As a practitioner, weight loss is a topic that I get a lot of questions about.  ”Can you help me lose weight?”, “Can you make me not want to eat anything?”, “Is there a secret Chinese Herb that makes fat melt?”.  The answer, of course, is complicated. YES, I can help you lose weight, BUT, and this is the thing that no one likes to hear, you still have to do your part.  Eat well, move your body, get it working properly.

To do that, let’s look at how your body works from a Traditional Chinese Medicine point of view:

The body is a furnace

In the early Han dynasty, physicians of the time made notes regarding what the symptoms, theory and mechanisms of obesity.  They knew even at that time what the risk factors were.

If obesity occurs in the nobleman and rich people, they must be over consuming heavy and greasy foods.”  - The Suwen (The Book of Plain Questions, Chapter 28)

Even then, the Chinese understood that obesity and excess weight was caused by over-consumption and undesirable eating habits. Now, as TCM Practitioners, when approaching patients with excess weight, we look at the underlying body condition and constitution as well as the mental state that may have led to the imbalance and excess weight in the first place.  These issues will then be addressed.  Once we can restore the body’s balance, the metabolism will begin to process the food properly and if the patient is eating the correct foods and moving regularly, the issue will be resolved.

Theory

Chinese Medicine views fat or adipose tissue as dampness having invaded the body, and the spleen is to be the organ to care for dampness and phlegm.  The spleen handles all of the transportation and transformation of body fluids and food in the body, and if damaged, it will fail in this.  Damaging to the spleen are things such as sweet foods and not enough exercise.  The fluids then become in excess, which congeal into phlegm which becomes fatty tissues.

Nutritional Support

This mechanism makes it clear why it is important for the patient to eat foods that support the spleen’s transportation and transformation functions.  Chinese nutritional advice can also help, with the practitioner suggesting foods that can bolster the spleen’s ability to do this work. Many people simply think that eating less and or/just eating vegetables and a raw food diet is the answer.  From a TCM perspective, the spleen and digestive system is more like a wood burning furnace and placing cold, wet materials into it, simply will put it out, causing more dampness.  If you have poor digestion, raw food can be damaging to your metabolism and your digestion.  It causes your furnace to work harder and harder, never able to really process the food properly.  Simply warming foods up, lightly steaming or eating them with warmer herbs such as pepper and ginger can help the body handle cold foods properly.

Of course, people of a hotter constitution WILL benefit from a raw food diet.  If your digestive system is very strong and you are warm and have a lot of energy, raw food may be the way to go because your body is able to handle the cold and damp.

Body Image

However,  a word about body image.  Our society today has so many ways of defining what proper weight and size are.  We’ve gone from seeing rail thin, bony and improperly nourished as the ideal, to even seeing unhealthy and obese as OK and acceptable. Few people these days are able to see themselves for what they really are, and if they can, they are unlikely to be able to be OK with that even if it IS healthy.  A healthy body should be able to jump, run, climb, swivel, laugh, wrestle and be active through a full day without being exhausted, tired or wiped out.  A healthy body should be able to function and move within its environment easily and with finesse.   If you are too thin to have any energy, or too large to tie your shoes, its time to look at your digestion and see if you can’t help your spleen function properly and get your body into a state of health.

As you can see, the issues facing obesity from a Chinese Medical perspective can be complicated, but TCM can help!  Regular acupuncture, nutritional counseling,  assessing and treating the base constitution of the individual can all help to get your body into the ideal state it should be in to lose the extra weight.

Research and Articles:

• Obesity Research: Acupuncture for weight loss – The Journal of Chinese Medicine
• Traditional Chinese Medicine for Diabetes has Scientific Backing
• Articles from AAAOM on Obesity

Make an appointment today to talk to your practitioner about your weight and how you can bring it into a healthy balance.

Photo by justthismoment on flickr.