How to actually balance yin and yang
Truly balancing yin and yang foods on your own dinner plate is a complex, individualized process. Visiting a traditional Chinese medicine provider cab assess your constitution and help you get it right. Xie said practitioners use a questionnaire to evaluate someone’s constitution and classify the constitution into one balanced type and nine unbalanced types to offer dietary advice accordingly. Yu offered examples of a yin-yang balanced meal. “If it is cold weather, a soup or stew with root vegetables, garlic, ginger, onion and pumpkin would be helpful to warm the body,” she said, “If it is hot weather, a brown rice bowl with sautéed kale or spinach, tofu, sesame seeds, cucumbers, tomatoes, chickpeas, burdock root and fermented foods, such as sauerkraut or cabbage, would be a great way to cool the body.”
Yin-yang nutrition is a holistic approach to nutrition
Comparing Chinese medicine nutrition with Western paradigms is difficult. Many Western diets focus on eliminating or reducing specific types of foods, such as low-fat or low-carb diets. The Chinese nutrition system’s emphasis on a balance of yin and yang foods is a much more holistic approach, Yu said. “While focusing on calories and carbohydrates is useful in some situations, it is a reductionist way of looking at food,” Yu said. “It does not always take into account the whole person. Eating according to the energetic properties of food is a holistic way to live that supports good health and well-being, factoring in the dynamic quality of human beings.”
Balance and eating with intention are at the heart of dietary therapies in Chinese medicine. Long-term monitoring of the diet is essential in Chinese medicine to ensure balance and that someone with a cold constitution is avoiding too many cooling foods and heat constitutions avoid too many warming foods, Xie said. “In Chinese medicine, by following the principle of clinical medicine, treating illness based on pattern, foods may be considered a therapeutic tool and recommended based on patient’s pattern when they are sick or constitutional types when they are not sick but they have abnormal constitutional type,” Xie said, “So, you can say it is about eating with intention.”
Article by Erica Sweeney