How to Get The Flu This Winter
1. Eat Candy and/or Booze It Up
Indulging in your candy habit or consuming too much alcohol consistently will depress your immune system. If you want the flu, you know what to do!
Research has found that your white blood cells (immune system) require a high amount of vitamin C inside their cell walls. Unfortunately, glucose (aka sugar) has a similar chemical structure to vitamin C, so when you have moderate to high blood sugar, the sugar competes for entry into your white blood cells. So when you eat sugar, think of your immune system slowing down to a crawl.
2. Stay Out Really Late and Lose Sleep
Your mom was right after all! Proper amounts of sleep suppresses infection and boosts immune function. Animal studies have shown an increase in bacteria due to sleep deprivation. Yes, the flu is a virus, not a bacteria but weakened immune function is weakened immune function no matter how it gets weakened. So the best thing you can do is stay out late drinking, which will strip your body of vital nutrient, let the sugars in alcohol displace the vitamin C, then get as few hours of sleep as possible and follow it up with a coffee and some fried foods and starch. Do this and you are earning yourself a spot on the growing list of flu victims.
3. Take On More Than You Can Handle
Chronic stress impairs the immune system’s capacity to respond to glucocorticoid hormones that normally are responsible for terminating an inflammatory response following infection and/or injury. Psychological stress, which is usually self induced, raises your fight or flight hormones, further suppressing the immune system, thus raising the risk of viral infection. Why stop there? “Stress also leads to the release of histamines, which can trigger severe broncoconstriction in asthmatics. Stress increases the risk for diabetes mellitus, especially in overweight individuals, since psychological stress alters insulin needs. http://www.econ.uiuc.edu/~hanko/Bio/stress.html).
Keep saying yes to everything, do more than anyone believes is possible, avoid meditation or other mind calming activities and then continue telling everyone all about how stressed you are so you can continue to relive the stress and you are setting yourself up for some flu-induced downtime.
4. Forgo All Hygiene Practices
Right so basically for this easy step to catching the flu, the idea is to touch as much stuff as you can- hand railings, door handles (especially the bathroom kind), handles on public transit vehicles- you get the idea. You also want to do your best to breathe deeply when in confined spaces with lots of people, invade others’ personal space and a really great one, eat a lot of raw food from questionably clean restaurants (or perhaps all of them for that matter, at this time). So do all these things, and never wash your hands. You also want to never blow your nose. Take notes my readers, touch lots of stuff, then touch yourself all over, especially mouth, nose, eyes and ears.
5. Line Up for Hours on End In The Rain with Other People Who Believe Themselves To Be High Risk of The Flu in Order to Receive a Vaccine for a Pandemic That Is Neither Pan Nor Demic But Has Simply Been Awesomely Hyped By The Media Using The Usual Flavour of The Month: Scare Tactics
