Here are three easy, home remedies you can employ to help nip a cold in the bud, ease your premenstrual cramps, and relieve you of that hangover nausea.

Remedy #1 – Scallions and Your Cold

Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) believes when you have a “cold,” the attacking pathogen is actually stuck in the outer layers of your body. This is why all of the symptoms you feel are also on the outer areas of your body – your runny nose, your achy neck, your cough and sore throat are all happening externally as opposed to deep inside of you. In order to release the pathogens from your body, TCM needs to open up your pores and let the evil out! To do this we use a number of diaphoretic, or sweat-inducing, herbs and food products.

An easy fix as soon as you feel the symptoms of a cold coming on is to gather two stalks of scallions and some hot water. Cut the green end of the scallions up into small pieces (an ⅛^th of an inch long) and put them in the bottom of a bowl. Pour in two cups of piping hot water and let the mix steep for 10 minutes.

Drink this mixture down, wrap yourself up in a warm blanket, and break out the last season of Desperate Housewives on Netflix – you’ve now taken the first step towards thwarting that pesky bug.

Related: 3 All-Natural, Home Remedies For Colds: Do They Work?

Remedy #2 – A Spoonful of Cinnamon Makes the Cramps Go Away

Although I’ve never experienced the joyful physical effects of PMS personally, I have successfully treated hundreds of woman with PMS symptoms through acupuncture and herbs. TCM views the cramping and pain caused by premenstrual tension to be due primarily to an attack of “coldness” on the uterus.

We have to give the ancient healers a little bit of leeway here, as they didn’t have the same imaging equipment and hormonal testing that we do now. All they needed to know, however, was that applying heat to the lower abdomen of a woman in pain was far more effective than applying an ice pack. Seeing my significant other doubled over on the couch with a hot water bottle and a blanket every 28 days is all the confirmation I need.

An easy home remedy for the cramping and pain of PMS is a spoonful of cinnamon added to hot water, hot milk, or hot almond milk. The warming effect of cinnamon is said to enter into the meridians of our body relieve the cold that’s trapped within them.

Add a spoonful to your warm morning beverage next time you’re feeling the monthly tension.

Related: Easy, Natural, Home Remedies For Your Monthly Visitor

Remedy #3 – Ginger for Nausea

Some good times without a hangover may seem like Christmas trees without presents under them – something’s amiss! When you wake up after the big party and try to sort out exactly what was said to whom, worry not about the upcoming wave of queasiness and nausea that’s surely on its way. Cutting up a piece of fresh ginger, no bigger than your thumbnail, and adding that into a cup of steaming hot water will help immensely in keeping your breakfast where it belongs.

Ginger is a fantastic remedy for a number of ailments, ranging from the prevention of food poisoning for its antiparasitic effects (ever wonder why it often accompanies pieces of raw seafood?) to clearing up a phlegmy cough in children. Its harmonizing effects on the stomach have long made it a favorite of pregnant women and the hung-over men who got them there.

Related: Avoid The Puke Fairy: How To Curb Nausea In Training

Give any of the above three home remedies a try next time something ails you and see for yourself why they’ve survived the test of time.

The post 3 Common Health Complaints & 3 Remedies You Already Have appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

As I shivered by the fire at the mountain cabin a few hours later, my weekend trip suddenly didn’t feel like such a great idea. Looking at the faces of my friends who were witnessing my violent coughing and trips to the bathroom corroborated what I knew to be true – I shouldn’t have been there. I should have been at home resting.

Sometimes in life it pays to suck it up and rally, and sometimes you have to know when it’s time to rest and pay attention to your body. Being sick is one of those times. I guess I’ll chalk my weekend trip up to a lesson learned.

To Work Out or Not to Work Out

At this time of year, one of the most frequently asked questions in and around fitness is, “Should I workout when I am sick?’ Having just learned this lesson the hard way, my short answer is no, you shouldn’t. However, there’s certainly more to the question and this query requires a more in-depth analysis versus a simple short answer.

