Maintain Good Immune System for Commoner

Summarized Version

Immune system is the most important body system to ensure of our health. While maintain a good immune system can be tricky but it can also be cheap and easy to ensure it's at the optimize level. Here are some tips tips to maintain your immune system.

1. Get more exercise weekly even if you are doing light one.
2. Frequently wash and dry your hand to prevent bacteria or germs sticking with you and anything you touch.
3. Get sufficient amount of sleep is most important one.
4. Consume less sugar and sweets whenever possible as it lower down body immune ability.
5. Keep drinking water all the time even if you are not thirsty.
6. Clean your tooth brush at least once a week.
7. Clean your bedroom and work place frequently.
8. Eat more fruits in a daily basis.

Maintaining a good immune system might be insufficient sometimes, you can also consider boosting immune system to a much better level.

1. Consume Probiotics that are available as supplement, dairy products such as milk, or youghurt.
2. Add in garlic in your food or put up a habit to eat more garlic
3. Get a shot from any preferred hospital or clinic.
4. Eat Vitamin C tablets or pills daily.
5. Use sanitizer to ensure you have a clean and bacteria-free environment.

Full Details

Immune system, basically the most important defense system in our body to fight illness and diseases, we know that it's crucial for us to avoid suffering from cold & flu, and to take us away from all kind of uncomfortable situation that irritate us really much. Including stopping us from any of our preferred activities and the food we like.

I'm not a person who spent lots of time reading articles and seeking ways to make my immune system to go all the way to the top and maintain at its best so that I will never fall sick and no illness can get near to me. If you are just a commoner like me, we don't need to do that to maintain our immune system and make sure we are at the optimized level so that we can carry on our daily life with fine condition.

The list below are part of people usual lifestyle, it's not something that you need to spend great effort to blend it into your lifestyle and habit, and you don't need to spend tons of money. If you notice, it's something really common that you can find it exist in your daily life as you browse through the internet or look into some books or magazine regarding healthy lifestyle. So here goes:

1. Get plenty of exercise on weekly basis. You don't need to be any serious athletics, or someone who has great passion into certain sport. It's best to choose a preferred sport like badminton, basketball, swimming, or etc, and practice it few times a week. At the minimal, doing some light exercise in your house helps too. You don't need to sweats too much to call yourself exercising, and you can setup a list of 3 to 5 type of exercise you to perform, get it done in about 10 to 15 minutes and that's it. For exercises that you can perform in your house without much trouble, you can refer to 10 ways you can exercise at home without any equipment by FitWatch.
   
   
2. Wash and dry your hand often, especially you just back from outside. Sometimes you might not recall it but you could have push open the door with your palm and you wouldn't know how much bacteria are attached right into your palm by doing that. Or, you might have lean on the wall while waiting for the lift to go to the floor you want, and you touch on your clothes or pants without recalling what had your clothing in touched with. So practice washing your hand with soup or sanitizer often can kill most of the bacteria and leave nothing bad at your home and workplace. Dry them off soon too because bacteria can attached to wet area easily if your hand are not dried after washing it.
   
   
3. Get at least 7 to 8 hours of sleep. we all know that we need sufficient sleep, but the problem is sometimes we give excuses not to get that amount of sufficient sleep especially we think it's alright since we can still make through the day anyway. But take note on this, if we are talking about immune system, insufficient sleeping time and incorrect sleep time is a major factor that bring down our immune system and defense ability. This is why we easily felt sick when we didn't get proper sleep continuously for few days. Apart of that, we shouldn't consider sleeping from 3am to 11am still consider proper sleep. It is sufficient but our body system begin repairing our body tissues from 12am to 2am. So bear that in mind and begin your sleep at that time. For more information about getting better sleep if you find it hard for it, you can refer to the tips to stop delaying & get a goodnight sleep.
   
   
4. Reduce sweets and sugar intake. This was surprising for me at first, but I slowly to understand that when we consume excessive amount of sugar, our white blood cell being to lose the ability to defend against virus and bacteria. At that time if any virus or bacteria attack our body system, we will fall right into illness. It's like, taking certain amount of sugar will "shut down" our immune system for a period of time. The larger the amount of sugar we consume, our immune system down for a longer period of time. Therefore, it's advisable to control yourself from taking sweets, since it doesn't give any benefits other than a short pleasure at the tongue. And avoid any drinks with high sugar amount especially soft drinks and commercialized fruit juice.
   
   
5. Drink lots of water all the time. Place a bottle of water right on your work desk, your study table, or your bedroom table. Make sure you drink it time by time even if you don't feel thirsty. But I'm only talking about plain water, and not soft drinks, fruit juice (unless you sure it's without sugar or other unnecessary ingredients in it), or other flavor drinks. Water serve as a supporting mechanism for immune system to fight and neutralize toxic that goes into your body. The more you drink, the more you able to detoxify the bed things accumulate in your body. You don't even need to purchase any expensive detox drinks at all by practicing a good habit of drinking water in a regular basis.
   
