All Things Maui Real Estate

Do These Three Things To Strengthen Your Resistance

Disclaimer: This information is not intended to replace or contradict with any medical professional advice you've personally received. 

You may be asking yourself, how does a Maui realtor know anything about the Coronavirus? And, why would I even spend time writing about this on my blog? Well, first, I'm passionate about health and wellness. Second, I've spent over a decade researching and experimenting with many wellness practices commonly known as 'bio-hacking' to improve my own health. Third, I love sharing!

I've learned an enormous amount about the human body and its resilience to disease through my research and have gained a new perspective of health in the process of dealing with some of my own health issues. 

While I'm certainly not a doctor, these 3 things I'm about to suggest to help protect you from the coronavirus are simple, yet will require some effort and are effective at preventing illness in general. Who knows, you might even have fun with it!

For What It's Worth

I'm not here to advise you to take or not to take any particular treatment, but I have spent over a decade learning ways to optimize my own health and wellness while avoiding prescriptions or expensive treatments, but this list certainly isn't to take the place of anything you agree to with your doctor. 

My qualifications come from my passion for health and wellness, my desire to learn and willingness to self-experiment. My motivation is simple, I want to help others and pass on what I've learned. Two of the three things I'm going to suggest are free and the third is extremely inexpensive and readily accessible at any grocery store. First, a little overview about stress.

The Power of The Human Body

The human body is capable of amazing things when given the opportunity to heal itself and fend off disease. Our immune systems are their own superhighways of information and resources to protect us against pathogens and viruses like the Coronavirus.

It's Our Job

It's our job to give our immune system the tools to succeed and we can do that through nutrition as well as through a process known as hormesis. Hormesis is the process through which we strengthen ourselves through small, controlled amounts of stress.

More Stress?

That's right, as if the COVID-19 pandemic wasn't enough stress, I'm going to suggest certain types of small stressors as part of a coronavirus prevention method. These small controlled stressors will actually reduce the amount of stress you may be feeling about the virus as well by releasing feel-good hormones and neurotransmitters.

Eustress vs. Distress

Just like with physical exercise, when we stress a muscle, it repairs and grows to meet any future challenges. The same process happens with the nervous system and the immune system.

Eustress (pronounced you-stress) is a group of stressors that positively impact the human body and performance. Funny enough, we need stress in our lives to be happy and healthy. Without challenges, there are no victories.

On the other hand, distress causes disease and illness and presents itself in the form of injury, trauma, and maladaption. Seek eustress while avoiding distress.Certain types of stressors are proven in university and peer reviewed research to actively boost the immune system and effectively prevent disease. When we are presented with certain stressors, our bodies are forced to adapt.

These adaptions from eustress result in strengthening of our body's innate ability to fend off disease. What are these three natural ways to protect yourself from Coronavirus? Let's get started.

1. Nasal Breathing and The Wim Hof Method

I start with nasal breathing because its the simplest thing you can do starting right now to be more intentional with your breath and try to breathe exclusively through your nose. James Nestor's book "Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art", available here at Amazon.com, explains that nasal breathing is actually the proper way to breath at all times to maintain optimal health.

By breathing through the nose we take longer slower breaths that can lower heart rate, actually improve oxygen absorption rates, and breath cleaner air.

The nasal cavity has evolved to filter out a lot of the particles in our environment and this results in less detoxification work by the lungs. Since the Coronavirus is transmitted through respiratory droplets, your risk of inhaling a respiratory droplet significantly decreases as does your ability to spread it since those droplets rarely come through the nose and if they do, they go down and not out. 

The Wim Hof Method

If you're not familiar with the "Iceman" Wim Hof, I highly recommend looking him up on YouTube and following him on social media. He has broken dozens of endurance related world records and has expanded the limits of what people thought possible with cold and heat exposure. He has gone as far to have several independent university experiments performed on him about his method's efficacy.

Simply put, there are two arms of his method. Tummo breathing, which is an ancient breathing technique designed to increase our CO2 resilience that creates eustress (good stress) in the body along with cold water exposure such as an ice bath or cold shower.

You don't need anything special to try this out and the way it makes you feel after just may have you coming back for more. I was fortunate enough to do a live seminar training with Wim a few years ago on Treasure Island in San Francisco and I can attest first hand to the many benefits of this practice.

As wild as it may seem, its worth trying. 

2. Fasting: Intermittent or Extended

Intermittent fasting has been the darling of all health and wellness headlines for many years now. With the increase in research and content being distributed about the practice, one things for sure, no one agrees on one particular way to do this, everyone finds their own way here.

It's Not Just For Weight Management

I've practiced both intermittent and extended fasting for many years now and have experience tremendous results not only physically, but mentally also.

Fasting is a type of stressor that results in the body producing different types of hormones such as HGH and BDNF (Brain Derived Neurotrophic Factor) as well as entering a cellular repair process known as autophagy.

Autophagy is the process by which our body removes damaged or mutated cells allowing the growth of new healthy cells. The first organ to begin repair during fasting is the lungs and the better equipped your lungs are to handle a possible transmission of COVID-19 the better. 

Fasting has numerous benefits, too many to fit into this article, but if you are interested I recommend starting slow with a small eating window such as 12pm-8pm and making sure that the foods you eat in that window are paleo-ish, meaning no refined sugars, mainly whole foods with plenty of veggies and avoiding any processed foods. 

3. Eat Seaweed

Wait, what? An article published on July 24th, 2020 about research performed by Cell Discover on www.sciencedaily.com indicates that seaweed extract has proven more effective at combating COVID-19 than one of the current drugs Remdesivir.  According to the study 

The spike protein on the surface of SARS-CoV-2 latches onto the ACE-2 receptor, a molecule on the surface of human cells. Once secured, the virus inserts its own genetic material into the cell, hijacking the cellular machinery to produce replica viruses. But the virus could just as easily be persuaded to lock onto a decoy molecule that offers a similar fit. The neutralized virus would be trapped and eventually degrade naturally.

 

It does sound like the seaweed in this study was highly concentrated into an extract, but seaweed is actually incredibly healthy anyway and has other health benefits. Living in Hawaii we have an abundance of access to many different delicious forms of seaweed, but we really love the seaweed snacks from Costco. 

Whew. That's a lot of info to download I know. I'm not saying these things can prevent the coronavirus, just that we know when we strengthen our immune systems through hormesis there are proven positive results on health outcomes in general. Being healthy and maintaining a strong immune system is paramount to avoiding illness in general.

I sincerely hope that all is well with you and that this article has been helpful in even the smallest way. These practices are some of the most interesting things I've come across and I appreciate you taking the time to check them out.