5 Things I Do to Stop Myself Getting Ill

0:00This is one of the biggest issues of early autumn health. When it comes to getting cold and coughs and flus, there is so much that you can do to avoid catching them in the first place. Oolong tea actually keeps the lungs nice and moist because autumn is the season of dryness. It's a very, very simple thing. It's called halo therapy. And basically what you're doing is you're breathing in the salt and salt is incredibly beneficial to the lungs. You're starting to get too stressed. It's one of the big issues as to why we get sick in the first place. One of the kind of really cool things that we know as Chinese doctors is hello and welcome to own your health with me Katie Brindle. And today's episode is all about five easy ways to avoid catching colds this autumn and wintertime. Now nobody wants to catch a cold. It's miserable and it's all way well if you can take your bed and be weighted on hand and foot whilst you get over the lurgy. But the reality is that almost all of us is that that's not possible and we have to struggle through whether we feel ill or not. So Chinese medicine has so much it can do to help us avoid getting sick in the first place. In fact, people kind of know that

1:02Chinese medicine sits very comfortably in this area because they say, isn't it true in ancient China that doctors were paid to keep you healthy and then if you got sick they kind of had to treat you for free. Sort of people sort of know this a little bit why they know it or how they do but they do. And the answer is when it comes to getting colds and coughs and fluses this winter there is so much that you can do to avoid catching them in the first place. There's just a little bit of simple intel that you need to know which is what today's episode is all about. So first of all let's just talk about the body's immune system because in the West we talk a lot about boosting the immunity but in Chinese medicine we don't really talk about the immune system in such a way. What we do is we break it down into internal and external. So let's start with the external system first. It's called wachii in Chinese medicine and it's basically a thin film of energy that circulates around the kind of the upper chest and neck and head and it's strengthened and kept healthy by the lungs. The lungs are responsible for the wachii and one of the things that

2:05we need to be aware of is that if our lungs get compromised the wachii will get compromised as well. The minute that wachii gets compromised it's much much easier for airborne diseases to get into the body and get a foothold. So the first thing that we need to do is make sure that we are keeping our wachii protected and we are strengthening our lungs. Okay so how do we do that? Well let's just go straight into some super quick fixes that I can tell you straight away that are going to make a massive difference. Number one you wear a scarf. I mean it is so old school isn't it? It's the kind of thing that your grandmother probably would have said to you leaving the house like well put a scarf on your catch cold and you think in this day and age oh I don't really need to bother with that or worse I see my children going outside with wet hair and I let me tell you if I see them going out with wet hair I grab them and pull them back in again making sure that this wachii is protected by a further layer and not compromising it by having damp wet hair around the neck and the upper back is a simple way to protect yourself against catching cold. It is imperative to wear an

3:06extra layer and the further into the autumn and winter we go the more layered up we need to be. Now interestingly I was just having a quick chat with one of our earlier guests before she left and she was just talking about the fact that this morning and this is relatively early autumn she was leaving Gilford she was really cold she bought her coat with her and now it's the middle of the day and we're in central London and it's actually quite warm. Now this is one of the biggest issues of early autumn health and prevention of catching cold. The what happens is because we're up in the northern hemisphere it's cold first thing and last thing and if there's a little sudden gust of wind that can also be quite nippy but then suddenly the sun will come out and it's actually quite warm and then those sort of fluctuations of temperature can catch us out and then we don't really sure whether we should be wearing a thick top or a thin top or a sleeveless top and we end up getting compromised at some point or other. So the most important thing at this time of year is to layer up. The other thing to be aware of is autumn is the season of the lungs and as I've said the lungs are the organ responsible for this wachii and this wachii is your external barrier

