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During the pandemic times, one vital question on everyone’s mind is – How do I work on my immunity so that I am prepared to face the COVID virus if at all need be?
These days, social media is bombarding us with tips on eating or drinking certain things that will work on our immunity. It’s not surprising that it gets very confusing on what to follow and what not!
Before we conclude on anything, it is important to understand what it really means when we say - “immunity is high or low”. Also, what are the fundamental principles using which our body functions?
Once we understand these basic principles, we would be able to make better decisions on what do we eat or how do we eat to ensure we are able to prepare our body and mind to face external viruses or pathogens, that we might come across.
Our bodies are naturally designed to fight with any external viruses that it comes in contact with. However, if we eat a lot of processed food and if we eat frequently, most of our body energy is expended in digesting the food, thus leaving very little energy to fight with the viruses that might enter our bodies. So, what do we do so our body functions in such a way that it has enough energy to deal with external virus attacks?
We should eat food that can easily be digested - To preserve energy for protecting the body from viruses
We should eat ONLY when we are hungry – To preserve energy that is spent on discarding microbial population
Let’s look at these principles in detail. What kind of food can be easily digested? The answer is quite simple – Food that nature has prepared for us to be consumed! This food is un-processed, full of nutrition, and ready to be eaten by us, which means our body doesn’t have to do a lot to be able to digest and assimilate it, leaving energy to heal and cope up with any external pathogens or viruses.
The other important principle is that we must eat ONLY when we are really hungry. When we are truly hungry, our body’s digestive energy is at it’s best. So, when we feed it with fresh food, it readily metabolizes it efficiently. If we eat when we are not hungry and even though we eat healthily, the food is not digested completely leaving partially digested food in our digestive system. This generates microbes that grow on the partially digested food and our body needs to work extra to throw these microbes out, again expending energy that could be saved for dealing with viruses.
In our Shodh With Sattv series, Episode#1, hear Dr Vikram talk about all about what immunity means and the fundamental principles that we should follow to ensure our immunity is always up and that we are not needed to worry about boosting immunity ever again!