Supercharge your Metabolism with Real Food
Integrative Nutrition for Optimal Health online course, 3/18/23
Guest blog by my wife, Dagmar Ehling, MAc, LAc, with our garden harvest!
Are you confused about what to eat? Are you frazzled about different websites making opposing recommendations? Would you like to know how to custom-tailor your dietary needs? Would you like to understand your body’s physiology and how you can tweak it?
A few years ago, I saw a 68-year-old female patient who had a history of estrogen-receptor positive breast cancer 20 years ago. She opted for a double mastectomy and tamoxifen for several years. At the time of her visit, she was overweight, and complained of high blood pressure, generalized joint pain, digestive malabsorption, fullness, gas, bloating, alternating constipation and diarrhea, gum disease, facial hair growth, hair loss, soft nails, poor vision, floaters, light sleep, and decreased memory.
Her diet included toast and eggs, tea or coffee, salads, crackers, tuna or egg salad, and a daily glass or two of wine. Many of her symptoms pointed to insulin resistance and metabolic syndrome and her laboratory values confirmed this suspicion. I suggested several dietary changes, various supplements, custom-tailored Chinese herbs, and acupuncture, which, over time, lowered her blood pressure, resulted in improved digestion with regular bowel movements, improved hair and nail growth, decreased facial hair, and enhanced her sleep and vision. Eventually, her joint pain disappeared, but she noticed certain foods would aggravate her digestion so she learned to stay away from those. Her overall quality of life was vastly improved and she was able to work long hours in her garden which she loved.
For the past 33 years I have worked with patients on their various health problems integrating acupuncture, Chinese herbs, nutrition, functional medicine, supplements, and homeopathy interchangeably depending on which modality would work best for the patient’s symptoms. It became evident how important real food is for people’s health concerns. On many occasions changing their diet including removing processed foods and identifying inflammatory foods was all that was necessary to turn around a condition. Teaching patients to learn to read their body’s signals proved to be very important.
A common source of confusion is eating raw vs cooked foods. Some people, particularly those with strong digestive function, can handle raw and cold foods. However, many folks do better with steamed or cooked foods because, according to Chinese medicine, nutrient uptake is amplified in a “warm” digestive environment as digestive juices tend to be more readily available. Folks that follow a diet that is mostly cold, iced, or raw are more prone to lose stools or diarrhea (often with undigested food in the stool), bloating, fatigue, and brain fog. Just recently I saw a patient who complained of having up to ten bowel movements per day and upon reviewing her diet it was clear that she consumed much of her food straight from the refrigerator. Her bowel movement frequency normalized when she “warmed” up her diet.
There is a tremendous amount of confusion about all the available types of diets, some of which are trendy fads. The key is to figure out the person’s specific metabolic make up then tailor the best possible diet to them to optimize their wellbeing. Integrating the best diet into Chinese and functional medical diagnostics and giving people a reason why they needed to make certain changes became a fundamental aspect of my practice and led to many satisfied customers. It also inspired me to grow my own food in our organic permaculture garden including Asian cucumbers, butternut squashes, black eyed peas and much more.
In my upcoming Integrative Nutrition for Optimal Health online course, we will briefly go over the different diets such as carnivore, vegetarian, vegan, ketogenic, paleo and weigh the pros and cons of each. More importantly, however, you will be able to pinpoint your functional medical strengths and weaknesses which will help you to make targeted changes to your diet and lifestyle. We will have time for class examples, discussion and Q&A. Come join me on March 18, 2023 for a live zoom webinar and in-depth discussion on these subjects. It will be fun, and recordings will be available afterwards!
Originally published 2/11/2023 on Medium.com