5 Guidelines on How to Eat
According to a Chinese proverb, ‘Taking medicine but neglecting diet wastes the skills of the doctor’.
This ancient saying reminds us how important what we eat is to our health and wellbeing.
But although millions of words have been written and spoken about what we should or should not be eating, much less attention is given to how we eat – our daily eating habits.
This is a shame because the how of eating is just as important as the what.
So here are five guidelines to make sure that how we eat contributes to our health, wellbeing and recovery from disease.
First guideline: eat less
A saying that every Chinese person grows up with (even if they don’t always keep to it) is ‘When eating stop when you are seven tenths full’.
So the first guideline is to watch the amount of food we eat. This is not so much about gaining or losing weight but about overall physical and mental health. The simple fact is that most of us eat more than we need and we would probably be healthier if we ate less.
A large body of research has found that when the overall quantity of calories is reduced while the nutritional quality of the diet is maintained, every animal species studied to date lives longer and suffers from fewer or less severe diseases of aging, including mental decline. Early results from human studies suggest that we respond in just the same way.
Of course some groups of people have to be careful not to eat too little. These include pregnant women, the elderly, growing children, manual workers and people who do lots of hard physical training (it is also vital to remember that if we are reducing our consumption, our food has to be nutritionally complete).
However most of us would benefit from the 70% rule. That means stopping eating when we could still eat a bit more and making sure we don’t end up feeling stuffed full after a meal.
So how do we go about eating less? Trying to count calories is deeply unappealing, but luckily we can use one simple guide and that is remembering what true hunger is.
True hunger is not the same as feeling peckish or just fancying something to eat – especially when only highly flavoured food packed with salt, fat and sugar appeals. True hunger is when even the simplest of foods – a piece of good bread, a raw carrot, an apple – taste fantastic. Hunger of this kind is a sign that our body really needs food and will extract the maximum nutritional value from it.
So the key is to not be afraid of hunger, to finish a meal still feeling a bit hungry, and to carry that hunger through the next meal and the meal after that. In other words to always stop eating before we are full.
As a result our food will taste delicious, we will digest it better and we will avoid overloading our digestive system - that faithful servant that does its best to process whatever and whenever and how much we throw at it.
Second guideline: when to eat
The second guideline is to pay attention to the timing of our meals and happily most traditional cultures agree on how this should work.
A Chinese saying goes: ‘Eat a hearty breakfast, a moderate lunch and a small supper’; an English saying goes: ‘Breakfast like a king, lunch like a merchant and sup like a pauper’, and a Jewish saying goes, ‘Eat your breakfast alone, share your lunch with a friend and give your supper to your enemy’.
This is beautifully explained in Chinese medicine theory. According to yinyang philosophy, sun, daylight, the morning and activity are yang, while darkness, quietness, rest, the evening and night are yin.
Our digestive systems require lots of yang energy to do the work of turning everything we eat and drink into the essential energies and substances of the body. It is no surprise therefore to discover that our metabolism and digestive efficiency are greater in the earlier part of the day when the yang energy is rising in the world around us, and weaker in the afternoon and evening when it is waning.
This is borne out by research which shows that we metabolise food better in the morning than the evening, that if we eat a healthy breakfast we are less hungry through the rest of the day, and that eating late in the evening is associated with more easily putting on weight.
From the Chinese medicine perspective, eating late in the day (less than three hours before we go to bed) is especially harmful. When we lie down to sleep our metabolism slows right down and the food in a full stomach can remain undigested through the night. This results in what is called ‘food stagnation’ and means that we can wake feeling bloated and uncomfortable and have no appetite for breakfast.
Like most things, this isn’t a problem if it happens once in a while, but if it becomes a regular habit, it can slowly weaken our digestion and we start to get problems. These include chronic indigestion and a wide range of stomach and bowel diseases. In many countries, up to one in five people suffer from these disorders. And in Chinese medicine, the potential impact of chronic food stagnation is wider than just digestive diseases and includes a number of other chronic diseases, including insomnia and sleep disorders.
The Chinese health tradition stresses that if we want our digestive system to last as long as the rest of the body we need to look after it.
When we’re young most of us have cast iron digestions, for example a healthy teenager can eat a massive meal at midnight and appear at breakfast claiming they’re starving. Unfortunately this innate digestive vigour starts to wear off as we age and unless we adapt our eating habits we may suffer. For example, we know that once old people lose their appetite and interest in food, it’s a sign they may not live much longer.
Third guideline: ‘regular eating’
The third guideline for healthy eating habits is what the Chinese call ‘regular eating’. This includes eating at regular times, sitting down calmly to eat rather than whilst working or walking along the street, and avoiding eating when we are stressed, upset or angry. This is because the mood we are in when we eat will affect our digestion and alongside eating too late on a regular basis, is one of the most common causes of digestive problems. We simply cannot digest well if we are feeling uptight or in the midst of an argument or family stress, including trying to eat at the same time as demanding or fretful children.
Traditional cultures often incorporated smart health behaviours into daily habits. Saying grace before a meal was one of these. It combined a healthy respect and gratitude for food, a communal moment, and the understanding that to sit quietly and take a few moments to turn away from the busyness of the day and give our attention to the serious and enjoyable business of eating, would stand us in good stead. And for both children and adults, sitting a while after a meal before throwing ourselves back into activity is a similarly wise habit.
Fourth guideline: a word about what to eat
As far as what we should eat, there is one especially valuable guideline. Chinese dietary tradition divided foods into two broad categories – ‘light’ and ‘rich’. Light foods included cereal grains such as rice, millet and wheat and vegetables. Light foods are mild in flavour, full of ‘qi’ (vitality), and easy to digest. They should form the foundation and largest part of the meal in the way that a traditional Asian meal is commonly built on rice or noodles, a South American one on corn, and a European one on potatoes, wheat, barley or buckwheat.
Highly nourishing and rich foods are added to light foods in smaller amounts. Examples are meat, fish and dairy as well as strong flavours such as salt, sugar, vinegar, soya sauce etc.
The amount of rich food we need depends on several factors including our age, where we live, and our levels of physical activity. People living in cold climates (and most of us in winter) need more warming rich foods, as do growing teenagers, pregnant women, manual workers and those who train hard physically. However if we sit a lot, take little exercise and go from a warm house to a warm office, we need much less.
The problem with modern diets is that most food is now rich in nature. Even light foods such as potatoes become rich when fried, roasted in fat or in the form of crisps. The whole balance of mostly light foods with smaller amounts of rich food has been turned on its head with more and more people basing their diet on high fat, high salt, high sugar and high animal protein meals. The result is a global epidemic of obesity and a range of chronic diseases such as cancer, heart disease, strokes, diabetes and dementia which have been shown to increase in countries soon after traditional eating habits are abandoned and these modern ones adopted.
Fifth guideline
Since the question of diet can so easily become a minefield leading to obsession and fear, we have to remember always to enjoy our food - whether we eat alone, with family or with friends. It is one of our true and lasting pleasures.
Conclusion
If we adopt a diet of natural and healthy food, not for an intense week or month but for a lifetime, and observe the above guidelines on how to eat, we give ourselves the best chance of staying healthy and maintaining our natural weight.
Diet is one of various traditional self-care practices available within the Jing app for practitioners to recommend to their patients. Click here to read more about the app.
