One of the very best things you can do to make sure your immune system is operating fully is to make sure that you’re well-nourished. It’s not even so much about eliminating the bad stuff — the bad stuff should be considered carefully — but more so about putting in the good stuff.
What we want to do is make sure that we’re eating enough of the good stuff, even if we do occasionally eat some of the not so good stuff.
Metabolic Health
This leads us to another area that’s related to nutrition, and that is your metabolic health. These days it’s become quite a buzzword and a popular conversation topic among many groups, so maybe you know a little bit about metabolic health or maybe you don’t, we’re going to explain a little bit of how it works.
Your body is an energy management machine. It’s constantly trying to figure out how to get the right amount of energy, how to store energy when it needs to, and so on. You have three primary fuel sources: you can burn sugar occasionally, you can burn fat pretty consistently, and you can even burn protein (it’s important to do that from time to time). The challenge is, most of us have the ratio mixed up. Most of us are living a life where we predominantly burn sugar and rarely, if ever burn fat, and almost never burn protein. That’s a problem. And it’s not good for your immune function.
Here’s an example:
When your body decides to burn protein, it’s so smart about it. Because it hunts down the old and sick proteins and burns them first. So every time you burn protein, you’re actually cleansing your system, which is a very important aspect of the immune system.
The same thing is going on with the many people who will never burn fat. There are a number of problems with that. One is that it means that they’ll gain weight. The other reason is that it means they have old fat stacked upon old fat, which is not ideal for a number of reasons. Here’s two: one is that fat is an organ, it’s not just this stored energy, it’s an organ. Your fat produces hormones. In fact, one of the hormones that your fat produces is estrogen, which tells your body to do what fats to store, so you see the vicious cycle.
On top of that, fat also acts as an insulator. It insulates you from toxins and acids that might be coming in as a result of your environment or diet or what have you. As a result, those are inside of you waiting for the next time you burn fat and release them… But if you never do that, then you’re just stacking and stacking and stacking.
By now, you probably see why it’s so key to do what you can to return to a really solid metabolic health, which is to say that you are burning all three types of fuel at various stages throughout the year.
Here’s a little clue on how you can do just that: your body will burn sugar if you give it sugar, and that’s fine from time to time as there are good and bad sugars. But it’s also important at times that you reduce your sugar intake dramatically to give your body the opportunity to regulate and move to fat burning and to protein burning.
If you’re interested in learning more about your immune system, and how you can protect it so it’s always operating with the intention of protecting you, then don’t miss out on our free video series where WILDFIT founder Eric Edmeades walks you through specific steps you can take to avoid weakening and rather strengthening your immune system.
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