I hear it all the time from drivers. We will be having a conversation about losing weight and when I ask them about their diet, they say, “Well, I have been eating healthy – lots of fruit and salad.” This is the common perception of eating “healthy”. However, defining what’s “healthy” is a lot more complicated than “fruits and salad”. Let me give you an example.
I recently went to an acupuncturist to get an “energy diagnostic.” Without going into my symptoms, the doctor of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) did his examination and then let me know I had a heart Qi deficiency, a liver Qi deficiency and a spleen Qi deficiency. What the heck is that?
Qi is a word to describe energy. It is a concept for the very real, living energy that exists in everything in the universe including the air, water and food we consume. Just like different organs of the body have different functions, there are different Qi systems or energy systems in the body. Western medicine is ignorant of this, but Chinese medicine has studied Qi anatomy for thousands of years. Anyway, the doctor explained that both my liver and heart Qi systems are nourished by my spleen Qi system. My spleen Qi system is responsible for extracting the Qi energy from the food I eat. He told me that my spleen Qi system was underperforming, so I wasn’t getting the nutrition and nourishment from my food. As a result, everything else was affected and that explained a lot of my symptoms. So, in addition to sticking me with needles in various points to stimulate and facilitate the flow of energy through various energy channels or meridians, he also prescribed something of a meal plan for me.
Now, get this, among the foods I am supposed to avoid: raw fruit, raw vegetables, chard, mung beans, soy beans, spinach, sprouts, tomato, cereal grass, white flour, raw nuts, raw seed, dairy products, most seaweed, salt, sugar, and tofu! Now, that’s most of your salad bar and vegetarian standard items!
Avoid raw fruits and vegetables????!!!! Avoid spinach, sprouts, and tomatoes???!!!! Isn’t that exactly what most of us think a healthy diet consists of? I had been eating an egg white sandwich with spinach and tomatoes almost every morning because I thought it was “healthy”.
The doctor explained to me that since my system for extracting energy and nutrition from food is underperforming, then eating raw fruits and vegetables will put an added strain on that system because it has to work much harder to metabolize it. I should cook my food because it makes digestion easier and also because some of the energy systems are sensitive to temperature, too.
Among the foods I was told to eat to specifically strengthen my spleen Qi system: cooked beans, carrots, Kale, potatoes, pumpkin, quinoa, anchovies, beef, beef liver, beef kidney, halibut, lamb, turkey, black pepper, cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, garlic and Stevia. LOL.
So my point here is that healthy is a relative concept. It changes based on your medical reality. What is healthy for you one day, one week, one month or one year may be different for you later on. It all depends on what you need and what your goals are. This is the reason why I don’t give out a meal plan or diet.
Drivers frequently ask me questions like,
“What should I eat?”
“Is such and such good for me?”
“Do you have a diet or menu plan?”
Because everyone is different – has a different medical reality, different nutritional profile, different tastes, different metabolisms, etc. – I can’t say you should eat this or that.
What I can do is analyze your nutrition profile. This is why drivers log everything they eat for 13 weeks (91) days. When I can see a nutrition profile, I can analyze it to see which foods are causing your metabolism to store fat and then help you to make food substitutions that will decrease the amount of fat being stored and increase metabolism, and thereby cause you to lose weight. What works for one driver will be different for another.
So, what you think is healthy for you may not be. Like me, you may think you are eating the right foods while in fact you are eating the wrong foods, based on your own medical reality. It’s all relative.
