The Win On Purpose Podcast

Q&A 1: "How Can I Boost My Immune System?"

• Adam Kelley

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This is our first Q&A discussion! If you have questions you would like answered on the podcast, leave you questions in the comments and we will get to them! You can also message Coach Adam Kelley directly on any social media outlet, or email your question to adam@transformedhealthcoach.com. 

Boost your immune system and safeguard your health like never before with evidence-based strategies shared in this episode of the Win On Purpose podcast. Join me, Coach Adam Kelley, as I unravel the truth behind popular health trends, such as intermittent fasting, and explore how they truly impact weight loss and immune health. Learn why it's crucial to rely on meta-analyses and credible research to make informed health decisions, rather than getting caught up in the hype of isolated studies or hearsay.

Our conversation doesn't stop there. We also explore the profound influence that sleep and stress have on your immune system. Discover why not just the quantity, but the quality of your sleep matters, and how chronic stress can sabotage your health efforts. Recognize the importance of foundational practices like regular exercise and effective stress management, which often outweigh the benefits of supplements. As families face the annual onslaught of germs, particularly in schools, these strategies become essential in minimizing illness and promoting overall well-being.

With firsthand insights from my life and work, I emphasize staying healthy in germ-prone environments, especially for families like mine with children in school. Uncover the key practices that help reduce the severity and duration of sickness, allowing you to live life with purpose and intention. Prioritize your health, make positive changes, and strive to succeed, not just for yourself, but for those around you. Join us as we navigate the path towards a healthier, more intentional life, winning on purpose.

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Speaker 1:

What's up guys, welcome back to the Win On Purpose podcast. This is episode number nine and it is a Q&A episode and we are discussing the question how do I boost my immune system? So there's so many different things and tricks and tips out there that people boast about that actually work, and we know that through research and evidence. A lot of it is just hearsay. So I'm going to give you five points of things that you can start today to boost your immune system. Enjoy the episode.

Speaker 2:

Welcome to the Win On Purpose podcast From health and fitness, business, personal development, relationships and more. We promise you will find inspiration to help you win on purpose in all areas of your life journey. Now for your host, adam Kelly.

Speaker 1:

What's up guys, what's up world, what's up all my people? Welcome back to the Win on Purpose podcast. I appreciate you for joining me today. My name is Coach Adam Kelly, here with the Transform Health Initiative headquarters is where I am reporting live from, and that is also our only sponsor for the podcast. So that would be my private personal training facility here in Moore, oklahoma, where I have the pleasure to serve some of the best people in the world every day, helping them to improve their health, change the way they think about nutrition, change the way they think about exercise and really value the body and the life that they've been given. All right, so appreciate you guys for joining me.

Speaker 1:

So I'm going to be doing something a little bit different on this one Number one. This is another question and answer video and actually, the way I kind of have things ordered, this is going to be the first question and answer video that's going to be posted on the podcast and also I'm adding a new feature in which is video. So I'm going to be uploading the video portion of this podcast episode onto my YouTube channel. So you guys be looking out for that If you guys like the video effect and you want to see my brown face speaking to you live, then you can check it out from there. If not, guys, just keep enjoying the podcast audio version and, as usual, if you don't mind, please take the time to give us some good ratings, on whatever platform that you use. Give us five stars if you feel we deserve it. Anything less than that, keep it to yourself. Please give us some comments, some engagement, because this helps us climb up the algorithm ladder. This helps us to be able to position ourself in front of more people, to help more people, to be a bigger blessing, a bigger benefit to the world around us and spread the idea of winning on purpose to the world. So appreciate you guys for the love and for the help there.

Speaker 1:

All right, so now that we are past all that, like I said, I'm going to do a Q and a episode and I'm going to be throwing these in periodically outside of our once a week podcast episodes. So the main podcast episodes, they're going to be a little bit more in depth, where I do a little bit more research, a little bit more information for you guys try to provide as much value as possible. These question and answer videos are going to discuss specific topics in more detail, based on questions that I get from viewers and listeners, from clients, from different conversations I have with people here and there throughout the years, and share this information with you because I know that most of the time, most of us that have questions, it's very similar to the questions other people have and you know, just a lot of times it's not that we need to learn something, because everything's basically the same. You know, the basic principles are the basic principles. However, it may remind us of something that we haven't thought about, or just that accountability of hearing it again so that we can start applying it to our life. All right, so Q&A today's episode is very, very relevant to the times that we're in. This is why I'm pushing this one up and going to put this out sooner than the other Q&A video or podcast episode that I've already recorded, because it's very relevant to the times that we're in. This is something that I'm experiencing in my own personal life and numerous clients that I have, and that is the sick season.

