Revealing Here the 6 Unexpected Benefits of Cold Showers

 

Click HERE to Discover these 80 Keto-Friendly and Healthy Slow Cooker Recipes

The thought of hopping into an ice-cold shower may be a hard sell, but there are many surprising benefits of getting chilly.

While a nice, warm shower or bath offers a relaxing reprieve from the day, taking a quick plunge into a cold shower may be just what the doctor ordered. Cold water immersion can boost fat loss, reduce depression, improve muscle soreness, and more.

The Benefits of Cold Showers

Discover how cold showers work their magic and the most effective ways to take them.

1. Boost Fat Loss

Our bodies contain two types of fat: white and brown. White fat is considered “bad”, as it’s the one that is stored in our body in response to weight gain from eating too many calories. It’s what causes “love handles” and other types of jiggles we’d rather not deal with, as well as the more serious issues associated with obesity, such as diabetes and metabolic syndrome.

Brown fat, on the other hand, is a type of “good” fat that is denser and helps our bodies generate heat, keeping our organs warm in cold temperatures.

It turns out that cold showers can help stimulate brown fat to generate more heat (which equals burning more calories), thus increasing your metabolism. One study found that exposure to cold temperatures increased the metabolic rate of brown fat in volunteers by 15-fold.

2. Reduce Muscle Soreness

Research shows that cold immersion can help treat and even prevent delayed-onset muscle soreness, which is the type you get post-workout. One study found that being exposed to cold water for roughly 15 minutes can help reduce soreness compared to passive recovery.

3. Boost Mood

Scientists theorize that our lack of exposure to alternating hot and cold temperatures like our ancestors did (like diving into a cold lake, then returning to the warmth of a fire) is causing negative changes in our brain chemistry.

Studies reveal that this theory has solid legs, showing that cold water stimulates your sympathetic nervous system, increasing endorphins (those feel-good chemicals).

Cold water also increases electrical impulses to the peripheral nerves in your nervous system, which could have an anti-depressive effect.

4. Boost Immunity

If you feel like you might be coming down with something during cold season, a cold shower just might help strengthen your immune system to fight off any bugs.

Studies show that cold water immersion can increase the number of leukocytes, granulocytes, and monocytes – the natural killer T cells of your immune system that help fight off “invaders” like cold and flu bugs.  One study even found that 29 percent of workers who switched from hot to cold showers took off less sick days from work.

5. Reduces Fatigue

Starting your day with a nice cold shower may also give you the morning energy boost you need to power through your day.

Studies show that when we’re tossed into the cold (be it in cold water or a cold environment), our sympathetic nervous system is activated, causing the release of hormones and chemicals like noradrenaline that boost alertness. 

As part of the “fight-or-flight” response, it’s your sympathetic nervous system’s job to prepare you to move quickly to get away from or defend yourself from any type of danger or stressor. In this case, it’s the shock of cold water.

Research on cold exposure and chronic fatigue also mention that cold exposure reduces serotonin everywhere in the brain minus the brain stem, which reduces fatigue in exercise-induced fatigue cases.

6. Improved Skin Tone

Cold showers may also give your skin a coveted glow. Many people claim cold showers have improved their skin tone, and researchers have discovered there may be a scientific basis for this phenomenon.

Studies show cold exposure can, in fact, increase peripheral circulation, which includes your skin along with your hands and feet. This could result in more nutrients and oxygen being delivered to your skin, improving tone.

Watch this video – 10 Unexpected Benefits of Cold Showers

How to Take Cold Showers

The easiest way to warm up to cold showers (pun intended) is to ease into them.

Start by slowly lowering the temperature at the end of your usual shower. Keep lowering until you start to get uncomfortable, then stay here for 2 to 3 minutes.

Each subsequent shower, reduce the temperature a bit more than the time before and begin increasing your time under the cold water. Aim to eventually reach 10 minutes.

The Bottom Line

Humans have been diving into cold lakes, oceans, and streams for at least several thousand, if not millions, of years. Considering this, hot showers and baths are a relatively new invention for our bodies and may be negatively affecting our mental and physical states.

Try cooling down your next shower. You may just find getting chilly has more benefits than you thought!

Written by Megan Patiry

Author Bio:

Megan is an inquisitive nutrition and wellness writer harboring an editorial love affair with the decadent and the nutritious. She is a dedicated researcher in all areas of ancestral health, a certified specialist in fitness nutrition, personal trainer, and professional almond milk latte addict.