4:09protecting you from the lurgis which are airborne and circulating around you. Now one of the most important things to do at this time of year is to nourish the lungs because it's the season of the lungs and therefore at this time of year it is really important that we are giving the lungs everything we possibly can to keep them strong. Another super super quick win for that is ulong tea. In China tea culture is like wine to French culture. They have thousands and thousands and thousands of different teas and they're specialist but one of the key things that they talk about is that there are four main sorts of teas that you want to have one per season and ulong comes into fashion and into its health criteria in the autumn. That moves to black in the winter, it moves to the floral teas in the spring and the white teas in the summer and if you follow the tea advice which I've been giving for many years now you will really notice that that ulong really comes into its own at this time of year. In fact I've served ulong to everyone in the room and everyone's smiling a lot of it. We go we love your ulong tea, it tastes amazing. It's really

5:13nourishing for the lungs. It's a really brilliant thing to have because the ulong tea actually keeps the lungs nice and moist because autumn is the season of dryness and if the lungs get too dry they start to become deficient and in turn that will compromise the wachie. Next to support the lungs is the Himalayan salt pipe which is over here. This is my Himalayan salt pipe which I absolutely swear by. It's a very very simple thing. It's called halo therapy and basically what you're doing is you're breathing in the salt through these little you've got the air coming in through these little holes in the bottom of the clay pipe. It passes over the Himalayan salt and then you breathed in like so. Salt is incredibly beneficial to the lungs especially if you're starting to get mucousy and you're starting to pick up coughs. It's a very very simple way to keep the lungs healthy. They discover this in eastern salt mines when people in Poland were either working the salt mines or the coal mines. They learned quite quickly that the guys who were working the coal mines tended to get ill quite quite early on whereas the guys who were working the salt mines lived

6:17long healthy lives and they soon realised that it was obviously to do with salt that they were inhaling all day long. This is a fantastic way for keeping the lungs healthy. It's also a brilliant breathing technique to reduce stress and we're also very much aware that a high stress level is very very detrimental to your immune system and to basically keeping you keeping you well. So if you're starting to get too stressed it's one of the big issues as to why we get sick in the first place and slow diaphragmatic breathing is a very very easy way to counterbalance the stress response and why the salt pipe is so useful is it acts a little bit like a cigarette filter. I am not suggesting smoking is a good thing for your health it is not but one of the things that smoking does is because you're inhaling through a filter you're you're basically passing the breath over something which in turn creates a slight obstacle and slows it down coming into the body which actually feels really really good. Another really simple way to supporting this exterior protection of the body is body tapping. So this is the body taper which is sold on the hay you method.

7:20Now the reason why this is so good is because it's long you can reach the all important upper pack by striking the body in in a therapeutic way you'll strengthening up the circulation and you're strengthening the wachie in turn. So by using the taper to just tap the upper body you're strengthening the wachie you can obviously use the taper over the chest as well and it's also really important to tap down the inside of the arms because the inside of the arms is the lung radion and therefore by strengthening the meridian you're strengthening the organ. One final area to tap which is a really easy quick win is on the crease of the elbow here because bizarrely one of the kind of really cool things that we know as Chinese doctors is that the creases of the body align to the different key organs and as those of you who follow my content know that one of the key things I talk about to owning your health is you've got to protect and balance the five key organs. So the liver goes to the armpit the heart and the

8:23lungs are on the elbow crease the spleen is on the groin and the kidney is on the crease of the knee really useful information so if you're wanting to strengthen this all important wachie you need to strengthen the lungs and the lungs have a relationship to the crease of the elbow so you can either use the taper or you can tap with the palm of the other hand really when you're doing this kind of exercise you want to pat about a hundred times okay you actually are looking for it to come up slightly red underneath but if you try it just give it a go now you will find it makes a massive difference to how you feel you'll feel energized from doing that exercise tapping the creases of the body is a very very simple health practice to do every single morning it's very energizing and very very healthy so that is a really quick five fantastic things that you can do to support the wachie on the outside of the body but what about the inside of the body well the inside of the body's defenses is called zonchi or zengchi there's various different explanations for both but let's just go is zonchi for now we don't need to get caught up in the detail this is your internal