Speaker 1:

All right, it has been quite the sick season already. There's this weird upper respiratory infection that's going around, especially here in Oklahoma. That's just been wreaking havoc on people. We have some nasty stomach bugs going on, different things like that, and it's just been. It's been crazy, guys, like literally I can't even explain how many cancellations and reschedules I've had to have, including having to reschedule a day or two myself due to dealing with it. So it's been crazy, guys.

Speaker 1:

And it always comes back to the conversation of you know, building our immune system. How do we boost our immune system so that we get through the sick season and either don't get sick or we minimize how long we're sick and the intensity and we avoid getting anything else? And there are so many conversations about immunity, about building up our immune system, about, you know, improving our health and making us more resistant to infection and sicknesses and sicknesses and just like most things when it comes to health and fitness and nutrition and this whole entire world. There's lots of things that are being said and presented that we just don't have the actual backing to prove what's being said or even a lot of cases, anything even pointing in that direction. It's what someone believes because it makes most sense to them, maybe based on their personal experience and sometimes with personal experience. Personal experience can be very good, right, like we can learn a lot from what we go through and how we overcome things. But sometimes, when something works, or at least we get the outcome that we're wanting, it may not be what we're actually attributing it to.

Speaker 1:

Okay, so for like, a good example of this would be intermittent fasting. Intermittent fasting has blown up over recent years. This is basically another word for that is time-restricted eating. This is a form of calorie restriction, but it's been toted as this miracle process. As long as you go 16 hours, guys, at least. If you go 15 hours and 59 minutes, nope, didn't work. As long as you go 16 hours or more, you're going to have all these miraculous effects like autophagy, like you know, just you know better mental clarity, immune boost, all these different things that are supposedly going to happen from fasting.

Speaker 1:

And just the large majority of what people claim is not backed by science. It's not backed by research. It is totally just what they're saying. Okay, now someone may have done intermittent fasting and they're like well, wait a minute, like I lost all this way, I had these effects happen, I had these good things happen. So how are you going to tell me that you know this is made up or that these things aren't true? Well, I, although you were engaged in intermittent fasting. It may not be the actual intermittent fasting that did the trick, but it actually helped.

Speaker 1:

What really works do the trick? For example, being in a calorie deficit meaning you're eating less calories than you're consuming causes weight loss. There's no way around it. That is basic physics, that's basic biology 101, okay, energy balance either you're consuming more than you're burning, so you gain weight, or you consume less than you're burning, and then you lose weight. You lose body mass. Okay, that can come from muscle or fat, but it's the same principle at the end of the day, and that's just the way it is. Like. That's what works. Okay, that's that is our anatomy as most living breathing creatures on this planet.

Speaker 1:

Okay, so intermittent fasting, being a diet strategy, helps people be in a calorie deficit because they're eating less over the day, which means overall, on a day-to-day basis, they're consuming less calories, which means they're in a better chance of being in a calorie deficit, which guess what? Equals weight loss. But it also equals a lot of other things, especially when we start losing weight and losing body fat. There's lots of health benefits that come from that that are directly tied to just losing weight. But because we use a certain method to lose the weight, we assume that that method is the solution and that method is what caused it, rather than it just aiding into it. Okay, so I give that long example of intermittent fasting because it's very relevant to what a lot of people know, because everybody hears how so-and-so had all these results and and crazy benefits from intermittent fasting.

Speaker 1:

But, guys, there's no magic to intermittent fasting. It's just calorie restriction, it's just another way to do it. So if it works good for you, then you should probably do that. For some people it works terrible. Some people, like myself, it just leads to being super focused, just constantly thinking about eating. Then it's just like all I'm doing is waiting all day until I can eat. Then I'm in food euphoria until I have to stop eating. Then I'm thinking about eating nonstop again and you know, hunger spikes. All these things that I dealt with and that a lot of people deal with just didn't work out well for me. Plus, I like to body build. I like to train in a way that produces as much muscle as possible and that's just not intermittent fasting and building as much muscle as possible, getting as jacked as possible Just don't act, don't really go together. Okay, so if it works for you, that's great, but that doesn't mean that that's the actual solution. So why do I say all that?

Speaker 1:

Because the same thing ties into our immune system. There's lots of claims, there's lots of products, there's lots of pills, there's lots of solutions that people are presenting that are going to help you boost your immune system, but we have to actually stop and say, okay, well, how do we know this to be true? Or at least, why do we think that this could be true? What evidence do we have to back what this person's saying? And when you start digging into the research and actually you know the credible research you know like meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials. So that's you know, meta-analysis is basically looking at multiple different uh uh experiments and basically lining up the ones that typically show the same thing. So we're testing weight loss through a low carb diet. So you know you may have 10 different groups or scientists that did experiments on this.