Like many topics in fitness, there isn’t a clear-cut, scientific answer to working out while being sick. Conventional wisdom suggests that if you’re only sort of sick (for example, a cold), it does no harm to work out and if it feels good, then why not. Conversely, the opposite is considered to be true – if you’re really sick (for instance, the flu), you should probably not work out as you could be doing more harm than good.

Time to Do a Neck Check

According to Thomas Weidner, head of athletic training at Ball State University, you should perform what’s called a neck check. That is, when determining whether or not to exercise, if your symptoms are above the neck – sneezing, sore throat, and runny nose – then it’s probably okay to work out.

Weidner drew his conclusion from two different controversial studies in which his subjects were actually infected with the common cold. Evaluating his subjects in a controlled environment, he determined their symptoms were no worse (or better) for exercising while being ill. In fact, the group that exercised, versus the group that didn’t, reported feeling slightly better after exercising.

Of course there are benefits to working out in general as it relates to our health. Specifically, exercise is a scientifically proven immunity booster. Exercising regularly may help you avoid getting sick in the first place. In a study at the University of South Carolina, adults who exercised regularly and moderately caught twenty percent fewer upper respiratory tract infections.

That said, while exercising moderately can boost immunity, the opposite is also true. Intense and vigorous exercise can increase your susceptibility to being sick. While all of this is well and good, it’s not necessarily news. It’s common sense that we should exercise for boosting our immunity when we’re not sick and that we should rest to boost our immunity when we are sick.

Why Am I Sick to Begin With?

In my estimation, the question of exercising when we are sick isn’t the right question to ask in the first place. A more valid question might be, “I’m sick. Why is body not in balance and what can I learn from being sick?”

Being sick happens to us sometimes. When we’re sick, it means our body is out of whack. While we simplify being sick to the bad luck of “catching” a cold, there is much more to the story. The problem lies in our reactive societal approach to health and wellness in general – treating symptoms versus causes.

Many experts concur that the ultimate cause of sickness is stress. Stress produces the hormone cortisol, and cortisol turns off the production of cytokines, the molecules that encourage an aggressive immune response. While there are many ways to alleviate and manage stress (exercise being a key one), there are few ways to actually solve it.

However, if stress is the root of what ails us, then why not take being sick as an opportunity to tackle stress head on versus avoiding or masking it? Exercising while being sick potentially does just that- masks the fact that you really don’t feel well.

Furthermore, exercising when sick certainly doesn’t aid your recovery process. So why do it? While exercising when we’re ill may help us feel better for the moment, it hardly helps us slow down to see the bigger picture of our health. Though perhaps not a popular opinion, I almost think we’re supposed to get sick on occasion. Our ultimate job in sickness is to learn and grow from the setback, as we should any challenge in life.

If you’re sick here’s a few tips for making your way through it and being truly better on the back end:

• Lean into sickness. As tempting as it is to mask every symptom of sickness, lean into pain when it appears in any facet of your life and learn what is to be learned from your unwelcome visitor.
• Take the downtime of sickness as an opportunity to be introspective. Take inventory of your body and especially the stress level in your life. Where are there opportunities to make changes?
• Use the neck check to determine your ability to exercise. If you absolutely must exercise, do exercise that encourages mindfulness, like yoga or meditative internal martial arts like qi gong. Do pure aerobic training, but avoid high-intensity anaerobic training, as intense exercise may actually suppress your immunity. Do not cause your body to be under duress or additional stress when you’re sick.

When it comes to the final word on being sick and whether you should exercise, it comes down to three words – rest, reflect, and recover. Do that.

References:

1. Thomas Weidner et al, “Effect of exercise training on the severity and duration of a viral upper respiratory illness,“ Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, 1998.

2. C.E Matthews et al, “Moderate to vigorous physical activity and risk of upper- respiratory tract infection,” Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, 2002.

Photos courtesy of Shutterstock.

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