Use These Winter Natural Health Tips
To help you through the cold weather you could look at some well proven natural health tips.
- Avoid cold foods and drinks. This is not the time for ice-cream or iced drinks. You still need to drink plenty of water, but you can have warm or hot water just as well as cold. This is probably the most important of all natural health tips for winter. Eating cold foods in cold weather is the cause of many illnesses in winter.
- Good warming foods are thick soups and stews. Individual foods that are warming are winter root vegetables such as swede (rutabaga), parsnip and turnip, and beans – haricot, butter beans, kidney beans all make good additions to a warming winter meal.
- You still need the vitamins from salads, but have your salads with a hot meal.
- Porridge makes a wonderful start to the day in cold weather – oats are one of the most heating foods of all. A bowl of hot porridge will keep you warm till lunchtime.
- Nuts and dried fruit are also warming and make a good snack for cold weather.
- It’s important to get outside and get fresh air and exercise, but wrap up warm. Wool is much warmer than cotton or acrylic. Try to find jumpers (sweaters/pullovers) made at least partly from real wool. Silk is also amazingly warm – a silk scarf around your neck can keep you warm, and look very stylish.
- As your neck, wrists and ankles your skin is thin and your blood is close to the surface – you can lose a lot of heat from these areas. One of my natural health tips is cover up with a scarf, thick socks and gloves or long-sleeved jumpers. Wrist-warmers give an extra layer of warmth on your wrists without the bulk of an extra jumper. Knit your own or cut them from an old pair of woollen socks.
- Keep your head warm - up to 70% of your heat loss can be through your head.
- Warm feet are also important. If your feet get cold when you’re out in the winter, have a mustard footbath when you get home – put a good spoonful of mustard powder or crushed mustard seeds into a bowl of hand-hot water. Soak your feet in it for 5-10 minutes. Be sure to dry them thoroughly and dress them warmly afterwards.
- Small children easily get earache in cold weather. Breath gently into the affected ear - sometimes you can give instant relief just with the warmth of your breath. A cloth wrung out in hot water or a hot water bottle can be very comforting. Meadowsweet is a plant that grows specially to help with earache – put a few drops of the tincture in the sore ear with a little cotton wool to hold it in. I’ve known this bring great relief. Verbascum is the Latin name.
( If none of these things help, try a hot bath – once when one of my daughters was screaming with the pain of an earache, the pain stopped almost immediately she got into a hot, deep bath in a warm bathroom.)
- Give your immune system a boost with a cup of Echinacea tea every day. If you don’t like the taste of the tea, take Echinacea tincture instead.
- It’s natural to sleep more in winter, when the nights are longer. Try to get to bed a little earlier whenever you can.
- Beat the winter blues with St John’s Wort (hypericum). St John’s Wort tincture captures the heat of summer, when the sun-yellow flowers are open. Taking St John’s Wort tincture is like taking essence of summer – it will cheer you up when the dull days of winter drag on and on.
- Take a vitamin D supplement. In summer vitamin D is made on your skin in reaction to sunshine, but in winter we simply can't get enough. Vitamin D is at least a simportant to the immune system as vitamin C, so don't miss out on it.
- Bring some daffodils inside. You may wonder why I've used this as one of my natural health tips. The yellow flowers will be like a splash of sunshine in your home – and they are a reminder that spring is only just around the corner.
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