Improve your immune response even when you are in the early stages of getting ill.

I will tell you about the biggest discovery that I made a couple of years ago. It completely eliminated my seasonal cold or flu and I haven’t been ill since.

If you make a search on Google for “How to boost immune system when sick” and you go and read what other articles are saying you can see that everyone is basically just repeating what everyone is saying.

Here s a list of things you should follow to boost your immune response:

Take vitamin C

Eat good food (Greens and fruit)

Get enough sleep

Eat probiotics

Get more vitamin D

Drink hot tea with honey

Avoid stress

Don’t drink alcohol

…

Now this are all good tips and you should definitely follow this steps as they will do you good. The problem is however that you will still get your seasonal cold or flu and none of this things will shorten your misery. Unless you actually have some sort of vitamin deficiency stuffing yourself with vitamin C when you already are sick won’t do wonders.

Every time I got sick I tried all of this things. I stuffed myself with vitamin C, I ate the supplements and I drank as much fresh organic lemonade as possible. I added honey to my lemonade. I ate raw garlic which should help with colds and smelled for hours later.

Believe me I tried everything, I even tried colloidal silver when I had a sore throat and it didn’t do much.

So what do I do to improve my immune system when I am sick?

I will get straight to the point, to boost my immune system I do cold showers. Even if I am feeling I am getting a bit down and feel far from comfortable doing a cold shower I do it anyway and it helps immensely.

Now the thing is that if I do my cold showers regularly I don’t even get to that first stage when you feel you are about to get ill. But I am human as everyone of us and I do have periods when I don’t perform them as I should. Then you add some stress and it can happen that I start feeling like I am getting something.

Now even if I didn’t take a cold shower for a while and I am basically on the brink of getting a cold I still go under a cold shower and it will pull me together. Next day I repeat the exercise immediately in the morning and I am at 95% again.

I couldn’t believe just how effective this is. Even if you neglect it you take 2 or 3 cold showers in a short period of time and it stops you from getting a flu.

Your body and immune system is a bit tricky. You don’t get sick because your level of vitamin C is 10% under what it should be, no you get ill because your immune system is to slow. One could argue that we are getting lazy and less active and to be honest I think we could say the same thing about our immune system. We are so isolated from all the germs and everything that out immune system can be half a sleep most of the time and you still wouldn’t get sick. So the first you encounter a virus your immune system just doesn’t react fast enough and you get a cold.

Now I must say that I am a reasonably healthy person and all I had to fight of was the seasonal cold or flu. I am not saying this is a cure for everything and I am not even 100% that it works for everyone. All I know is that it helps me immensely and not just in terms of preventing a sickness but it also makes me feel good and alive.

One of the nice benefits is also that once you get adapted to cold water you can swim in colder waters. I live in Europe where the sea never goes below a certain degree and I can basically swim in the sea all year long.

But getting back to your situation, if you found this page searching for “How to improve immune system when ill” you are probably ill and the last thing you want to do now is to go under a cold shower and to be honest I wouldn’t even advise you doing this as you are already sick and most probably haven’t had a cold shower for a very long time and if you have high fever I wouldn’t advise you even if you would be doing it every day as that could be a big shock to your body and could pose a risk.

Now what you can do so you can get at least some benefits of this technique is that even putting your feet in cold water helps. Now you can go under the shower and have a warm shower and at the end slowly start to lower the temperature and just shower your lower part of the legs. If you feel comfortable enough you can even go higher.

This will already give you a little boost to your immune system and it is not as horrible as taking a full body cold shower.

I also usually do a small fast or at least do some sort of intermittent fasting where I skip breakfast and have a later lunch. This way my body can focus only on fighting the virus and not so much about digesting the food.

Now to get a bit sciency about this subject

Unfortunately there are very few studies done on this matter and most of them are not recent.

Boosting the human immune system: a study from England found that taking daily cold showers increased the numbers of disease-fighting white blood cells (compared to people who took hot showers). The investigators at Britain’s Thrombosis Research Institute suggested that as the body tries to warm itself during and after a cold shower, metabolic rate speeds up and activates the immune system, which leads to the release of more white blood cells. And, according to a German study, an occasional winter swim in cold water causes oxidative stress, but, done regularly, such swimming leads to an adaptive antioxidant response; in other words, the body is better able to combat oxidative stress in general once it’s accustomed to cold-water swims.

As you can see there is some science behind my discovery.

And here is a more recent study which showed a 29% decrease in sick days in the test group.

And her is a study that shows that cold shower also releases noradrenaline into the body which increase the activity and percentage of the natural killer (NK) cells, and the leukocyte concentration.