No.
But, let’s discuss this further. I’ll be brief. Consider, say, Medifast. It’s popular among teenage girls and, apparently, some Chinese medicine students. Perusing the website, it seems like a perfectly reasonable diet plan. Things seem balanced, on the whole. Great, great.
Let me ask you a question – is there something wrong with a basic whole foods diet consisting of whole grains, legumes and/or lean organic animal products, vegetables and fruits? Maybe some exercise? In the form of gentle Qigong, Taiji, walks outside, hiking, playing team sports and the like? Are contemporary people so different from ancient people that we can’t engage in the same activities that they did and manage to stay fit?
No. No, no, no, no, NO.
Medifast, like many of these programs, has you eating the bulk of your foods in the form of highly processed proprietary products. These foods are Qi-less and likely damaging to the Spleen Qi. All the clinical data in the world can’t convince me that these diets make sense, at least not from a Chinese medical point of view. Now, is there anything in the Neijing that says, “Don’t eat Medifast meal replacement bars?” Well, no.
The fact of the matter is that food processed in the way that we know simply didn’t exist in Han dynasty or earlier. But it is clear in many passages throughout the Neijing indicate that food is the source of vitality. We also know through our own experience and reasoning that foods that are closer to their natural state feel more vital and nourish us more deeply. We also have the research of various modern institutes as well as the extensive work done by followers of Rudolf Steiner to help us understand the importance of vital foods more deeply. An excellent book to begin one’s search for a balanced, whole diet is Paul Pitchford’s Healing with Whole Foods.
Many people claim that these kinds of contemporary diets help modern people to be more moderate with their food intake. That may be true. Moderation is a good thing, but moderation should be combined with a whole foods diet and internally directed Qi invigorating activities. Moderation combined with processed crap, reliant on someone else to tell you how much is a good amount to eat is not going to get you very far, not for very long, and not without long-term consequences.
I can hear a few of you out there saying, “But it WORKS!” and “I’ve already lost 20 pounds!” Who cares? At what COST? Are you developing the internal resources necessary to live healthfully? What’s happening to your organ systems? To your Yang? To your Qi and Blood? I find it incredibly inconsistent to be a person who is entering into a field of holistic, functional medicine and NOT asking these questions. More than just asking the questions, I would expect any self-respecting Chinese medicine student to ask the questions, find relevant answers, and order their behavior accordingly. We are the future of healthcare and we have a responsibility to model a lifestyle that runs in accordance with the principles of our medicine.
If someone has asked these important questions and found answers, yet still engages in this kind of contemporary diet program – please do leave your thoughts in the comments. Everyone else, too. :)
Eric
Tags: Theory, balanced-diet, theory-to-practice, professional-development, dietary-therapy, neijing
{ 18 comments… read them below or add one }
Well, with all respect to my friends and colleagues that are doing Medifast, there’s gotta be a better way. I lost, lets see…about 30 lbs (and counting) from the end of ‘06 to present, but it wasn’t via dieting. It was due to changing pathology back into physiology. How? Correct herbal formulas to put broken physiology back on track and elimination of dumb eating habits (like ice cream). My diet still isn’t all that rich and flavorful due to time and money constraints, but it’s not HARMFUL. The rest was due to fixing the processes that had me overweight, which is how I treat for weight problems. Boiling off fat via starvation, privation, or hyperstimulation is not good medicine.
Hi Eric,
Complete agreement from me. I love Paul Pitchford too – I’d like him to do a recipe book!
I also agree. I have no personal experience but know of a few who did similar diets and all I can ask them is how they feel about consuming so many preservatives and to consider the impact long term on their bodies. However, if it is short term and does help a person to lose weight, then it might pay off.
Let me share my experience with weight loss and chinese medicine. After taking the medicine I lost apetite and had a permanent running stomach for 15 days. I could not eat anything and was running for the bathroom atleast 8 times a day.
But guess what I lost around 8 lbs in 15 days, but I never continued again.
I’ve often considered moving quantum’s blog into a running commentary on my thoughts on weight loss and Chinese Medicine. I’ve always been stocky and heavier than I should be. I’m also very spleen and kidney qi xu.
From my point of view: the more spleen qi xu I am the less hungry I am and the more I eat. It sounds counter intuitive but after many years of trying to mindfully look at this I notice that I never feel really full either so it is easy to eat mindlessly. Also I tend to crave heavy foods (perhaps to ground myself because I lack earth?) At any rate it becomes a really difficult cycle to break.
The only time I’ve had a decent spleen pulse was when I was working at my office in Vancouver. My office mate and I were reading South Beach AND The Breast Cancer Diet (9 – 11 servings of veggies a day and make sure they were of a variety of colors). The two combined well and I’ve never eaten so many veggies in all my life–and I lost a lot of weight without feeling deprived because I was always working so hard to get in all my veggie servings. In fact I was eating so much more than normal and feeling so full that I think I was surprised when I started loosing weight.
I did modify the SB program: most all my veggies except for some lunch salads were cooked and warm and typically cooked in the same pot as any proteins.