A lot of people have gotten results from the Keto diet, and enjoyed the foods that it has to offer. However, many of the people who are following this diet have a hard time finding the recipes that they need, especially ones that are quick and easy to complete.

Fortunately, Kelsey Ale, noticed this problem, and decided to do something about it. She’s found that making recipes in a slow cooker gives you meals which are not only delicious, but also take very little time to make. Mostly you just put a few simple ingredients in the slow cooker, and let it do the rest.

To find out more, click on – Keto Slow Cooker Cookbook

How to Prevent Parkinson’s from Progressing and Even Reversing Some Symptoms

 

Click HERE to Learn How to Slow Down the Progression of Parkinson’s and Repair the Effects It Has Had on Your Body

Prevent Parkinson’s from Progressing and Even Reversing Some Symptoms -Parkinson’s Disease Halted Using This Social Activity

There is no cure for Parkinson’s disease. So we’re always on the hunt for methods to halt its symptoms and improve quality of life.

Which is why we welcome a new study that just appeared in the journal NPJ Parkinson’s Disease, which reveals a social activity that improves the lives of Parkinson’s patients more than any known drug.

Best of all, it’s free and doesn’t take a lot of effort.

A team from the University of California at Los Angeles and the Bastyr University Research Institute in Kenmore, Washington wondered how badly the loneliness and social isolation forced on the world by pandemics like COVID-19 affected people with Parkinson’s disease.

They sent out a survey to people who had been officially diagnosed with Parkinson’s to ask them about their social lives, their levels of loneliness, their perceptions of their social performance, their quality of life, and their experience of their own Parkinson’s symptoms. They were also asked about their dietary and exercise habits.

Of the respondents, 1,527 returned valid results that could be analyzed.

Overall, those who identified themselves as being lonely reported around 55% greater symptom severity than those who did not call themselves lonely.

Those with the most severe disease symptoms reported the lowest levels of social performance and social satisfaction.

Unsurprisingly, quality of life decreased as Parkinson’s disease symptoms worsened, and poor quality of life was most common in people who reported having few or no friends.

Interestingly, the subjects reported that tremor, one of the symptoms that most defines Parkinson’s disease, did not affect their quality of life nearly as much as loneliness did. Loneliness and friendships were better predictors of quality of life than their tremor severity score.

The subjects who reported poor quality of life were more likely to be single, while those in partnerships or marriages reported a better quality of life.

Those who reported engaging in stress management practices reported the slowest Parkinson’s progression, while those who were stressed reported the fastest deterioration.

The biggest differences between lonely and non-lonely patients showed that lonely people were more socially withdrawn, depressed, anxious, and unmotivated.

One of the most interesting findings of this survey was that meaningful social interactions were better at slowing down the progression of Parkinson’s disease than exercise.

But socializing may not be enough to hold back the onset of Parkinson’s. However, there is a way to prevent Parkinson’s from progressing and even reverse some symptoms. I’ll explain the exact steps to do that here…

Prevent Parkinson’s from Progressing and Even Reversing Some Symptoms -Potential Cure for Parkinson’s Discovered

Parkinson’s is a complicated genetic disease with no available cure and very few medical treatment options.

And although natural methods have been successful at keeping it from progressing, they will not cure it either.

A new study in the Journal of Clinical Neuroscience is therefore celebrated as a breakthrough because it reveals a simple procedure that reverses Parkinson’s permanently.

There is currently no form of stem cell treatment available for Parkinson’s disease that has been authorized as definitively effective by health organizations, but this does not mean that the treatment is completely unavailable or that researchers have not been trying.

Although some health services do offer such treatments, regulatory authorities like the FDA have also sued some of them for marketing an unauthorized treatment.

Until now, medical scientists have harvested fetal stem cells or neural stem cells to implant in patients. The theory is that, since stem cells can develop into any type of specialized cell, they can repair or replace the brain cells in Parkinson’s patients that are supposed to produce dopamine but no longer do.

Scientists either inject the stem cells into the patients’ veins or inject them below the skin. But there is one major problem with this approach.

Stem cells do not cross the blood-brain barrier in sufficient amounts to make a huge difference for these patients, which means some other delivery method must be found for the stem cells to work properly.

Some scientists have tried to inject stem cells into the cerebral spinal fluid, with some level of success, even though the process sounds painful and cringeworthy.

