The poorly understood Immune System

The Immune system is more important that most people think. It’s more than just getting some extra sleep. It’s more than getting a little more vitamin C in your diet or taking some  bullshyt  supplement. Like with losing weight, nothing comes easy and you can’t take a magic potion to magically loose 100 lbs overnight. It never works that way. Even modern medicine can only do so much when you get sick.  The immune system is your first and most powerful form of defense and you need to use it or you lose it. Your immune system is a muscle – it needs exercise or it gets WEAK!

“…what do you think you have an immune system for? It’s for killing germs! But it needs practice, it needs germs to practice on. So listen, if you kill all the germs around you and live a completely sterile life, then when germs do come along, you’re not gonna be prepared. And never mind ordinary germs, what are you gonna do when a super virus comes along and turns your vital organs into liquid s**t? I’ll tell you what you’re gonna do, you’re gonna get sick, you’re gonna die, and you’re gonna deserve it because you’re f*****g weak, and you got a f*****g weak immune system.”

My hero, George Carlin, telling it like it is. There are two extremes of people:

Those who embrace the dangerous environment and everything it can throw at them. They don’t shy away from door handles, they don’t care if their food is a little undercooked, and they don’t care if someone has a cough. They have a strong well-functioning immune system and rarely ever get sick. People like myself and George Carlin are in this category.

On the other side of the coin, there are people who have a literal phobia of anything potentially “dirty” or harmful. These people will constantly keep everything sterile and mindlessly dump tons of sanitizer on their hands at the slightest sign of something gross. When they get a sniffle or a cough, they rush to the doctor to get a medication. They take whatever the doc gives them and they still get sick all the time. They usually have a couple of chronic illnesses as well. I’ve known a few people like this in my life.

The immune system is a spectrum. It’s somewhere between weak or strong.

Here’s a simple visualization to help you understand.

People like Carlin have immune systems that are the equivalent of an experienced swat team, fully armed to the teeth to neutralize any threat that might appear, keeping the host healthy 90% 96%+ of the time. They aren’t perfect (nothing is), but they get the job done!

Compare that to the people who have an immune system that is little more than a fat rent-a-cops. They’re weak and just don’t care. Not only are they ill-equipped, but its like there’s just no motivation to protect the host. These are the kind of people who constantly have to take sick days and are completely immobilized by sicknesses.

Now I want you to imagine the following:

Drop the two of those groups into a volatile and dangerous place like Iraq. Guess who will last longer?

Those Iraqi insurgents are the things currently crawling in you and on you right NOW. They’re covering every doorknob, every handlebar, every keyboard, even the very mouse you’re touching at this moment! THEY ARE EVERYWHERE.

You CAN’T escape them. You need to fight!

Part of the reason I get so pissed off is that there’s so much misinformation going around this world that makes people scared and weak. This is especially apparent in America. I figured this schyt out as a kid. I loved getting dirty and playing outside. I touched millions of germ covered surfaces and I only washed my hands before I ate or if I got something really nasty on them. I rarely ever got sick.

One day I remember I was at the the store with my mom. I was looking at hand sanitizer in the store and a thought popped into my young head… “If we need to be exposed to something bad for our immune systems to be able to fight it, why would I want to have constantly clean hands??”

This is like thinking “If I want to be big and muscular, I should never ever touch a dumbbell!” It’s horrible logic, but somehow people don’t understand it. Your immune system needs practice or it’s worthless. This stuff is not rocket science.

As I grow older, this has become much more obvious to me. I was one of those kids who rarely ever had to take a sick day from school. I literally took maybe a total of 1 or 2 days off from being sick for my entire high school era. If I did get sick, it was easily manageable and I could still function just fine.

Those bad guys never had a chance when they got into me! It’s because I train my system to fight! I’ve been working on my immune system since I was old enough to know about it. I keep it in optimal condition all the time and I’m not afraid of anything. As Carlin puts it:

” …I don’t shy away from people who sneeze and cough, I don’t wipe off the telephone, I don’t cover the toilet seat; and if I drop food on the floor, I pick it up and eat it! Yes I do!”

How do I strengthen my immune system?

This is something that will take time to explain, but for now I’ll give the following suggestions:

• Don’t be scared to touch stuff that other people have touched. The more exposure you get, the stronger your immune system.
• Limit the use of disinfectants, hand wipes, sanitizers, etc. Let yourself get dirty. It’s not gonna kill you.
• Eat whole plants and fruits that have been grown without the use of excessive pesticides. Go to a farmer’s market if you can.
• Organic is ideal, but if you peel off the skin, don’t go out of your way to get it.
• Believe it or not, the stuff in soil is very beneficial to your body, so don’t worry about getting your veggies super-clean. Grow your own food if you can!
• Fermented foods are a huge part of introducing beneficial bacteria to your system. Store bought yogurt and probiotics in a bottle are worthless. Real “Lacto-Fermented” foods are easy to make.  Kefir, kombutcha or saurkraut are my favorites. (I drink Kefir almost every day.)
• Avoid excessive use of anti-biotics. They work, but at the price of killing both good and bad bacteria. They’re slowly figuring this out.
• Eat real food and get your minerals and vitamins. Supplements are no where near as beneficial.

I personally only visit the doctor for checkups and that’s about it. I was sick maybe 3 total times this whole year (2013) and it was something that was just an annoying cough or stuffy nose that disappeared in a week or two. That’s because my MicroSpartans are hard at work keeping me healthy.

It’s not too late to exercise your immune system, you just need to understand how it works and what methods to use.

-Yossif

PS: “IN PRISONS, BEFORE THEY GIVE YOU A LETHAL INJECTION, THEY SWAB YOUR ARM WITH ALCOHOL !” – George Carlin

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Last updated by Yossif on August 28, 2014.