A thing that really scares me is that I hear from people who have had the stomach stapling surgery (Shudders at THAT) is that before the sx they make them do a sort of fast where they are essentially living on skim milk.. (hello–how much damp can we create in a short period of time?!). The people I’ve met doing this are not patients but I’ve met them socially and they are so excited it’s all I can do not pick up my jaw and then bite my tongue not to say something…
The present methods like Medifast does help people to get very fast results. But it is also known that the body can suffer in the long run. So what do you suggest that should be followed according to chinese medical science? Many people are desperate about getting slimmer and looking prettier, is there any way to get them back into shape fast? Exercise is always a good answer though.
Robin,
I think the very point is to eliminate the focus on “FAST” weight loss. A person doesn’t get fat fast, so why should losing the weight be any different? The focus should be on supporting the physiology of the body (usually wood and earth are out of balance in people who put on weight and can’t get it off), helping people to learn lifelong habits of health and supporting them in their process. I’ve lost 20 pounds in the last 8 months doing just this – and despite the current lack of activity (due to snow) and increased food intake (due to holidays) I don’t seem to be gaining much back.
It’s as simple as that for the majority of people, I think…
Eric
Eric, I can’t thank you enough for mentioning wood. We don’t really focus on weight loss (or didn’t at my school) and over the years I’ve really noticed what a big place wood plays in the whole weight equation.
Indeed. In fact, I’d like to see a post on it as a follow up. Would be most instructive.
Let me work on that, Mike. It seems like this post has received plenty of attention, and it’s definitely an important subject…
Eric
I find your discussion interesting in that none of the respondents seem to be studying nutritional science or indigenous diets. My husband Michael Gandy. L.Ac., and I have been collaboratively treating clients for 28 years using Classical Chinese Medicine and dietary changes to successfully treat everything from infants with failure to thrive to HIV/AIDS and Parkinson Disease. One thing I can tell you — there is no one diet that is good for everyone, nor is there even a diet that is good for someone through all of their life. An infant needs a very different diet from her mother and father. The 16 year old male (or female) athlete needs a different diet from a pre-menopausal woman. You can no more give one diet fits all recommendations than you can prescribe one herbal formula for everyone. Any diet regime that focuses only on weight loss and/or purports to be good for everyone is not worth the paper it’s written on.
Two books that begin to ground your knowledge of healthy diets are Sally Fallon’s Nourishing Traditions and Gary Taube’s Good Calories Bad Calories. For Chinese Medicine practitioners Paul Pitchfords book is good, but does not give enough information on deficiency or excess syndromes. How to nourish an elder who is deficient and loosing muscle mass as well as organ function? A Vegan diet can improve symptoms in the short term — any diet that gets someone off their junk food will do that — but in the long run such a diet will risk exacerbating the elder’s deficiency and decline. Henry Lu’s book includes important dietary knowledge particularly applicable to a TCM practice. Knowing which foods support stomach/spleen function or clear up damp heat in the lower burner becomes crucial when dealing with chronic progressive disease. Knowing how to design a meal which supports all organ functions while nourishing qi and blood in a particular client while appealing to that client’s food preferences and fitting into their lifestyle is a science and an art.
Much like herbalism and acupuncture, learning to balance a particular client’s nutritional needs and then to teach that client the skills required to make those changes requires years of study and experience. At least start with good information and wisdom, not popular books written to make money from the gullible.
Warm regards,
Margaret Shockley Gandy, N.C.
Two concepts I try to live by: (1) “You are what you eat” and (2) eat less + exercise more = weight loss.
Both fairly simple and easy to live by. Try not to eat junk (I think total denial can be detrimental too though) and find a good balance. The more you know about nutrition and it’s effects on you the better you will be able to maintain your health.
You’re absolutely right and we should always put our physical and spiritual health before weight loss but unfortunately, and especially amongst young women, the weight loss seems to rule all! Why are we so obsessed by our weight other than those where it’s actually causing a health problem?
Okay, Medifast is one thing, but what about diets that are more nationally accepted….nutrisystem, weight watchers, curves and the like?
You know what I love about this post? How Google picked up on the word ‘diet’, and as you are ranting this wonderful rant about the evil of these fast-loss, processed food evils….well, there is Google, happily supplying you with no shortage of adverts for every diet on the planet! Stuff like that tickles my funny bone.
LOL it tickles mine too!
Gotta love Google adsense! Posting a diet ad on the precise post condemning the very thing!
Some people don’t do well on a heavy vegetable diet. I use a system called Metabolic Typing. Dr. Mercola uses a similar idea (he used to use Metabolic Typing but he’s come up with his own thing with Dr. Weill). The problem is that the diets around the world, which we developed on, are too different. We should test people for their basic constitutional type and then recommend from there. Some people need heavy fat and meat- think of the Eskimos for an obvious example. For more info go to :www.healthexcel.com/
Also, check out the Price-Pottenger Nutrition Foundation: http://www.ppnf.org/catalog/ppnf/
This group represents a key set of nutritional thinkers.
We need to use the best nutritional thinking from the West, based on OUR Bodies’ needs, and integrate with Chinese nutritional thought. By the way, when our say Western nutrition, I don’t mean the FDA or your school nutrition class’s thought.
These approaches are related to the previous comment mentioning Sally Fallon- she runs (or at least used to) the Price Pottenger Foundation. If you start on learning from this line of nutritional thinkers and related thinkers you will experience a massive opening in your nutritional thinking.
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