Eating With the Seasons

Chinese medicine puts great emphasis in eating in harmony with nature.  Eat season provides us with the foods that are needed to keep us healthy and in balance.  Below are  appropriate seasonal recommendations.

According to Traditional Chinese Medicine, one key to a long life is living in harmony with nature and the four seasons.  All living things on earth, including humans, are influenced by environmental and seasonal changes.  Each of the four seasons has its own individual characteristics and rhythms that affect not only the external world but our internal world as well.  According to the Huang Di Nei Jing, a core text of medicine in China, “Spring gives birth, Summer grows, Autumn harvests, and Winter stores.”   

 It is important to know that during each of the seasons our body is also “doing that season.”  Simply put, what is happening outside is also happening inside us.  Autumn is the season when everything begins moving in a state of inward contraction. As the Harvest season indicates, autumn is the time when the last of the summer crops have reached maturity and are ready to be harvested.  Trees begin to lose their leaves; plants cease to bloom and begin dying or go dormant.  The bright sunlight of summer begins to wane and the days become shorter, the air crisper and dryer. This dryness effects us in many ways.  As a clinician we see most illnesses that patients are suffering with in the autumn are aggravated by dryness.

Autumn - How to balance your diet for this cooling and drying season.

Winter - still to come

Spring - How to balance your diet for season of growth and expansion.

Summer - still to come