Speaker 1:

So we take all of that data, compile it together and see what the bulk of it's saying. If the bulk of it is pointing in a certain direction, that gives us some pretty good confidence that that may have some validity to it. All right, or you know, because what happens is you get one study that says you know this, for sure is this? And then people are like see, I have a study right here, pubmed, boom, prove it. Well, you may have 50 other studies that say the exact opposite. So if you only take and create your belief system off of that one study, you may be way wrong just basing it on that one piece of data.

Speaker 1:

So that, like I said, is the same thing with our immune system. There's so many things that are touted to boost it up that it's going to do this, it's going to do that. So what actually works? That's what we're left with, because a lot of us have tried all these things. We've tried the pills, we've tried the supplements, we've tried this, we've tried these little hacks and ice baths and all these different things that people are doing, sauna and all these things that are supposed to boost our immune system, but a lot of it we just don't see it actually working. So what do we know from actual research, actual experiments on human beings? Do we see? Typically has the biggest effect.

Speaker 1:

And so I've wrote down a few points here. If you're watching the video, you see I got my little sticky pad here. So these Q&As are really just me just giving you my opinion on something based on my expertise, based on my experience, based on my research and my readings and studies, and just giving it to you guys. Like I said, I'm not going to do a lot of research to give you different points and statistics and things like that on these. This is just. Hey, if you were to come up to me and ask me this question or you were a client and you wanted to know this, I'm going to tell you just like I would them. Ok, so I have a few things that we can actually focus on that are worth our time and attention and energy and effort that may actually help benefit our immune system and help increase our immune system.

Speaker 1:

All right, so number one is basically this is the most basic one. It may sound like elementary, but a lot of times we don't think about this and basically just standard good hygiene practices. Okay, so the boring things like washing our hands, you know, not just touching everything when we're out in public, not getting face to face with people and breathing their spit and their oxygen, you know, creating distance from people that are sick, social distancing, if you will Things like that, you know. Bathing Sorry, but not everybody does that Brushing our teeth, you know. Cleaning, sanitizing things. This is probably our number one defense against the majority of infections, the sicknesses that happen, because basically all of them we catch from somebody. So standard, good hygiene practices should always be instilled, no matter if it's sixth season or not. These should be the things we do. We should be washing our hands regularly. We should be, you know, being aware of bacteria and germs, things like that. Not drinking after everybody and germs, things like that not drinking after everybody, eating after everybody, things like that, guys, things that our mom and dad told us we shouldn't do. And we know we shouldn't do, but we don't always do it, and so that would be a big place to focus your energy on.

Speaker 1:

The next one exercise, physical activity. So we know you can look up the research on it we know that physical activity, exercise, has a positive effect on our immune system. Now what you may not know is exercise can have an acute meaning a short-term negative impact on our immune system. So it's probably not best to go work out and stuff if you're actually sick, because now you're going to, in the short term, lower your immune system, which is going to make you more susceptible to getting worse viruses or just making your condition that you're dealing with worse. But if you're not dealing with something, exercise is one of the best preventative measures to boost your immune system, to sweat out toxins, to get our body temperature up, which kills a lot of sickness and viruses and infection that are in our bodies that our immune system is fighting against, and several other benefits that directly impact our immune system when it comes to regular, consistent exercise. So that would be number two point to make sure that you have intact All right.

Speaker 1:

Number three eating a healthy diet. All right. Again, all these sound elementary. It's all things we know. Sometimes we just need to be reminded. So, eating a healthy diet, what does that look like? That doesn't mean cutting out certain food groups. That doesn't mean you know a lot of the perceptions we have. It means eating a balanced diet, eating a variety of foods that provide us with all the macro and micronutrients, all the macro and micronutrients. So everything from our protein, carbs and fats, which is our macronutrients, to our micronutrients, like vitamins, minerals, things like that, electrolytes. Making sure that we're eating that variety so that we're getting in all these nutrients, because that is a big part of protecting our body against sickness and infection is making sure that we're getting in the nutrients that we need. You know, antioxidants, things like that that actually have an effect on the body. So that's a big one.

Speaker 1:

Um, kind of touching on diet, a lot of people they connect supplementation to diet, and I'm not necessarily talking about supplementation. There may be some benefit there. People are like oh, you need to be taking your vitamin C, or you need to be taking your elderberry, or you need to be taking this or that. There may be some truth there, but we just don't really see enough weight of evidence showing that those make a big impact. It may make a small impact, but overall it doesn't seem to be a very big one. However, if our diet consistently is filled with nutritious foods, we're constantly providing our bodies with the vitamins and nutrients and minerals that it needs so that it can boost our immune system, so that it is in a position to protect us, rather than how opening that this pill or this supplement is going to do it for us All right, so make sure your diet looks good and you have a variety of you know, lean proteins, fruits, veggies, whole grains, you know fibrous foods, things that we know improve our health overall, because if we're improving our health overall, we're going to be improving our immune system as well. All right, the next one I would definitely spend time focusing on.

