the body itself needs to be hydrated to work properly. Both the blood and lymph systems (which have immune cells) require water to circulate properly through our bodies. In addition, every single organ, cell, and tissue within your body needs water to work as designed. Generally, a good rule of thumb to remember, based on data from the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, is that adults should aim to consume the following amounts of fluids daily:
● Men: 15.5 cups of fluids daily (3.7 liters)
● Women: 11.5 cups of fluids daily (2.7 liters)
Keep in mind that these fluids include water and other beverages as well as fluids from food. Your water intake should make up about 80% of this number, as only about 20% of the daily requirement comes from food.
Give Back to Others, Serve Others, Get a Pet
In addition to all the physical changes and choices you can make in your diet and your exercise patterns, living a life of wellness also includes making lifestyle choices that give back to others. For example, if you don’t currently have a pet, then welcoming one into your home can be a great way to boost your overall mood and lift your spirits. This, in turn, will help you live a life that is more focused on making good, healthy choices and boosting your immunity. You can also volunteer to help others by working at a food bank or a mission or volunteering at your church or community center. Often, by reaching out to others, we are brought higher and many times find ourselves living much richer lives overall.
You Can Empower Your Living Through Lifestyle Changes
While the information outlined above might seem overwhelming, it’s important to approach it slowly and make noteworthy changes regularly to adopt all the habits outlined above. When you do this, you will make significant improvements in your overall health and wellness, which in turn will help you boost your immunity. We all want to stay healthy and not get sick, and incorporating these changes into your daily lifestyle is a great way to do just that and more.
Megan Isola
Megan Isola holds a Bachelor of Science in Hospitality and a minor in Business Marketing from Cal State University Chico. She enjoys going to concerts, trying new restaurants, and hanging out with friends.