Are You Eating A Healthy Diet?

“I eat a healthy diet”. As a Chinese medicine practitioner, I hear this statement often. People say it when I ask about their food choices. But what is a healthy diet? The answer may surprise you. For a practitioner, a traditional ‘healthy’ diet differs from modern food choices. Television and magazines often recommend very different meals. The Chinese medicine diet rests on simple energetic principles. Therefore it encourages balance, clean-burning digestion, and a well-functioning body. As a result, it supports steady energy and good digestion.

In Chinese medicine training, the focus is on the traditional idea of balance in the body. In this framework, practitioners pay attention when a person feels out of balance and is experiencing discomfort. Chinese medicine may use needles or herbs within this approach. Moreover, it includes a wide range of tools. These include qi gong, tai chi, and dietary therapy. In the traditional view, these methods aim to support balance. However, the primary idea is caring for balance in the first place. As a patient, you hold this valuable key in your hand daily. It’s called ‘the fork’.

Chinese medicine dietary therapy is a deep practice. It identifies and treats the underlying patterns of imbalance behind your symptoms. Yet every human body shares some basic standards. Therefore the Chinese medicine diet starts with these basics in mind. For example, I help you choose more balancing foods. These rest on common energetic principles. As a result, you build a foundation for healthy living.

How A Chinese Medicine Diet Supports Healing In Adelaide

At our Adelaide clinic, a Chinese medicine diet works alongside acupuncture and herbs. First, we assess your body’s pattern with care. Then we suggest gentle food changes that suit you. For example, we may add warming, cooked foods. Meanwhile, we reduce dampness-forming ones. Therefore your treatment plan feels practical, not restrictive. Moreover, the Chinese medicine diet gives you simple daily habits. As a result, you support your own healing between visits. We also explain the reasons behind each change. Therefore you can keep the new habits with confidence. Many patients pair this guidance with Chinese medicine care for lasting results. In addition, a steady diet can ease many everyday complaints. For instance, it may help digestion, energy, and sleep over time.

Every person is different, so we tailor the Chinese medicine diet to your needs. We consider your symptoms, your season, and your daily routine. Then we keep the advice realistic for a busy Adelaide lifestyle. Furthermore, small, steady changes tend to last far longer than strict rules. Therefore we begin with one or two simple swaps. After that, we build from there at a comfortable pace.

DAMP PRODUCING FOODS

Eating for balance has been a way of life for the Chinese for thousands of years. Their culture roots this idea deeply in what to eat and when. The Chinese diet includes well-known spices such as ginger. It also features common foods such as pearled barley. Cooks choose ingredients for their medicinal value, nutrition, and taste. Picking herbs and spices that aid digestion is easy to understand. However, the Chinese diet aims for another principle unfamiliar to most Westerners. That principle is draining dampness. For instance, the Chinese have long known that ginger helps digestion. Likewise, barley helps drain moisture.

DAMPNESS

Dampness is a by-product of foods that clog the free flow of energy inside your body. Popular foods such as cheese, yogurt, white flour, and sugar all cause dampness. Dampness causes stagnation, which creates blockages. As a result, the body breaks down and pain or disease follows. Signs of accumulated dampness vary widely. For example, they include mucus in the nose or lungs. They also include loose stools, constipation, excess weight, and swollen joints. Some common Western diseases link to dampness, such as chronic allergies and arthritis. Dampness is hard to treat once it accumulates. Therefore we eat in a way that prevents it from forming.

MEET YOUR DIGESTIVE SYSTEM

First, it helps to examine how the body forms dampness. Have you ever thought about how your body processes food? For over 2,000 years, the Chinese have observed the digestive process. Therefore they declared proper digestion the cornerstone of Chinese medicine. It is also the foundation of good health. The digestive system is where dampness begins to accumulate.

When food enters your mouth, it travels through your stomach and intestines. There, your body extracts energy from the food. Meanwhile, it expels the waste products at the other end. This food energy becomes your vital life force. Therefore it provides the fuel you need each day. Digestion should be an unnoticeable event. Your digestive system should stay quiet and clean. It should burn cleanly to extract the most nutrition and energy from your food. ‘Clean burning’ resembles metabolism. Suppose you metabolize your foods well. Then your body uses the food efficiently. As a result, no leftover residue remains after you excrete the waste. However, a clogged system cannot separate energy from the foodstuffs well. Although you excrete wastes, leftover residue sticks to places within the body. We consider this residue ‘dampness’. Moreover, it affects your body’s functions in multiple ways.