In the new study, the researchers took mesenchymal stem cells and injected them into the facial tissue of two subjects.

Mesenchymal stem cells occur in fat tissue and can be reprogrammed to replace any other specialized cells.

The potential benefit of injecting cells into facial and nasal tissue is that there is a particularly rich blood supply to the brain from these areas.

The researchers harvested these cells from two subjects and injected them below the skin on their upper, middle, and lower cheeks.

Both subjects were being treated unsuccessfully with dopamine-increasing drugs and both were suffering from tremors to the extent that they were struggling to walk.

Both participants, a 72-year-old man and a 50-year-old woman, reported substantially lower tremors, reduced fatigue and disability, and improved quality of living. These improvements were noticeable two weeks after the treatment.

The researchers gave both of them a Parkinson’s Disease Questionnaire that measured health status and quality of life (called PDQ-39) before the treatment, two weeks after treatment, and five years after.

The man reported an improvement from a score of 70 to 49, and the woman improved from 74 to 19 two weeks after treatment.

They also showed a huge improvement over five years on another questionnaire, the Unified Parkinson’s Disease Rating Scale. The man improved from a score of 20 to 4 and the woman improved from 18 to 3. Keep in mind that most Parkinson’s patients get progressively worse.

More and larger studies need to be performed to confirm these findings. Therefore, this treatment is unfortunately unavailable to the general public at this point.

But there are simple steps you can take to boost your dopamine levels naturally. It won’t cure your Parkinson’s, but it should stop it from progressing…

Prevent Parkinson’s from Progressing and Even Reversing Some Symptoms -Parkinson’s Disease Blocked by This Popular Drink

Some people are genetically more vulnerable to Parkinson’s disease than others. And the medical system claims there is nothing you can do to protect yourself from it if you are.

But a new study published in the journal Neurology, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology, now shows that one popular drink can block the onset of Parkinson’s and even help reverse it.

Even if you’re genetically vulnerable to catching this disease.

Previous studies have proven that caffeinated coffee protects us from Parkinson’s disease if we have no genetic risk factors for it. This is why the authors of the new study decided to check whether coffee could be equally useful for people who are genetically vulnerable to it.

Some people have a mutation in a gene called LRRK2 for leucine-rich repeat kinase 2, which renders them vulnerable to Parkinson’s disease.

But this genetic mutation only increases people’s chance of developing Parkinson’s—it does not make it inevitable. As a result, researchers have been trying to find things that protect such people from this disease.

They recruited 368 people: 188 Parkinson’s sufferers and 180 healthy subjects for comparison. Both groups had subjects with and without the LRRK2 gene mutation.

To measure caffeine, the researchers used a combination of the amount of caffeine in their subjects’ blood, the chemicals in their blood that stem from the processing of caffeine, and questionnaires to record their caffeine intake.

Once they crunched the numbers, they could see that caffeine was protective against Parkinson’s for people with and without the LRRK2 gene mutation.

Those with the mutation who had Parkinson’s had 76 percent less caffeine in their blood than those with the mutation but without Parkinson’s.

Those without the mutation who had Parkinson’s had 31 percent less caffeine in their blood than those who had the mutation and had Parkinson’s.

For both those with and without the gene mutation, Parkinson’s sufferers consumed 41 percent less daily caffeine than those without Parkinson’s.

This seems to suggest that coffee and caffeinated teas can protect against Parkinson’s, even in cases where people are especially vulnerable to it.

Watch this video – How I Reversed My Parkinson’s – Manoj Agarwala’s Journey

But if you already suffer from Parkinson’s, drinking coffee is not enough. But you can prevent Parkinson’s from progressing and even reversing some symptoms, using the simple lifestyle changes explained here…

This post is from the Parkinson’s Protocol Program created by naturopath and health researcher, Jodi Knapp, to help you diagnose and treat Parkinson’s naturally and permanently. The Parkinson’s Protocol is a comprehensive program that teaches you simple ways to reduce your symptoms, slow down the progression of Parkinson’s and repair the effects it has had on your body.

The Parkinson’s Protocol Program has a four-part series (consists of 12 simple steps) that comes with an abundance of valuable information that teaches you the relation between dopamine and Parkinson’s, the different treatment options, causes, and more. It then provides you with easy, step-by-step instructions that allow you to improve your brain health to begin delaying Parkinson’s and healing the brain within. 

To find out more about this program, click on Prevent Parkinson’s from Progressing and Even Reversing Some Symptoms