Why the Chinese Don't Count Calories (31 page)

The passivity of
yin
and the energy of
yang

Meditation does not come naturally to me. I have never been very good at switching off. The truth is that, like many people in the West, I find the thought of a day with nothing to do rather threatening. If I ever look ahead and see an empty schedule, I feel a bit panicky and my first reaction is to rush to the phone or send a few e-mails. I suspect that at heart I am really a couch potato and that if I let myself experience a period of inactivity I might find that I like it.

The body’s state of activity is
yang
and inactivity is
yin
. When I came to understand that
yin
and
yang
always contain at least small amounts of each I recognized that I am a potentially lazy person inside an obsessively busy one, and that fear of this other side of my nature had made me push myself unnecessarily. Had I let my body rest more, especially after I had asked a lot from it, I would be a fitter person. In China, women stay inside for a whole month after giving birth (a process that demands a tremendous amount of one’s
qi
). During this time they have the support of the extended family and lots of nourishing soup. Traditionally, new mothers did not even change their clothes and great care was taken to maintain their body at an ambient temperature. Breastfeeding is still seen as a full-time occupation, not something that you do in your lunch break, as I had done.

It is never too late to start on a programme of restorative exercise and meditation. By practising
qi gong
you will begin to build a healthier relationship between yourself and your body, between yourself and nature and ultimately between yourself and the world. Regular and sustained practice will help build your inner strength; if you are not in control of your eating, it will help by strengthening your willpower. But also, as you balance the
yin
and
yang
and the Five Elements in your body and in your organs, you will find that you naturally seek out truly nourishing foods. The
qi gong
routines I have outlined here are just an introduction to this age-old practice. But the best way is to join a class.
Qi gong
is not usually taught in the West, but the related martial art form, Tai Chi, is increasingly popular. More about physical balance than inner harmony, it is nevertheless a way in to restorative exercise.

The calories in versus calories out approach to diet and exercise puts tremendous strain on mind and body alike. Your exercise routines, like your diet, should be sustaining and nourishing, enhancing your
qi
, not exhausting it. All you need to do this is to improve the way you breathe. A brisk walk in the country or a session on the dance floor can make you feel great, not because you have burnt up 200 calories but because you have filled your body with the
qi
from the air. With practice you will be able to achieve the same sensation through meditation. When the lungs sort the pure from the impure and the
qi
joins with that, we ingest from the earth via our food and that of our own essence, the basic life processes are vitalized. As we breathe out, exhaling substances that will nourish the plants we eat, we take our place in the natural order of things and renew our relationship with the rhythm of the universe.

If your chosen form of exercise makes you feel good then it is likely to be doing you good. Be aware that your body is more than just tissue and muscle. The right type of exercise, like the right diet, will help keep you fit inside and out. If you are totally exhausted after visiting the gym, or running five miles, then your session may have done more harm than good. Consider alternatives. A survey carried out by Cancer Research showed that women who do their own housework are 30 per cent less likely to suffer from cancer than those who don’t.
¹⁹
The results of the survey showed that moderate forms of physical activity may be more beneficial to health than less frequent but more intense recreational activity (e. g. going to the gym). According to the Five-Elements concept, cleaning and polishing tones the
metal
element, keeping us fit into old age. Or what about digging the garden and sowing some fresh organic vegetables? You would not only tone your
wood
element, but you would also contribute towards the scheme of things and enhance your own diet at the same time. Another Chinese proverb says ‘
zhi you yi hao
’ (‘everyone has his or her own preferences’).

fifteen
Avoid extremes in all areas of your life

‘
Gong tai man ze zhe; yue tai man ze que.
’ (‘When a bow is pulled too far it will break; when the moon is at its fullest, it will wane. ’)

The Chinese saying ‘
suan
,
la
,
tian
,
ku
’ (‘sour, spicy, sweet and bitter’) doesn’t refer only to the flavours of Chinese food but is used to describe the emotions in a truly fulfilling life.

The connection between illness and emotional state is so often overlooked in theWest. We might admit to being run down or stressed out, but these states are almost seen as something to be proud of. If we were to admit that illness might result from an imbalance in our lifestyle, then we would have to acknowledge we are responsible for doing something about it.

There are five indigenous pathogens or emotions, as they are called in traditional Chinese medicine, linked to the Five Elements and Organs, and with the same creation and control cycle. Like the flavours, the right amount of emotion exerts a positive effect on an organ; too much can cause damage.

20
.
The relationship between the Five Elements, the Five Organs
and the Five Emotions.

According to Chinese thought, too much anger, associated with the liver, makes the
qi
rush upwards, too much joy (heart) upsets its smooth circulation. Toomuchworry or thought (spleen) can make the
qi
stagnate, excessive grief (lung) can consume it and extreme fear (kidneys) will force
qi
downwards.

