How To Boost Your Immune System During a Lockdown

There was some ridiculous garbage going on about that. I just was like, why does this information get out there that we shouldn't be boosting? Our. First of all, there was information that you can't boost your immune system. I'm like, well, you can deplete it. So if you can deplete it, you can boost it. If you can make it go low, you can make it go high. But there's some information out there you don't want to rev up your immune system. And I'm like, that is wrong information. You want your immune system working at its peak. You do not want to be deficient in these things because these deficiencies create opportunities for viruses to come in there and take hold.

Hey, everybody. Welcome back. It's Eric Edmeads here with thrivetime. And today I have another incredible special guest for you. I've got J.J. virgin, and I. I want to talk to you a little bit about why I was so excited about getting JJ on the show. I was actually just telling JJ before we got started that I have this, like, file cabinet in my head of people that I consider to be masters of resilience. And she's definitely one of those people. She's also really, like, on the edge of things. And so what I mean by that is that if I'm curious about opinions about what's going to happen in a particular health area, I'm always fascinated by what JJ's got to say about that. And I'm also very, very interested in her opinions on business during these difficult times, because I've never seen somebody more at the edge of what's going on in business. And also, I've never seen anybody more generous about sharing their ideas and collaborating to lift all ships at once. And so I'm really, really excited to have JJ here to help us both navigate our way through the true health implications and immune issues that we're dealing with right now, and also how to navigate the business world as it is now and how it might be in the future. Jj, thanks so much for coming on the show.

Great to be here.

So, you know, let's start with health, because, frankly, you know, that's the most important thing in my opinion right now. Mental and physical health. And, you know, when I first met you, the first story I heard from you was the story of you as a mom having to really become a unbelievably resilient and smart researcher and, you know, expert in a bunch of fields, because, of course, your son had been in a terrible accident, and you ended up Having to deal with all that stuff. And the way you. The way I heard that story, it kind of reminded me of the movie Lorenzo's Oil. You know, it was like. It was like that, like, I am going to take charge of this situation. And I imagine that the skills and muscles and resources that you put together at that time in your life probably are serving you quite well right now. Tell me, where are you on this? I've been describing this as. People's reaction to this situation ranges from hysterical to denial. And frankly, in my opinion, denial is the more dangerous end of the spectrum. And often what was hysterical on Monday becomes common sense by midday Tuesday. So where are you on this spectrum? How serious do you think this is? And chair.

So I believe in life that you plan for the worst and manifest the best. And when I started traveling right after you were at my house for New Year's, and as I was getting ready for that trip, I was watching what was going on, and I bought face masks, hand sanitizers, and loaded up on immune stuff, just in case, you know. And I also thought, I'm going on all these trips. Who wants to get sick during that time anyway? So it's a great thing to do. And I was watching this so carefully because I was in Israel, I was in Germany, I was in la, and I actually had just canceled a trip at the end to New York. And so I was one of those people on the forefront who literally was watching some of our friends poo poo this whole thing, or call it the first. And I'm like, it's not acting like the flu, guys, like, look at the numbers and the fact that we aren't testing. And they're like, we don't even know people are sick. I actually had someone in our group say, you know, go to the ER. I just went to 3ers and none of them had COVID 19 cases. And I'm like, well, I don't believe you, because that's a HIPAA violation, number one. So there's no way you went to an ER and they told you what they had there because they can't, right? And they're busy. But I think you look at anything in health, Eric, when it's too scary, denial is the easier place to go. Right? But one thing that can help you so much in handling all this is feeling like you have some semblance of control. And the cool thing is, as we know, you really do. And so if you first start with, well, I literally called my mom, and I go, mom, I want you to prepare for four months, and you need to stock up now. My fatal error there, Eric, was that I didn't send her the stuff. I just gave her the list of what she needed to get. Oh, okay. I'll do it, honey. Well, she didn't. I just got to spend $95 shipping some of our toilet paper to her. I was like, oh, my gosh, I told you so. But I literally just went, all right, what would I need if I couldn't leave the house for four months and I had my family here? And what would I need in terms of supplements? What would I need? I have, like, iv, vitamin C. I have medications. I like everything. If I had to just hunker, hunker on down here. Right. And, you know, hopefully that won't be the case. But if it is, we're prepared and we have extra to help if we need to help some of the neighbors as well.

