Power of Energetics: Food as Medicine

At East-West Wellness, we love to promote food as medicine and the best way to do that is through understanding the energetics of food! I often get asked what Energetics of Food actually means.  The most basic answer is that the Energetics of Food is the Chinese thought that you can and should use food as medicine.  Within Chinese Medicine there is not a one-treatment that fits all, every person is different and thus every treatment is different.  The same goes for the Energetics of Food or food as medicine—there is no one diet that works universally.

Chinese Medicine and energetics are about creating and maintaining the balance of Qi (pronounced “Chi”)—the vital essence found in all things—especially within your body to achieve optimal wellness. Sickness and disease are thought to be created by imbalances of Qi within the body and treatment for these illnesses is aimed to rebalance your Qi. This is done by acupuncture, herbal remedies, tui-na, cupping, and most importantly diet.  You can also use these treatments to maintain your balance of Qi, but using food for your personal benefit is by far the easiest method in which to do this.

While Chinese Medicine looks at the nutritional values of foods, such as calories or carbohydrate content, it focuses mainly on the other dimensions or energetics (warming vs cooling, yin & yang, etc.).  Each person is unique and thus each person must eat according to what their body needs. For example, I myself tend to be yin, damp, and cold. Therefore, I usually try to avoid eating too many cold or damp foods; I can handle them in moderation, but if I overindulge them, I get an imbalance or excess of cold in my body.  Chinese Medicine and Energetics do not follow a set protocol for what to eat—there is no magic food flow chart—they work by differentiating between multiple factors to find the ideal diet for each individual.

Joey’s Story: Why is are the Energetics important?

“My lack of applied knowledge, within the vital field of the energetics of food, led me astray. My hand flared a fiery red with inflamed dermatitis; the discomfort associated with this kept me from sleeping and was a constant struggle of attempting to rehydrate it will various oils; the less I slept, the more I stressed, the worse my hand inflamed. I then saw Donna, our practitioner here at East-West Wellness, and she reminded me of the importance of the energetics of food. After a month of this, I was finally able to see through the forest and know the path that I needed to take. I back-peddled through my mind to try to find where I went wrong. What was I doing that could have caused this to happen? If there isn’t a directly specific cause, then what things are feeding this fire on my hand?

Here lies one of the things that started the fire on my hand: my most recent blog posts (written 3 months before this blog and about 1 month before my hand flared) were written about the energetics of turmeric. Turmeric has a plethora of amazing benefits for the body so I decided to prescribe myself ‘therapeutic dosages’ of turmeric. Even though I wrote this article with the intention of expressing its energetic qualities, I again still focused on the Western sense of a nutritional potency: I made a golden paste (highly condensed turmeric) and put this into most of my foods; I would sprinkle turmeric on almost every meal that I ate; I would also add it into my coffee and cacao drinks. I did this heavily after I wrote that set of blogs, and then after a month of heavily consuming turmeric, my hand slowly exploded with dermatitis that got worse day by day.

Turmeric has a warming energetic constitution; this energetic quality of turmeric—even though it is also anti-inflammatory in Western terms—most definitely fed the inflammation on my hand. I also love spicy foods of all sorts, so naturally, I had been consuming many spicy foods at the same time as this new influx of turmeric came into my digestion. Donna explained to me that the dermatitis on my hand has a “hot energy” to it (as it was obviously inflamed, red, and felt very hot in temperature), and therefore I should remove all energetically warming foods, begin to include more cooling foods, and to also use a topical neem cream with added vitamin D. I did all of this as well as ingested Chinese herbs prescribed by her which helped to clear the extra heat that I had in my system.

Almost two months later, after being urged to become aware of the energetic impacts of the food that I choose to consume, I now feel and see an immense improvement in my hand. The inflammation has receded, the pain has gone away, and my skin is beginning to feel normal again (FINALLY!). The miraculous thing about this improvement is that this improvement in health was able to occur during my most intensely stressful semester of college-level chemistry and biology (which was definitely among one of the causative factors).

All of this to say that by shifting my perspective into applying the importance that energetics can play within my own body was a mind-body altering experience for me. Now, I can’t say that turmeric and warming foods were the only culprits—that is very obvious to me—as the ways in which I was dealing with my stress was also a contributing factor, and there were many other things that I had to become aware of (e.g. ingredients in soap, my need to increase exercise, etc.). However, I do feel that being armed with medical knowledge from a multitude of cultures, and now the direct experience of how the energetics within all foods affects my biology, became a key concept that allowed me to take control of my own health. This applied knowledge allowed me to be empowered in the decisions I make every day: what will I eat today? How will this food choice affect my energetics?

Now, this doesn’t mean that I can never eat spicy foods or turmeric ever again—unless of course I took a food sensitivity test and found out otherwise. It does mean, however, that I need to learn how to balance my foods in relation to the qualities that these foods bring into my body. This is an art within itself; one that I am immensely excited to learn more about and integrate into my ever-evolving diet.

I know within my heart that this disruption in my health was a blessing in disguise. It is my hope that this experience can also be of help to those of you who read this.”

Be sure to keep up with all our blog posts to further understand what the Energetics of food is and how this knowledge can completely change the way we view and consume our food.