Why the Chinese Don't Count Calories (26 page)

Traditional Chinese medicine is particularly suited to deal with chronic conditions because these are often
yin
and affect the internal workings of the body. Acute illnesses, on the other hand, are usually
yang
and shorter lived and likely to burn themselves out anyway, though when they do they may lead to a chronic condition because the body has been severely out of balance for a period of time.

Whatever your problem, a traditional Chinese doctor will look behind the obvious symptoms of an illness for a syndrome that will point to the underlying cause. You will have to describe your symptoms in great detail. Is your pain gnawing or heavy? Does it move around? Is it worse in the summer or the winter? Do you prefer hot or cold food or drinks? What time do you wake at night? Are your stools soft or hard? Is your sputum thick, thin, white or yellow? The doctor will then go on to look at the patient’s tongue. Tongues are reasonably straightforward: a pale tongue represents a cold syndrome and/or
yang
,
qi
or blood deficiency. Dark red indicates heat, and purple shows extreme heat. Taking a pulse, in the Chinese way, is a specialist job and Chinese doctors can feel nine different pulses, using three fingers at three different levels, on each wrist. Each position on the wrist corresponds to a different organ and different abnormalities can be found at different depths. ‘Superficial’ syndromes such as colds and minor illnesses tend to be found nearer the surface, with the more serious internal problems or damage to the
qi
showing at a lower level.

Detailed and personal questions allow Chinese doctors to build a picture of the syndrome behind every disorder. After my daughter Honor was born I spent years feeling ‘shrivelled’ and, while I had had plenty of milk for the other three, I had faced a real problem feeding her. While I had previously enjoyed being outdoors and especially loved to take the children swimming, I found I could no longer face the elements unless heavily wrapped up and I developed a dread of swimming pools. This was the stage when I lost my taste for hot drinks and found that alcohol stopped me from sleeping because my body seemed unable to control its temperature. Through experience I knew that if I took these minor irritations to my Western-trained Beijing family practitioner, he would tell me that they were just part of getting old.

I knew that I needed a full Chinese medicine consultation, but was slightly nervous of the questions about bodily functions that I knew it would involve. Then something happened to prompt me into action: my son Sam fainted at a friend’s house. It was a sweltering day in May and I was not unduly concerned; he had passed out a couple of times before and always came round fighting fit. A friend, however, was of a different opinion and before I knew it we were in the middle of a thorough investigation that involved trailing round hospitals all over town, a three-day ECG and a CAT scan.

To my great relief, but not great surprise, theWestern doctors found nothing serious behind Sam’s fainting incident. During the investigations, however, I spent time reflecting on how many physical characteristics Sam and I shared: as a child I had passed out every year or so. ‘Why not take Sam along with me for a Chinese medical consultation?’ I asked myself; his presence there might provide a distraction from the embarrassing questions about bowel habits that I knew to be par for the course.

In the event, they weren’t even asked. Dr Li Xin was immaculately groomed with a fixed smile on his small face, and eyes that seemed to pierce right through you – and probably did.

Although he went through the motions of feeling my pulse and looking at my tongue, I think he figured me out as I entered the room. My problem, he explained, and the one that my unfortunate offspring had inherited, probably from both parents, was an excess of
yang
. Did I often suffer from nosebleeds, mouth ulcers or outbreaks of acne? How were my teeth? Did I drink wine? And did it give me a headache? What about coffee?

I wasn’t convinced about his diagnosis. When I was a child I had the odd nosebleed and mouth ulcer and my share of teenage acne, but no more than most. My teeth were pretty lousy but I put that down to four pregnancies. I didn’t drink any more wine than contemporaries, or most of them anyway. Yes, wine did sometimes give me a headache, as did coffee. ‘But,’ I asked him, to show that I had done my homework, ‘I thought that if you have too much
yang
you tend to be too hot and don’t feel the cold?’ I had just spent most of the winter perfectly spherical from extra layers of clothing. Then I thought of something else:‘Sam never feels the cold. So how can we have the same constitution?’

15. The Five Elements in the lifecycle.

Dr Li Xin patiently explained that people with excessive
yang
have too much energy; they are restless and impatient, blush easily and have a tendency to high blood pressure. Proving his point about the impatient bit, I argued with him. ‘My blood pressure is very low, and so is Sam’s. ’ Nonplussed, Li Xin asked me if I sweated a lot. ‘No, hardly at all,’ I announced proudly and then added, ‘only if I wake up at night, which sometimes happens after drinking wine. ’ I was beginning to see where we were going here. ‘Your
yang
was so strong that it has exhausted itself, and in doing so also damaged your
yin
, which was fighting to control it. You can swing from excessive
yang
to deficient
yin
at any time. When you get tired or feel low or sweat spontaneously you are displaying
yin
symptoms. When you drink wine you give your
yang
an artificial boost so you wake up sweating in the night, further damaging your
yin
,’ he said.