You know, I'm very much with you on that. Like, you know, be prepared for the worst and do the best you can to make it the best and manifest the greatest outcomes. And so, you know, I think one of the things that I keep hearing from people, like, I saw on Twitter the other day, some nut bar politician was saying, the American people need certainty. We need to know when this is going to be over so we can get on with our economy and our lives. And it's like, oh, well, we'll just let the coronavirus know that you would like to have this all handled by Easter. You know, we'll just.

Yeah. Oh, my gosh. I know.

But I think one of the things that becomes dangerous about that is that I would rather. And I've been telling my team this for weeks, and my family. I've been. I'd rather that you get with the idea that this is like six weeks to three months of lockdown, and then if it's shorter, you get to celebrate. But if you think it's going to be two weeks, how are you going to feel at the end of two weeks when it just keeps getting extended?

Well, and also, when you look at this whole thing, had we just at the start, shut it down, we'd be through it.

Yeah.

You know, it's like we still haven't shut it down in the States. We still. We had a pastor here in Tampa and a megachurch hold two services last weekend.

Yeah, I am no longer. I'm on a temporary boycott of the. Maybe a permanent boycott of the Stereophonics. I'm now calling them the Pandemics because they Held a concert. They held a concert with hundreds of people. Like, are you guys not paying attention to what's going on here?

Well, even in February here, we still had Gasparilla going on, and people were still going to that. And I'm like, are you crazy? So I just. I don't understand. I'm really watching because I believe. You know, I love the Wayne Dyer statement. When you squeeze an orange, you get orange juice. I'm watching how people show up and what's fantastic. And I saw this when my son was in the hospital. People blew my mind with how they showed up and how generous they were. And so you're watching people get squeezed, and you're really seeing who's in there because it brings out who you are. And sometimes that's awesome, and sometimes it's not good at all. But I do think what's important here is to look at what you personally can control, because it's a lot. I mean, just stay the heck inside. And you've controlled the majority of your risk. Right. You know, as long as you're careful with what's coming into your house in terms of mail and stuff, you know, so it's really under your control. And then the other side of that is if it is that one person average would infect three other people, which it sounds like it's much more than that. But if. Let's say it's that, you also. What if you just took that stat and said, I, as one person, could go help three other people, and those three people could go help three other people, and you get this exponential shift of everything. Because, I mean, I think we're all seeing. There's some definite silver linings here to what's going on. Right?

Yeah. Yeah. I think the idea of people getting squeezed and figuring out who they really are, I think that's a big deal at the moment. What I've been telling people is, what I really would suggest to people is just recognize this will be over, and there will never be. We won't go back to what was. There will be something else. There'll be some other new normal afterward. But in that new normal, whatever comes after this, how do you want to remember yourself during this time? Do you want to remember yourself as being panicky and fearful and scarcity and scarce and difficult? Or do you want to remember yourself as somebody who was productive, who worked on their personal development, who helped the people around them that took strides forward? And I think if we get really clear about how you want to remember yourself, it kind of Helps guide decision making about how we do things. Today. We have some good friends that are here in this little town in Canadians, friends of mine that are here in Cabarete, and both of them are single moms with young children living in small apartments, not in secure communities. And I'm in my house locked up alone because my family got separated from me in America. And I just opened the house. I said, you guys are at any point in time, you know that you guys need to be. So to be somewhere, you can come here, we'll practice some quarantine processes and you can be here. Be clear, I don't want people in my house right now. It is what it is. But I also recognize that I want to be there for my community. And I think sometimes it does require a little sacrifice.

It does. I have been since this thing really started to pick up steam. I told my teams, both companies, I go pretend we're in war and we are first responders. And in my one company, I just said all those scheduled calls and things that you have only so many of, it's wide open. Text, whatever you need, we're here. We'll just start going live and helping you every single day. And in the other company, I'm like, what do we have here that we can give people right now to support them? We're pivoting. And I've worked every single night, I've worked weekends. It's just. It just is what it is. You do what you have to do and you pivot as quickly as possible. We had one person, our team was like, well, I don't really like change. I'm like, oh, oh, well, this is. Learn to learn to.