Accumulated dampness clogs organs such as the lungs. As a result, it causes allergies or asthma. When it obstructs the digestive tract, indigestion or bowel problems can develop. Damp can also stay ‘hidden’ and block meridians. These channels carry life force, and we use them in acupuncture treatment. Therefore blocked meridians lead to pain, stiffness, or even swollen joints. Over time, dampness can become warm. Then it creates diseases of inflammation such as diabetes, high cholesterol, and high blood pressure. In Chinese medicine, addressing moisture is described as one of the keys to supporting balance. Since it is so hard to remove once it accumulates, prevention matters most.

How do we choose foods that prevent dampness and aid good digestion? Such foods also allow free-flowing energy. Here the wisdom of selecting foods by their energetic properties comes in. This is simpler than you may imagine. In fact, foods found in any grocery store form the foundation of a healthy Chinese medicine diet.

THE CHINESE MEDICINE DIET

What types of food does the Chinese medicine diet recommend? Think of the typical menu you’ve seen in Chinese restaurants. Cooks build the meals around steamed rice and cooked vegetables. They add only small quantities of animal protein or beans. Higher-quality Chinese restaurants also use very few cooking oils. Suppose you skip the deep-fried choices made with flour products, such as dumplings and wheat noodles. Then you have the essential Chinese medicine diet. Furthermore, this diet keeps the body in balance at any age.

VEGETABLES

Have you ever noticed the number of vegetables on a typical plate of Chinese food? Usually a Chinese restaurant serves you a heaping plate of lightly cooked vegetables. Vegetables drain dampness well. Moreover, they pack life-giving nutrition. Various colours and textures please the eye and the palate. Varied colours also provide a broad array of nutrients and antioxidants. Therefore they promote health and longevity. Taste and texture play an important role in regulating appetite. A wide variety ensures satiety, so you feel full. Your plate should begin with a large quantity of lightly cooked vegetables. A good guideline is to fill half your plate with vegetables. In addition, include lots of leafy greens. These rank among the most balancing and nutrient-dense foods you can eat.

RICE

Rice is a balanced food that digests easily. In my allergic patients, rice is the number one hypo-allergenic food I recommend. It helps with their symptoms during allergy treatments. Furthermore, it is so gentle to the digestive system. You can swap white or brown rice, depending on which one digests best for you. White rice tends to cleanse more, while brown rice nourishes more. In Chinese medicine, rice is a ‘clean burning’ food. Therefore it gently drains the body’s dampness. Rice should fill one-quarter of your plate.

PROTEIN

The Chinese diet includes small quantities of animal protein or beans. Animal proteins are ‘building’ foods. However, they can challenge digestion, hence the emphasis on ‘small’. You can eat beans more often, since they absorb dampness and provide fibre and protein. A typical serving of animal protein is 2-4 ounces, 3-4 times per week. Your protein choice should fill the other quarter of your plate.

NO COLD RAW FOOD

One food you won’t find in the Chinese medicine diet is raw, cold food. This includes salads, chilled food, iced drinks, and frozen foods. Cold, raw foods cause dampness, because your body struggles to process them. Your digestive system must first warm food to roughly body temperature. Only then can it begin breaking the food down. Therefore cold food strains your energetic resources. Over time, this weakens your energy system. Lightly cooked vegetables and well-cooked grains help instead. As a result, your digestive system extracts energy right away without heating the food first. Raw foods such as salads do contain slightly more enzymes and nutrients. However, the net gain is less than that of cooked vegetables. After all, you lose energy to the internal cooking process while assimilating raw foods.

WHAT, NO DAIRY?

Notice that the Chinese menu has no cheese, butter, or milk. One reason is that these foods tend to create dampness. Even when heated, dairy stays energetically cold and hinders digestion. Chinese medicine treats dairy as a building food. Therefore it suits only undernourished people. As a result, dairy becomes very stagnating if you are already well fed.

CALCIUM

In a culture concerned about calcium, many people believe dairy is the only source of this bone-building mineral. This is far from the truth. Foods such as almonds, salmon, leafy greens, and broccoli are high in calcium. Moreover, they supply other minerals that also build strong bones. You can easily meet your calcium needs through diet. For example, eat several servings of vegetables daily. Then add small servings of salmon and almonds each week.

SUGAR

Concentrated sweets quickly create dampness. These include soda, candy, sweetened yogurt, and energy bars. People also greatly overeat them in the modern diet. Chinese dietary therapy treats the flavour of ‘sweet’ as nourishing. However, most foods in the Chinese diet are only mildly sweet. This means rice, animal protein, and vegetables, not concentrated sugars. If we count vegetables as precious, then imagine the intense sweetness of a piece of chocolate cake. The mild sweet flavour of rice, meat, and vegetables benefits the digestive organs. By contrast, concentrated sugar impairs the body’s ability to transform food into energy. It also blocks the transport of wastes for elimination. As a result, incompletely transformed food becomes dampness. Over time, it accumulates to produce blockage and disease.

