As the New Year begins, we all set our minds to certain resolutions that we hope to change in the upcoming year. Most of us hope to lose some weight. However, some of us are not willing to give up on delicious foods in order to lose weight and prefer to spend a few hours at the gym instead. But is exercising without a healthy diet a good good enough to achieve your weight loss resolution?
At HolliBalance Well-being Center, we have people come in looking for help with their acid reflux or indigestion problems. After speaking to them in depth about their dietary habits, we’ve come to the realization that they commonly consume ice cold drinks very often. Some of them enjoy iced drinks better because they’re more refreshing whilst others admitted that it’s simply because of cultural habit; cold beverages are all around and easier to access. In order to maintain a healthy metabolism, it’s important that everything we eat is close to our body’s temperature. However, it’s common for people to want to enjoy a cold beverage or consume cold food during the summer when the weather is very hot. This is because cold beverages are seemingly refreshing. However, many of us don’t realize that drinking ice water or consuming cold foods is detrimental to our health. For hundreds of years, traditional Chinese medicine has recommended against the consumption of cold beverages. However, this isn’t a common advice given in Western medicine so many people shrug the advice off because they don’t understand the reasoning behind it. It’s harder to comply with instructions when we’re unfamiliar with the reasons and benefits.
At HolliBalance Well-being Center, we’ve had many patients with various pain conditions tell us that they often use ice on the pain area as instructed by their orthopedic doctors or physical therapists. They are instructed to do so especially after doing exercises that involve the affected area. Some of them say that they do feel that ice help the area temporarily. Some of them never tried using heat for their pain because they were never instructed to do so and they thought heat would make the inflammation worse. After their visits at HolliBalance Well-being Center, they started using heat or combining heat and herbal pain spray and they feel that heat lessens the pain a lot more than ice. Some of the patients also pointed out that after using ice, they were still feeling extensive pain at night while sleeping and that the pain diminished after they used heat. These claims are not surprising because Chinese Medicine has been advising against the use of ice on injuries for centuries.
At HolliBalance Well-Being Center, we often have patients come in with complaints related to their digestive system. Some of them experience bloating, frequent loose stool, indigestion and heart burn. More often than not, people don’t understand why they are having so many digestive system problems because they believe that they have been following healthy dietary habits. Many of them have been vegetarians for an extended period of time and thought that they weren’t prone to digestive issues due to their eating habits.
The strength of traditional Chinese Medicine theories is that we look at every case individually and identify the underlying cause of the conditions due to imbalances from either constitution or post-natal environment. Two people both have similar symptoms of acid reflux. One person is possibly due to the inherent cold condition in the digestive system while the other person is due to excess heat in the stomach. These two people are told to have different body types.
Traditional Chinese medicine focuses on balancing Yin and Yang energies within the body. Its ultimate goal is to reach optimal balance. Optimal balance leads to good overall health, whether it is physical, mental, emotional or spiritual. Once body has to reach the peak of its ultimate balance, it is considered healthy and this prevents illness and disease. According to traditional Chinese medicine, each individual is born with a certain body type and each organ is either Yin or Yang dominated. Our body type determines how we live and behave and how we deal with diseases and bacteria. As human beings, we try to balance Yin and Yang energies through our dietary guidelines. This means that our body works to balance the energies through the foods we prefer. The downside here is that sometimes, the energies in our bodies are so uneven and off balance that the diets we think are beneficial to us are actually hurting our health, which is why we have to be aware of our body type and the foods we need to harmonize our organs.