Living in China has made me acutely aware of the different pressures of modern and traditional lifestyles. In underdeveloped areas, people are not so insulated from negative emotions. People in many regions of China live in constant dread of natural or man-made disaster. Floods are commonplace and the country has a history of tragic earthquakes; the newspapers report a fatal accident in mines at least once a month. I have seen factories in China where the conditions make theVictorian age look state of the art. There was a family living in a hut with no sanitation or electricity less than a mile from our home. They had moved up to Beijing to work the land there because, back home in Hebei about 300 miles south, there wasn’t enough to eat. The Chinese are no strangers to the concept of
chi ku
(or ‘eating bitterness’), and believe that a period of hardship has its place in the scheme of things.

Children seem to be able to cope with extremes of emotion; they are in their
wood
stage of life, with plenty of rising
yang
. As we get older our bodies are not so forgiving. Too much anger, especially when bottled up, might manifest itself in liver malfunction, leading to headaches and migraines; excess worry can damage the spleen/stomach and leads to abdominal bloating and problems with the digestion.

In the West grief and fear are often experienced only vicariously through TV and films, only to be all the more overwhelming when they do strike home. My solution over the years has been to enrol all my children in aggressive, competitive sports in the hope that the pre-game tension, adrenalin flow and after-match emotion might add balance to their relatively charmed existence. As the older boys entered their teenage years, I was unsure that a weekly game of ice hockey was enough. Beijing is a teenager’s dream: beer is cheap, taxis are cheap, and there are no licensing laws or age restriction on nightclub entry.

When our eldest son, Max, opted at the age of thirteen to spend a year at a local Chinese school called the Number Fifty-five Middle School, his ex-pat teenage life was put into perspective. As Christian neared the same age, he made it perfectly clear that, thanks to Max’s reviews of the establishment, he would not be going there, so we almost reconciled ourselves to several more years of mutual disagreement and distrust. Then his hockey team went to Harbin, an industrial rust-belt city some 500 miles north of Beijing, to play the Chinese national junior team. ‘We were beaten thirteen-nil!’ he wailed on his return. ‘It could have been worse,’ I replied. ‘It was,’ he said, ‘that was just the girls’ team. The boys took one look at our performance and decided we were so bad that they didn’t think it was worth challenging us. ’

Six weeks later Christian and I were on the overnight sleeper to Harbin. He spent the next three months living in an eight-man dormitory with iron bunk beds and straw mattresses, following an ice time schedule that might start as early as 5. 45 a. m and finish at midnight. On his arrival he was given two enamel bowls that fitted inside one another, which he would take to the canteen to be filled with food then wash out with cold water in a stone sink. The food was good and plentiful, even if it had to be eaten off formica-topped tables which were usually covered with the remnants of a previous diner’s meal.

Christian learned a lot of Chinese swear words in Harbin, some time-management skills and the importance of wearing long-johns. He told me that in the time he spent in the boarding school he never saw a student take a day sick; a stark comparison to his Western friends who, despite, or perhaps because of, their centrally heated classrooms and school buses, seemed to drop like flies in the winter months. Despite some tough moments, like getting locked outside at night in freezing temperatures for six hours, Christian says that the time he spent in Harbin was the happiest in his life.

Yet the Western media gives us a very different picture of where we are likely to find happiness, one that leaves young people in particular with unrealistic expectations. A new car, a new outfit, a holiday in the sun, a box of chocolates are marketed as panaceas. While ‘supermodels’ give the subliminal message that super-thin is super-happy, diet plans promise access to supermodel super happiness.

With so much perfection promised, we become indignant when things don’t go our way. When we are ill, for example, we expect the pharmacy or the hospital to deliver a cure rather than reviewing our diet and lifestyle and wondering where we might have gone wrong. Inability to accept one’s natural body shape is a major problem in the West, exacerbated, of course, by a badly balanced diet that does not help the body feel well and quick-fix diet products that do not deliver. My journey in the Taoist way of thinking has led me to believe that every overweight person has a slim body on the inside, and vice versa, which does much to explain the eating disorders and obsessive diet regimes that abound in the West. If your fat person is a threat to you, acknowledge it, relax about your shape and don’t be afraid to eat, rather than pushing your whole body with a punishing regime of starvation. If your slim person is the hidden one, let it emerge naturally by nourishing it with foods that will restore the balance in your body.

The wilful deprivation of bodily nourishment that occurs in anorexia is not, psychologists tell us, simply about food. In a period of rapid change, when young people may be buffeted by pressure from peers and parents or under stress academically, they often find themselves unable to strike a balance in their lives, so they try to exert strong control over one particular area. They become unable, or unwilling, to accept that they are getting bigger, so they try to block it out, sometimes causing the mind to lose track of reality. Deprived of nourishment, as the result of an increasingly limited range of foods, they become less and less able to restore the balance they have lost. Thus their
qi
supply gradually weakens, and the situation, if not checked, can become life-threatening.