9:26immune system now this is supported by the spleen so this is a different organ entirely and the spleen has got a very deep responsibility to your internal immune system so it's really really important to keep your spleen healthy at all costs the spleen is responsible for transforming and transporting the food and fluids around the body it's important for your gut health and it's important for basically keeping the immune system strong on the inside so if that pathogen has managed to penetrate its way through your now very strong external fortress and has nevertheless like a trojan horse managed to get itself into the internal defense of the body it is the spleen's responsibility to make sure that those pathogens are attacked at all costs so that they get killed off as soon as possible before they get a foothold into the body so I think the easiest way to describe this is kind of when you get that tickle you know you get that tickle at the back of your throat and you think oh no that's it I'm going down with something I can feel it straight away and often that's the worst point because it makes you feel really drained and really exhausted so what do you

10:28need to do at this point? Well the first thing to do at this point is to take a really good immune supplement now there's three immune supplements that I really really love and I have them in my cupboards at all times I even travel with them at all times I have been caught out in the past by not traveling with them thinking oh Katie come on what are you talking about you're going to call food it's the middle of June you don't need to take an immune supplement with you and someone got cold I've also traveled thinking I'll just put one of these boxes in my suitcase just in case I now have learnt as a mother of three if I'm traveling with all my family that I need to make sure that I have got a plentiful supply because if one person brings pathogens into the group when we're all away on holiday the chances are it's going to spread like wildfire throughout the whole of the group and therefore I need to have enough of this supplementation to ensure that everybody is okay so now I travel with bucket loads of it because one of the things that people notice is that when they go away on holiday they get sick it's one of those things right happens people it's just people talk about it's all the time thinking it's so unfair and it's because the body is going

11:31into its rest and restore mode and therefore we'll start to deal with things that have been accumulating and suppressed whilst we've been under stress so it is really important to make sure that you have these immune supplements in your cupboard and in your suitcase this is the first one which is the leap program you which are these it's based on the magic ingredients is lactoferin which is fantastic and has saved my family again and again and again since this has come many years ago I literally swear by this the other one that I take is this one which is a brand called ringana this one is based on Chinese herbs you can see this is once fairly empty now this one's based on a Chinese it's it's three different mushroom complex and it works brilliantly well in conjunction with this because this one's based on lactoferin this is a different set of ingredients and they're working different ways you put the two things together it's amazing I will take both of these preventatively in the winter as well so I'm already building up my immune system by taking both of these supplements now that the weather's turning last what my name means

12:32least is this one which is called source of life gold this is something that actually heret introduced me to last year now this is something again I keep in the cupboard and put in my suitcase I only take this when I feel something coming on so it's another one that I just have like a little shot ready to go now as well as those little things that you can do to support our spleen that will in turn support our immune system from the inside and this is giving the spleen what it needs the spleen does not like ice the spleen does not like cold damp gusts of wind around its middle so crop tops and low slung jeans spines like vests spines like regularity they like to be fed three times a day at the same time they like exercise every day they like to be stretched they like to be massaged and they like to be loved and that's what spines like spines also like warm nurturing food so at this time of year it's really important to start leaving those chiller cabinets behind not that I'm a fan of chiller cabinets full stop but at the absolute outside I

13:36will let people have access to them in the summertime but preferably not but now that the weather is starting to turn they are an absolute no no it is imperative that we start giving our body what we call in Chinese medicine warm slurpy food this is things using seasonal ingredients and nice and warm preferably with a little bit of herbs and spices added to it and moisture at the same time so things like sweet potato root vegetables coming into season right now like pumpkins and button up squash carrots parsnips I've said sweet potatoes but anything like that lentil stews things with kind of coconut milk things with ginger things with turmeric things with lots and lots of different spices my lovely friend Miramanik who's a friend of this show she has a wonderful chai which I start to bring into my diet at this time of year and chai guys do another one as well they do a sugar free one which I which I like as well but using the complex spice cabinet available to us is extremely good the spleen is literally like a garden what it wants is lots and lots and

