Dietary Therapy & Lifestyle

Chinese dietary therapy provides a valuable contribution to healing and balance. Based on your individual diagnosis, certain foods can be recommended to bring balance to your constitution or condition and enhance your acupuncture treatments and herbal prescriptions. Your body needs fuel to function and there are positive choices you can make. We help you determine the best fuel for you. This is generally incorporated into a session, though in some instances, nutritional consults may be recommended in order to focus on this aspect of your return to health and balance.

Chinese Medicine has its foundation in living in accordance with seasonal energy; a food which is beneficial in the warmth of summer may have the opposite effect in the cold of winter, and vice versa.

Foods carry particular energetics and flavor; cooling, neutral or warming, sour, bitter, pungent, sweet and salty. This confers particular properties to a food; astringent, heat clearing, relaxing, dispersing, moisture generating, descending, tonifying, warming, and so on.

For example, a persistent cough in the fall (the season of metal) might be partly attributed to the dryness of this season, which relates to the lung. Patients who have a tendency to metal dryness will benefit from sipping pear juice in fall, which happen to be plentiful at this time of year. The pear flesh is white – the color we relate to the lung, and it’s flavor is sweet, which tonifies earth, which is the mother or generator of metal and the lung, and can therefore support the function of the lung.

One’s diet can be analyzed according to these principles. As another example, dairy is known to carry the energy of cold and damp. Some of us have a constitution that can accommodate this energy, but some of us do not and its repeated ingestion can precipitate imbalance and be an obstacle to healing. Diet gives power to the patient.

By educating you on what is beneficial, and what may contribute to imbalance, depending on your individual body type and condition, we can provide you with the information to feed yourself well. This is something you can do for yourself at home, every day.