Whenever the cold and flu season is just around the corner, you need to take certain precautions to avoid getting hit with the flu. While you might enjoy most of your nights cozying up indoors with your family and friends, the last thing you want is to spend most of your time feeling awful and curled up with a pile of tissues. This guide offers some tips you can follow to stay healthy and build up your immune system to prepare for the cold and flu season.

Eat a Healthy Diet

Eating a healthy diet is still one of the best defenses against the cold. Instead of eating too many saturated fats, sugar, processed foods, and red meat, it’s better to stock up on fruits, vegetables, healthy fats, and whole grains. By eating these types of foods, you can build your immune system to become more robust and responsive. Some of the things you should consider eating include:

• Selenium-rich foods like chicken, egg yolks, seafood, and whole grains
• Citrus fruits, red bell peppers, and kiwi for your daily dose of vitamin C
• Carrots for beta carotene and vitamin A
• Vitamin-D-rich foods like yogurt and salmon to help you build your immune system
• Beans, crabs, and turkey meat (dark) for zinc

Get Plenty of Rest and Sleep

If you like staying up late and pulling all-nighters, you may want to refrain from doing that once the flu season hits. Not getting enough puts you at risk of falling ill and weakening your immune system. If you want them to function at their best, you need to get at least seven hours of shut-eye every night. This is because losing some of those hours of sleep can cause inflammatory markers to go up and your immune system function to go down, increasing the likelihood of you getting sick. Since nights are longer during the cold season, take advantage of it and get as much sleep as you can.

Stay Active Even When You’re at Home

We all know how hard it is to stay active and do all your workouts when it’s wintertime where you’re mostly stuck at home. However, you really need to adopt some good indoor exercising habits to help keep your body active and avoid living a sedentary lifestyle. Think of it this way: winter is the best way to take up a new sport that you can play indoors. If you like going out for a jog or cycling around the city, you can instead do yoga or indoor rock climbing as an alternative. It can help you mix it up when it comes to your workout routine but still remain active and fit.

Get a Flu Shot

Before the COVID-19 pandemic started spreading around the world, people didn’t seem to give that much thought to vaccines and flu shots. In today’s post-pandemic world, getting vaccinated and getting your shots just became much more important than ever. So if you want to give yourself that added protection against the flu, it’s best to get your flu shot every year and give your immune system a better fighting chance against the thousands of different strains of the flu virus out there.

Conclusion

Colds, flu, and other illnesses can give you a pretty hard time, so you better be prepared once the flu season starts. The best way to stay healthy during this time is to take preventative steps even before you feel any of the first symptoms. Follow this guide and prepare yourself better against what you’re up against every flu and cold season.

Aspen Medical Center welcomes you to our locally owned outpatient medical facility in Santa Fe and Espanola, NM. We offer family urgent care and primary care services to all our clients. If you have any health concerns that need to be addressed, let our urgent care specialists examine them for you. Contact us today to set an appointment.