“Eating Healthy the Chinese Way, BUT It’s Not About Cooking Chinese Style”
Eating healthy is quite a bit different in Chinese medicine. The Chinese studied human diet for thousands of years. Food is both therapeutic and enjoyable. And not all foods are suitable for everyone, given a certain dis-eased condition. You can make intelligent choices and eat simply but well to satisfy both appetite and mental clarity.
Ancient Chinese doctors felt that the seasons have a profound affect on the human body and psyche. As seasons change, so does the environment. When this happens, then people also need to change along side with it. That includes the foods that you choose to eat during these seasons. Now even in western cultures there was such a thing as “eating with the seasons”. So in the following links, here is how the Chinese see it.
The ancient Chinese knew about food as medicine – how to use it therapeutically to treat disease and injury – better than almost anyone. We have a completely different take on food, because we figured out thousands of years ago how a given food AFFECTS the body.
First, we diagnose you. Then we choose appropriate food cures based on the EFFECT we want, to make you strong again.
Today, there’s a lot of confusion about food. I’ve witnessed many contradictory food studies over most of my adult life. You may have also arrived at the same conclusion that modern-day researchers have NO clue about what really is healthy and good for you. There are low-fat diets, high-fat diets and grapefruit diets! That’s one-size-fits-all advice. It’s wrong! The truth is there is NO one diet that works for everyone. But that’s not what you’ll hear in modern medicine. It doesn’t matter who the famous doctor is, they all say the same. They promote a single diet for all of us.
In Chinese medicine, we take into consideration that you are an individual and therefore UNIQUE. We use the information we get from you during the diagnostic process. So a balanced diet for you is different from one for your spouse, each one of your kids and everyone else you know. There is only one diet that works for you and that’s the diet that is PERSONALIZED JUST FOR YOU while you’re healing and then again, when you’re healthy once more.
For elite and professional athletes, there will be times when you need some supplementation. Such as when you’ve been training for hours and days on end, when you REALLY are using up your energy stores. When I talk about ENERGY, I’m talking about the vital substances ― Qi energy and Blood. You use up Qi and Blood when you exercise. When you over-exercise or work too hard, with not enough rest and not enough whole nutritious food in between, you ARE taxing your body’s Qi and Blood. Chinese Medicine will teach you how to put nutrients back into your body properly.
A negative emotional state USES up and BLOCKS precious energy. Anger, worry and anxiety lock up energy and you can’t use energy that is inaccessible! Chinese Medicine and Chinese Psychology (Section II) teaches you how to release all that pent-up energy that you may have felt you’ve lost. It’s still there. You just need to find out how to put it BACK into CIRCULATION.
Understand energy better and you’ll learn how to replenish it too. The better approach is to make sure you can squeeze every last bit of energy out of your food. When you’re injured, that’s especially important.
Pay attention to the choices you make and pay attention to how you feel afterwards. Here are some general recommendations for every meal to ensure you get maximum benefit from eating healthy:
1. Limit or eliminate drinks from the dining table. You want to optimize your stomach acids for digestion. Having too much drink dilutes your stomach acids. So it SLOWS down digestion, which then leaves undigested food in your digestive system, resulting in fermentation. POISON. It’s one of the reasons for bloating (feeling full) after meals. Don’t you get a feeling that the system isn’t moving very well?
2. Another reason to limit or eliminate drinks from the dining table, is that it fills you up. I see this happen in young children and adults all the time, often in restaurants. You get full too fast! In the case of kids, please, parents, bring some toys or take your kids for a walk while waiting at a restaurant! Then you and your kids will eat your meal instead of wasting your money.
3. Turn off the TV. Why does watching TV affect your eating? It affects intake, because you’re not mindful but you’re distracted. Unless you’re really disciplined about listening to your body, when it tells you it’s full, I’d stop the practice. It’s a major reason why people eat too much.
4. Junk food isn’t just bad for your body. It’s bad for your mind and emotional state too. The Calgary Herald occasionally runs an experiment during the Calgary Stampede where they assign an intrepid reporter to eat junk food during the entire 10 days of the festival. One year, a reporter kept his normal weight because he spent a lot of time walking the grounds BUT he noticed he felt grumpier and less patient than usual.
That reporter found out that a lousy diet makes you feel lousy. He didn’t ignore his feelings when this was going on, which is a credit to him. If he’d continued to eat this way, then his body would also start showing symptoms.
Overprocessed and fried foods are cheap for your pocket but expensive to your physical health and to your mental emotional state.By eating a poor diet, you clog up the filtering organs in the body, namely the kidneys and the liver. In Traditional Chinese medicine, there’s a connection between the organs and specific emotions. For the Liver, anger, impatience, and frustration affect it. So the reporter experienced what a poor diet could do to his organs ENERGETICALLY, but he didn’t know why.
There are only two ways for change to occur in your life. Either a change comes into your life from outside of you or a change comes out of you. so if you really want change then you have to change EVERYTHING That includes consciously eating healthy and cultivating healthy thoughts and feelings.
I hope you enjoy my eating healthy guide. You can do this. You can make the changes necessary in your life. If I can do it, if my clients can do it, so can you.