Speaker 1:

This is a big problem for all of us as a whole, and that is sleep. So I don't mean just, you know, the duration of sleep that you're getting, but also the quality of sleep that you're getting is very important. So we know that whenever we're lacking sleep, it is a direct hit to our immune system, because all of our healing, all of our recovery you know all of the good processes that are happening in the body the majority of that happens when we're sleeping. So if we're lacking sleep, we're not getting all of those benefits, though that healing, that cleaning out of you know infection and dead cells, and you know all these benefits that happen while we're sleeping just aren't happening. And that's a big problem. And again, it directly impacts our immune system. So if you're not getting adequate sleep, you are really increasing the odds of you contracting something that's probably going to be a lot worse than if you were well rested. All right, so make sure your sleep is intact.

Speaker 1:

And the last one that I want to touch on is stress reduction. All right, this is probably the most overlooked one out of all of these stress reduction. So we know that stress in in a chronic sense, meaning longer than just oh, in this moment I'm stressing about something until it's solved and then I de-stress and move on. But that chronic stress that we're under day in, day out, from work and family and responsibilities and all these other things that we tend to stress about, this is a huge, huge detriment to our health, to our immune system. It's going to affect our hygiene. It's going to affect, you know, our hygiene. It's going to affect our desire for physical activity, our intensity with physical activity.

Speaker 1:

If you're super distracted, super bogged down by stress and things going on, the chances of you getting a really good workout aren't as good, because your mind isn't you know actually where you're at in the workout. You know it can definitely affect our food choices. So we tend to make more rash decisions, more impulsive decisions and just more not so great decisions. In general, when we're stressed, we have a higher chance of stopping and grabbing some quick junk food, or stopping and getting fast food for dinner because we're too stressed and don't feel like going home and cooking a clean meal, things like that. Definitely, stress will affect our sleep. Rather, if that's sleep deprivation, where you just can't fall asleep, or maybe you're not able to get into those deep sleep cycles because you have this thing on your subconscious and even though you're asleep, your body's still dealing with the stress response. We have cortisol that spikes super high, which you know. Again, a consistent spike in cortisol can wreak havoc on our bodies.

Speaker 1:

So stress reduction is very important, even if you have a high stress life. Finding ways that you can mitigate that stress, that you can you know, work through it, that you can put your mind on things that are less stressful. This is again where exercise is a big benefit, because for most of us that are addicted to training or exercise, a big part of why we're addicted to it is the mental benefits that we get from it. Okay, it's like therapy. So, uh, stress reduction is going to be huge, right?

Speaker 1:

So there's five points for you guys that you can that are actually practical, that actually backed by science and research and human beings time and time again, that you can start implementing, if you're not already, or at least focusing even more on these things, because these are going to have a direct effect on your immune system. Now, you know, maybe you could try the supplement, maybe you can try whatever this person's touting is going to be, you know, it's the best thing for your immune system and maybe it has a benefit at the end of the day. But if you don't have these five things in line, it doesn't matter what supplements you're taking, it doesn't matter what program you're following or who you're listening to or what they're telling you to do. It is not going to have the effect you're wanting, because you don't have these staples, you know, dialed in. You know you don't have these standards set that are actually going to make the biggest difference. All right, so take care of these things, guys, and you are going to put yourself in the best position to avoid getting sick. And if you can't avoid getting sick, at least lessening how long you're sick or the, you know, the intensity of the sickness. And just put yourself in the best position, because sometimes it's inevitable, especially those of us like myself.

Speaker 1:

Me and my wife have four kids. They're all in school, so they're constantly around germs, especially the younger kids in elementary. Kids are just kids, all right, they're nasty, they're picking their boogers, they're wiping them on each other, they're coughing all in each other's face, they're drinking after each other All the stuff that we started with good hygiene they don't typically do on their own and so you know, like us, we're always around something. So, even though we take good care of our health, even though I make sure to focus on these five things on a regular basis, sometimes I can't avoid it because it's the environment I'm in and I also in my profession as a trainer, a health coach, I work one-on-one, face-to-face with people and so they're bringing in sicknesses they may not even realize that they have, or that's on them that I'm coming in contact with.

Speaker 1:

You know, my wife is a school teacher, so she's constantly around hundreds of students and hundreds of staff members that are constantly sick, having to come into work or go to school still sick. So they're touching everything and spreading those germs. So sometimes it's unavoidable. But if we do the main things and keep the main things, the main things, we put ourselves in the best position to avoid all that, or at least, like I said, less than how long we have to be sick and how sick we actually get, all right. So I hope you guys find this information useful, that it actually benefits your journey and that it helps you not be as sick during this time, so you can enjoy life and keep it moving and keep winning on purpose and reaching for your goals and killing it All right. So, with that being said, make sure you do something good for yourself, something good for your health, something good for those around you and, whatever you do, make sure you win on purpose. Talk at you next time.