   
6. Take care of your toothbrush. Not only that it's easy to have bacteria accumulate in it especially if you didn't not completely dried it off after you used it, brushing tooth on a daily basis expose your toothbrush to bacteria that stay inside your mouth from food and any external source everyday. When the bacteria are left uncleaned in your toothbrush for a long period, you get higher chance to take back the same bacteria into your mouth and they can invade through your throat. So it's best to sanitize your toothbrush at least once in a week to make sure it's free from unwanted stuff.
   
   
7. Clean your room and work/study desk often. This can be troublesome if you have a busy or lazy lifestyle. But if you really want to maintain a good immune system, cleaning your room and work/study desk at least once a week can ensure you are living at an environment that is clean and free from bacteria for a long period of time, apart of look and feel more tidy. Especially your bed, bed mites and bacteria can stay for a long period and invade your body when you are asleep. That's the time when your body is at it's lowest performance so you will become defenseless against such attack. Just make sure you have a good wash of your bed sheet, blanket, and other related item on your bed, and then dry them up under the sun for a few hours. Do this once in a week, and you can sleep on a bacteria-free and comfortable bed.
   
   
8. Take fruits often. It's actually not that hard to consume at least an apple after your meal. I usually buy a pack of oranges that consists bout 10 of them for RM12.90. After each meal, I would get a small plate and a knife, cut an orange into four pieces, and finish them up in two minutes time. Adding the preparing time and washing up the plate and knife, it takes less than 5 minutes. So no mater how busy your lifestyle is, taking less than 5 minutes to take some fruit give you wide range of benefits. Also, RM12.90 wouldn't consider much for a week since I usually buy fruits from supermarket. If you want something cheaper, you can go to the morning market during weekend for cheaper price and larger portion.
   
   

Boosting & Improve Immune System

If you really hate the feeling when you got ill and serious about getting your immune system to the top notch, the list above is not enough because it only tune your immune system to a fine level where you can fight over any ordinary invaders, but not the powerful one. In case you find yourself ill too often even though you sure that you had practice some or most of the list like above, you probably need to go for something further that involve more consideration and effort.

1. Take Probiotics. Probiotics are live bacteria or yeast that believed to improved healthy. You can have a detail read about Probiotics from WebMD. Basically, Probiotics comes with various type of health benefits and one of the biggest benefits is the improvement and maintaining a strong immune system. You can get it from either supplement or dairy product such as milk and yoghurt. Supplements such as pills and tablets can cost you around RM30. But my concern is the effect of pills or tablets might differ for each individual. You can also consider going for milk powder that can last roughly a month if you consume every day, or yoghurt for once in a week.
   
   
2. Eat more Garlic. I used to dislike garlic because of its taste, but change my mind after learning the massive amount of health benefits it can provide. Garlic is extremely effective to fight cold and cough because of the natural ability to kill bacteria. You may or may not know, it had been decades when people use garlic for all type of food and health purpose, as well as a common food for immune system boosting. Try to get yourself more chances to consume onion, especially if you are making your own food. To get its best effect, it's recommended to eat it raw. It can taste really awful if you eat it raw and plain, here some tips to consume raw garlic in better ways.
   
   
3. Take a shot yearly. I don't have much information about this one. You will need to look into what type of common shots people usually take monthly or yearly to provide them a strong immune system and to improve body condition to fight off virus and bacteria. This is probably the most expensive method but usually is the most effective one.
   
   
4. Take Vitamin C daily. While fruits consist of certain amount of vitamin, you might want to be a bit of more hardworking to take vitamin C daily to ensure you get the right amount of nutrition on a daily basis. Fruits from local market are good, but might not be sufficient because according to some articles I read long time ago, fruits are usually harvest when they are in shape but not at the time when it's mature. In another words, those fruits have not sustain great amount of nutrition when they got harvested. This is to ensure that the fruits are still fresh and not getting spoil too early when they reach the market, and also causes lacking of the right nutrition in fruits. This is why Vitamin C pills is necessary. I tried several brand of Vitamin C pills and they taste the same for me. You can get them minimum at RM15, and you get to choose among tons of brand if you go to Watson or Guardian.
   
   
5. Use sanitizer. The three type of sanitizer that I concern are mainly for hand, bed and toothbrush. You can place a hand sanitizer on your work desk or any table you usually perform your work at. When you back from outside or if you frequently touch with any other object, use it frequently; You need to wash and clean your bed sheet and blanket every week, and use sanitizer once in a month to greatly clear all bacteria that stick to your bed over time. You can do it once in a month. For toothbrush, it's easily accumulate bacteria because you are re-using it at least once everyday. Every time you use your toothbrush, new set of bacteria attached to it and it won't be easily cleared on its own. Using sanitizer on your toothbrush once a week will ensure that you worry less on getting more bacteria attached into your mouth every time you use it. So using sanitizer with the right schedule can greatly reduce bacteria. Even if you don't fall sick, you can at least ensure least bacteria and fungal entering your body.