Quick Get-Healthy Checklist: Ten Things to Fight a Cold

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Okay, so you've got that sniffle-tickle-scratchythroat feeling approaching. It is unsurprisingly common in this day and age, at this time of year. I see all sorts of friends, family, and co-workers out of the office, staying at home with the sick kids, just trying to recover for days and days. But when given the proper environment, the body can resist instantly or fight off a cold in about a day or so. What do you do? Run through this checklist and make these part of your get-healthy quick routine:

1. Do not consume sugar when you're feeling sick. Don't eat it any other time, either, but concentrate on it specifically if you're feeling a cold. Consuming sugar will have the opposite effect of making your body strong and healthy.
2. Even more so than sugar, stay far, far away from artificial sugar replacements such as AminoSweet (aspartame), Sucralose, and so on. At all times, but especially when weakened, your body needs to work on repairing itself, not fighting off these chemical poisons. (No Diet Sodas!)
3. WATER. Flush that illness out of your body! Your cells work less efficiently when they're dehydrated.
4. Raw garlic, minced or chopped, three times daily! Mincing makes it a little harder to get down than slicing, but either way, taken with a glass of water you'll barely feel it.
5. Oil up! Certain oils have very strong anti-bacterial/ anti-viral/ etc properties and can really help out in times like this. Oregano oil, Thieves oil, and Cod-liver oil are all daily-use cold fighters.
6. Stay away from pharmaceuticals offering the promise of relief from colds, such as Airborne, Emergen-C, aspirin, or non-aspirin pain relievers, and so on. These fight the symptoms, contain harmful substances, and can leave your body more vulnerable than before. If you want some real vitamin C, grate the peel of an organic orange or lemon, and swallow it down. It's much cheaper, and much much healthier than the synthesized ascorbic acid you'll find in the drugs.
7. Restore your pH balance: This typically means eating healthy foods like green vegetables and all the other things you're probably not eating. Avoid coffee while you're sick as it's acidic. A body in an acid state has a harder time fighting off colds. As Jay Kordich has said, when you're green inside, you're clean inside.
8. REST. Get to bed at 10:00 PM (or earlier if the fancy grabs you) and wake up at around 6:00 AM. Let your body do what its R&R - rest and repair.
9. Ginger tea. It's a soothing, antiseptic, antioxidant. Easy to have on hand, this will relax you while it heals as well.
10. Avoid the fake four foods: White sugar (notice how this is first and last on this list?), refined flour, bad oils (hydrogenated, and nearly all vegetable oils), and processed dairy. This is a more complex step than the others and takes a lot more preparation and study, but it's a major step in reclaiming your health and truly fights off those colds.

This article is part of Prevention Not Prescription at TheKathleenShow.com and Fight Back Friday at FoodRenegade.

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