16
.
The
24
-hour cycle of
Qi
.
Qi
flows through the body in a twenty-four-hour cycle. The Pericardium and the San Jiao are beyond the scope of this book.

‘Because your
yin
and
yang
are damaged, your
qi
, which is created by the balance of
yin
and
yang
, is weak which is why you cannot control your temperature or tolerate hot drinks. And you are often cold because your
qi
is not flowing smoothly. Sam is young so he still has a plentiful supply of
qi
to keep him warm, but as people get older their supply gets weaker, especially if they don’t work to conserve it,’ he explained. ‘
Qi
deficiency leads to weak blood, which is why your blood pressure is low rather than high and you also have problems with varicose veins and pains and numbness in your arm, do you not?’Wow.

Dr Li Xin suggested that Sam, who was in the rising
yang
stage of his life, keep active to allow an outlet for his natural tendencies but also eat more (
yin
) sour foods to keep his rising
yang
nourished but under control. I thought about how my third son loved nothing more than to make his own homemade lemonade by squeezing fresh lemons and adding a touch of sugar. I hadn’t particularly encouraged the process as it involved wielding large kitchen knives and leaving a sticky mess, but resolved to be more tolerant in future.

As for me, I took four weeks’ worth of foul-tasting Chinese medicine to boost my blood and
qi
and I underwent a course of acupuncture. I still feel the cold, but nothing like as badly as I did, and I can tolerate coffee and red wine but know to avoid too many artificial boosts to my
yang
. I incorporate plenty of foods that nourish
qi
in my diet and have learned to listen to my body. If it is out of sorts, however small the problem, I know it is telling me something and that I need to attempt to restore the balance, not by extreme action but by a gentle readjustment.

Read more about Chinese dietary therapy (see Further Reading on page 222) and you will find hundreds more foods with health benefits. Some of these will suit you better than others,depending on your individual constitution, your stage of life, the time of year and even time of day. In every twenty-four-hour cycle the
qi
flows right through the body and it is at its height in the different organs at different times (see page 176).

If you always feel more out of sorts at a certain time of day, the position of the
qi
flow in the body may be an indicator of where your weakness is. For instance, you may feel bloated in the morning, when the
qi
is flowing through the spleen, or suffer asthma attacks in the early hours of the morning as it travels through the lung. Many people find that after a good night out they wake up at three o’clock feeling uncomfortably hot – this is exactly the time that the
qi
passes through the liver. Alcohol is very heating, and while a youthful body can deal with its extreme effects, as we get older and our
qi
starts to diminish we need to treat it with caution.

This ability to listen to your body is not something you can acquire overnight. If your diet to date has featured quite a limited range of foods you may find it takes time to become accustomed to, and recognize the benefits of, new tastes and textures. But if you do begin to feature some of these truly nourishing foods in your diet you will feel the difference, and your body will soon not want to return to its former undernourished state. When you get more in touch with your body you will recognise the signs that it’s out of balance; these are different for every individual but could include spots, rashes, unexplained aches and pains or itching, lank hair, digestive upsets, and a host of ‘allergic’-type reactions.

As I reveal the eleventh secret of the Chinese diet, that food can protect your body from disease and even treat illnesses, I am not exhorting you to rush out and stock up on quail’s eggs and seaweed, nor to flush your prescribed medication down the sink. The most influential Chinese herbal was published in 1578 (Li Shizhen’s
Ben Cao Gang Mu
), mentioned on p. 164. There are many health-giving foods available in our supermarkets today that the ancient Chinese herbalists would not have had access to. Thus, while I encourage you to seek out the foods which Chinese dietary therapy recommends, you can enjoy many other natural foods, currently promoted by today’s nutritionists. If blueberries and raspberries, salmon and tuna had been available in China in the sixteenth century there is no doubt that their many health benefits would have been recognized too.

So if
er jiao
(donkey-hide gelatin) is not your thing, then look to our own food culture for foods with health benefits. In his
British Food: an Extraordinary Thousand Years of History
, Colin Spencer lists nearly one hundred wild plants that have been eaten in Britain since Roman times. Reading through the list, I could only find twenty-three that feature in every day modern-day cooking: half of those are soft fruits and nuts that until recently were used mainly for baking Christmas treats; most of the rest are herbs which are used sparingly by the initiated. Many others, including nettle, dandelion, dock and various sea vegetables still proliferate but are viewed as weeds rather than foodstuffs. Nettle helps clear toxins, dandelion improves liver function and digestion, chickweed was once used to get rid of scurvy. So next time you feel a need to go running to the chemist for a paracetamol or an anti-acid tablet you might consider what’s in your garden or see what the hedgerows have to offer first. There are many reliable modern guides on the medicinal properties of wild foods, and weeds.

If you only get one message from the fifteen secrets let it be this one: food is good for you. The right foods, real foods provided by nature, will help your bodies keep fit and free from illness.

twelve
Make an occasion of meals