[Foods carry 5 different flavours – sweet, sour, pungent, bitter, and salty. Chinese dietary therapy balances these flavours by your body type, disease pattern, and the season. This is a deep subject. For a fuller treatment, see the book The Tao of Healthy Eating: Dietary Wisdom According to Traditional Chinese Medicine by Bob Flaws]

SEASONAL EATING

Different seasons require different cooking methods and food choices. In winter, people naturally eat warmer, heavier foods. For example, they choose soups, stews, and baked foods. By contrast, summer draws us to lighter, cooler foods. We cook these more quickly, such as steamed vegetables. Eat warmer foods when the weather is cold. Then eat cooler foods during the warmer months. Therefore you stay healthy in all seasons. Varying your food choices by season keeps your body in sync with nature.

Likewise, eating what grows in your region keeps your body balanced. For instance, someone near the equator lives in warm weather all year. Therefore they eat different foods than people in cold, northern climates. People in tropical regions naturally have tropical fruits nearby, since these grow in that climate. By contrast, those high in the northern mountains never see tropical fruit growing locally. As a result, they should probably avoid such foods.

One of my favourite herbal educators, Bob Flaws, calls the modern diet a ‘recent aberration’. In fact, it has only developed over the last 50 years. Many current food choices would not exist without fast global transport and refrigeration. If you think about it, humans evolved eating what was local and in season. Preservation methods did emerge. However, these methods usually involved cooking. Today the grocery store is like an in-season garden all year. Therefore watermelons, pineapples, and grapes are always available. However, you might never find these foods growing in your part of the world. Traditional practice suggests eating them freely may lead to imbalances over time.

Eating local foods in season is still common in many parts of the world. Researchers have long studied Indigenous cultures that produce many centenarians, people living past 100 years. Scientists have tried to isolate particular foods these people eat. They hope to find the secret to long, healthy lives. However, many of these studies overlook an obvious fact. Indigenous people have never eaten foods grown outside their region. In addition, the lens of Chinese medicine reveals many similarities in their food choices. For example, they eat more locally grown vegetables, rice, and whole grains. Moreover, they avoid sugar and processed food. They also eat smaller quantities of protein than their Western counterparts.

Eating for a specific concern

The principles above apply generally. The guides below look at what people commonly eat, and commonly avoid, for particular concerns. They are general information rather than personal advice — what suits you depends on your own constitution, health history and any medicines you take. For guidance tailored to you, see Chinese medicine in Adelaide or what happens on your first visit.

Digestion and gut

• How to improve digestion naturally
• Foods that cause bloating
• Foods to avoid with acid reflux
• Eating for a fatty liver

Hormones, fertility and thyroid

• Foods for hormone balance
• Fertility diet and lifestyle
• Eating with an underactive thyroid

Pain and inflammation

• Anti-inflammatory foods
• What to eat and avoid with gout
• Migraine trigger foods

Heart and cholesterol

• Heart healthy foods
• Lowering cholesterol with food

Sleep, mood and immunity

• Foods for better sleep
• Eating for a calmer mind
• Foods that support your immune system

Skin

• Foods for clearer skin

How Can We Help

Adelaide acupuncture clinic offers gentle treatment in Adelaide CBD. We provide laser and traditional acupuncture alongside Chinese medicine. All health funds recognise our registered acupuncturists and Chinese medicine practitioners. Therefore rebate claims stay efficient and simple through HICAPS facilities onsite. On your first visit, we start with preliminary examinations. For example, we use pulse taking, tongue checking, physical palpation, and assessment. Then we collect related information about your diet, lifestyle, toxin exposure, hereditary factors, and medications. Consequently, we work with both the symptoms and the cause. As a result, we form a treatment plan for your approval. This approach delivers personalised therapy with minimal side effects.

Our laser acupuncture treatments in Adelaide stay painless and non-invasive. Therefore they will not affect your daily lifestyle during the treatment plan. Your acupuncture treatment may combine with other natural therapies. For example, we may add Chinese herbs, Tui-Na massage, cupping, and laser acupuncture. It can also integrate with your routine care and prescription medications.

Our treatments are informed by traditional practice and current research, and results vary from person to person. Balancing your lifestyle and reducing stress can help you feel and function better. For trustworthy background on this tradition, see Chinese Medicine Board of Australia.

Our aim is to help you feel and function better. Thus, we will work with you to find the best treatment solution for your healthcare needs. Furthermore, We are conveniently located in the CBD and easily accessible through private and public transport. Email or Call Us at (08) 8221 5880 now to learn more about acupuncture and Chinese medicine, or schedule your consultation online today.

Related reading

• Chinese herbal medicine: what to expect
• anti-inflammatory foods