14:39lots of different flavors to kind of get its teeth into so therefore kind of that sort of international iavidic based spicy food is a really really good thing to bring into your stomach at this time of year and your stomach will thank you for it spleen's also like five minutes just to rest and digest so it's not a good idea in your lunch break to go and buy a sandwich eat it as fast as possible and then get straight back to your desk okay the spleen needs a little bit of exercise it needs to perhaps walk to where it is you're going to get your food it also then needs just a little bit of time to start the digestive process now there's one final organ that sits behind the lungs and the spleen when we're really thinking about this external and internal defense mechanisms against all these luggages and that's our kidneys now when our kidneys start to get depleted you will find that it's highly likely that you will start to catch everything going so what do we need to do to get our kidneys which is basically your constitutional energy that sits underneath what's going on between the lung and the spleen well a simple quick fix is again warmth one of the things that

15:42the kidneys absolutely love is being warm and one of the things that we tend to do to our kidneys is keep them cold we tend to wear the wrong footwear and we tend to have gaps at the bottom of our clothing and just as much as the spleen doesn't like it the kidneys really don't like the cold so one of the things that I always recommend that we start doing at this time of year is to wear as a kidney warmer many of them have a beautiful little kind of colored stripe at the bottom which make them really attractive in terms of what you're wearing and they look fantastic and they're not expensive they are a very very simple undergarment that you can wear that will make a massive difference to your health the other thing that is really really important is to keep the feet warm because the kidney channel opens at the base of the foot just here under the toes now what you'll notice with me is because this has been broadcast you right at the beginning of September so we sort of it's warm in the day and it's nippy in the morning and it's like and I've been in these clothes well I'm not the top half I keep changing for the pork I suppose my shoes and socks have done on that's been on since six o'clock this morning when I took on someone out for his morning

16:42walk wearing socks wearing shoes and when it gets even colder wearing boots making sure that your feet are warm and dry at all times and above all wearing slippers inside the house do not walk around barefoot it is a really bad idea for your kidneys and ultimately weakens your constitution now as well as that keeping the ears warm is really important in Chinese medicine the kidneys open to the ears so actually when the weather gets colder that is why it's so important to wear earmuffs and hats that cover your ears but another simple practice we can do right now because it's too soon to do that is ear massage ear massage is a very very easy way literally by massaging the ears it's as if you're massaging the kidneys simple simple simple simple it's a very easy practice it feels absolutely lovely and it's really good for you now what else we've talked about the lungs we've talked about spleen and we've talked about the back up organ of the kidneys and I've given you some really really simple things that you can do to strengthen all of that up over the autumn and the winter period but there are some other things that you can also do um guashar is a really

17:48really important way to keep the bodies immune system strong it is such a simple practice um the one that's the best to do at this time of year is actually to use the heiw body oil with the copper body tool now beauty guashar took off when we launched it 10 years ago and the whole world now does it because it's so brilliant for the skin but the whole world did not catch on to the brilliance of body guashar despite the fact the body guashar has been used for thousands of years for umpteen different practices in Chinese medicine and it's one of the best self-care techniques that you can do at home all you do is you just apply the oil to your chest area take the rounded edge of the tool and press stroke across the chest like so and down the neck turn it around to this bit to go down the back of the neck and across the top of the shoulders this is what it takes about two minutes and you want to do it every evening it is so good for the immune system if there's anything that's got clogged up there that's getting caught up or that's penetrated through the wachie this will clear it out it makes the fascia more slippery it makes the lymphatic system more efficient and

18:48it strengthens the wachie it increases micro circulation up by 400 percent it's also fantastic for your skin for your decalotage and it's absolutely brilliant to strengthen the immune system and it only takes a couple of minutes every single day and your body will thank you for it so hopefully that will keep you nice and healthy all the way through these darker months if you have any questions about this please let me know and I look forward to speaking to you next time