Yeah, that's going to be. That's going to be an interesting thing. Okay. I want to move into immunity or health in a minute. But the one thing I'd like to underscore for everybody is that those of you who are sharing memes about how this is less dangerous than the flu and all that kind of stuff, I want you to know that you can use statistics to lie about anything. And you can use true statistics that are not a lie to lie about something else. I'll give you an example that more people are probably alive today as a result of coronavirus than are dead. And that's just the reality of the fact that we lose 3,000 people a day to car accidents, and we're not currently losing those people to car accidents. And we're just now getting to those numbers. With coronavirus, we could use that number to suggest that this isn't serious. But what that doesn't tell us, when you compare this to the flu and you spread those ideas, what that doesn't tell us is about hospital surge, about the fact that the flu hospitalizes a very small percentage of people and this one is like 20 plus percent. So there are hospitals right now that don't have space for either the living that are coming and needing support or the people that are dying out the door. So I know this is a little stark, but I'm just saying stop posting that stuff, get isolated and take it seriously.

It's not helping. We had someone in our community reaching out to our mayor, angry that they closed the town and everybody's businesses were getting hurt. And like, okay, if we have to weigh between business and life, it's a pretty easy decision, right? We can come back to work, but we can't get our life back. So it's a pretty easy decision. And gosh, when they're building a hospital in Central park, in the Javits center, in the Dallas Convention center, when they have to have refrigerator trucks turn into morgues, I mean, this is not the freaking flu.

Yeah. And then every time people post that it's just the flu or it's a conspiracy thing, what they do is they take, they potentially inspire people that are otherwise paying attention to lockdown and say, oh, screw it, I'm going to go out. And then that just propagates the whole thing. You and I are so on the same page about that. And I think you and I are fairly similar. Neither one of us are like full on survivalists, but we're both like about that close.

But my husband is, it turns out, oh my gosh.

So one of the things that I noticed early on, which I'm sure you did as well, and you and I even were talking about this just a couple days ago, but I noticed when it was hitting Italy that, you know, the press was going on and talking about coronavirus being ageist. You know, it's going after the elderly. But of course, immediately what I noticed is that the flu goes after the elderly and the young. Why is this one not going after the young? And it turns out, of course, now that we're seeing the statistics coming out of Italy, that it's not about elderly, it's about existing health challenges. And even the science advisor to the health minister of Italy came out the other day and said that only 12% of the cases that are being reported as COVID deaths are actually COVID deaths. Many of them are much more like you know, two people being in a car accident, one of them being morbidly obese and dying. And they may have survived if they didn't have all the other health challenges they had, but now they died in a car accident. And so. And now, as the statistics are coming to America, we're seeing that it's a much younger section of the population that's ending up hospitalized. And why is that? Well, I would suggest that, you know, we have some health challenges here in America. So, jj, you know, you've been in the, you know, like, you were early in the fitness world, you were early in the health world. You were, you were a true pioneer in that space. And you've had reasons to be very dedicated to research and forming really solid opinions about what works and doesn't work. So tell me from your perspective. We've done our social distancing, we're washing our hands, we've got a good protocol for groceries coming into the house. I mean, we're doing all the outer defense stuff. What I want to talk about from your perspective is what is the inner defense stuff? How do you feel we can support our last line of defense best?

Yeah. And obviously someone who's obese, diabetic, any pulmonary issues is going to be always at higher risk. But the other part of that, Eric, I wonder about because they're also saying, okay, well, this someone was in La Quinta where I, you know, have lived in the past, died, and it was a 25 year old, like regular weight pharmacist. And I just wonder if we went back and tested their blood levels of zinc, vitamin D, vitamin C, magnesium. If we find that those people, because we know mild nutrient deficiencies of those vitamins and minerals can actually put you at risk for respiratory infection. So I think that there's something there as well. So when I looked at what could you do, what's within your control to do, and honestly, for 35 years I've been talking about this and I had to swing it always. The message always has to be to solve the current problem. Like, you know, you've got pain, you've got belly fat, you can't sleep. Because people don't buy prevention. They don't. Except for now. Now they do. You know, and so if there was a silver lining here, it's that people are finally waking up and realizing, wow, I need to do prevention. Because this thing could turn around. And you've seen people being, you know, leaving the hospital. You heard about the woman leaving the hospital and dying in the cab on the way home. I mean, this thing, when it hits your lung, suffocates you. So prevention is everything here. And there's so many things you can do, and a lot of them are absolutely.