I LOVE how Chinese Medicine helps us understand how a body works. When you are born, you have a full tank of “Qi”. Qi is your life force. It’s what beats your heart, pumps your blood, digests your food, and constantly makes repairs that you’ll never see.
So it’s a full tank for your journey of life, it’s about half full at midlife, and when the tank is empty, you expire. This is my loose analogy anyway. In Chinese Medicine, we replenish an aspect of this Qi every 24hrs. with food, air or oxygen, and water. All living things require these three things. Food must be nutrient-rich, water must be clean, and breath must be deep to oxygenate your body.
If any of these three elements are deficient or of poor quality, your health will suffer. It’s really that simple.
Only real food has the nutrients your body needs. Whole food from the earth, un-processed will supply you with nutrition. It is impossible for processed, packaged, chemical-laden, non-food to give you nutrition. It’s dead. Even if the package says it’s “natural”, or “high in omega this, that, or the other”, “fortified”, your body doesn’t know what to do with a man-made chemical chain of fakeness. Not only do you NOT get any nutrition, your body has to spend your valuable and precious energy to discard this processed mumbo-jumbo. This is a burdensome monkey on your metabolism’s back that must come off.
As you become more and more open to aligning with choices that give you health (as you’ve already begun to remove blocks to being healthy and eliminating sugar), it will be easier for you to discover how to switch processed food for whole food.
Begin by asking yourself with everything you eat, “How many steps of processing did this food have to go through before it got to my plate right now?” If you’re eating a cucumber, not many. If you’re eating a can of Annie’s Chili, more than it should.
Here’s why this is important…your body needs access to new Qi daily. Dead food doesn’t provide new Qi to your body, in fact, it robs you of Qi. Whole, real food gives you Qi, it gives you life force and provides you with energy for the next 24hrs. or so.
If you want to have an unburdened metabolism which gives you health and optimal weight, you need Qi. And you need that Qi to be free and available to all your cells (which are energy factories), your blood, your muscles, and your brain.
If you just had a beautiful new pool built in your backyard and it was ready to fill, which would you choose to fill it with, clear, clean water, or mud? It’s a ridiculous question but it’s the same thing inside your body. The only reason you’re blind is that well, you’re blind. You can’t see inside your body. You can’t see the muddy waters that surround your cells from head to toe. Processed food makes mud, whole and real food makes clear water.
Starting with the very next thing you put in your mouth, make it real. If you don’t have it, go get it.