ExclusiveHuman Body Yin Yang, diet and health, TCM concept by Lorraine Wilcox

Yin and yang are more or less in balance with each other. That's going to be health. This is not a rigid, you know, balance. But with day and night, with the four seasons, the balance is, you know, leaning this way, leaning that way. But it still needs to be relatively in balance. When they get out of balance, that's when we have symptoms, which maybe are disease or maybe, you know, in the beginning, they're just a few little discomforts or something like that. If yang is too strong, then that's going to have heat in the body. And so, for example, easy to understand example, if you get a sunburn, you feel heat in your body because you've had too yang on your face. But if you eat a lot of hot spicy food, that can add yang to the body. Or if you're angry all the time, anger is a very hot emotion. So various things can add yang to the body. And then you're going to feel hot and heat rises. So you may have more symptoms in the head, like headache or red eyes. And so that would be an excess of yang that would cause heat. In some respects, it can cause a fever. But even if your temperature is completely normal, there are a lot of people who feel hot all the time. So they're always wearing less clothes than everyone around them because they feel hot. So that would be an excess of yang. You can also have heat if there's a deficiency of yin because yin is the cooling, moistening part. And so as people get older, sometimes their yin decreases bit by bit. And now, you know, their yang is normal, but their yin is not enough. And that's kind of like in a car, if you don't have enough water in the radiator, the car overheats. What you need to do is add more yin water in order for the car to run at a normal temperature. So that kind of thing, yin deficiency, often happens with chronic disease or it happens with aging. And so there's some deficiency symptoms as well, some weakness in the body. On the other hand, you could have a yin excess. And in that case, yin is cold, yin is damp. And so you might have too much cold or damp in your body. For example, if you eat ice cream all day long, that adds like literal cold to the body. It also, certain foods are considered to be more moistening. If you have dryness, the moistening is good. But if you don't have dryness and you keep eating those moistening foods, then you're going to end up with too much yin. And so an easy example then is somebody who eats a lot of cold raw foods, a lot of frozen foods, a lot of ice cold drinks, and adds too much cold to their body. And so that would be an excess of yin. Over time, if you have an excess of one of them, it's going to damage the other side. So if you're eating too much cold, damp food, then over time, the fire of digestion, which fire is yang, the heat of digestion, will be damaged. And so maybe that person starts getting chronic loose stool. And because they don't have enough fire to properly digest the food, they're not getting enough nutrients. So they're not replenishing their body. And they have chronic loose stool. So the nutrients are going out when they have a bowel movement and not being retained in the body. And so now they're going to end up with their yang getting weaker and weaker. And now they have yang deficiency. And with yang deficiency, you're going to feel cold, but you're also going to have symptoms of weakness or deficiency. So you could imagine, I'm sure you've seen an old person who even in the middle of summer wears a sweater or has their heat up to 85 degrees and you feel like you can hardly breathe when you go in their house. That would be yang deficiency. The idea of drinking ice cold drinks that a lot of people in the West like, or even I think in China, maybe more younger people might be doing it. This is something that is just totally the opposite of what Chinese medicine would say, because digestion is a warm process. You need some yang in order to break down the food. And if you were trying to cook soup on your stove and you kept adding in frozen vegetables, every time it starts to heat up, you add more frozen vegetables. It's never going to cook. It's never going to break down. You know how when you're making soup over time, even if you had carrots, which were crispy, when you put them in, the carrots get soft. You put meat in and it just starts falling off the bone as it cooks. But if you keep adding ice into the soup, it's never going to cook and therefore the nutrients are not so available during digestion. So cold can cause then yang deficiency. As I mentioned before, when you don't have enough yang, you can't really properly digest food. So if you're young and strong and have a lot of heat in your body, then yeah, you could eat some cold food for a while. But over the years, it's going to deplete your ability to get nutrients from food. In addition, cold can cause other diseases. A lot of women don't realize that if they drink cold drinks when they're menstruating or about to have their period, that that can really cause menstrual cramps. But in the West, we're so disconnected from these ideas that we don't even put two and two together sometimes. So cold in the body can cause other problems besides the decline of yang, digestive yang. Asian people tend to want hot tea or even just hot water if they don't want the caffeine. In a restaurant, when I'm with some of my Chinese friends, they'll just say, oh, can I have a cup of hot water? And that's completely normal in a Chinese restaurant. But if you go to a non-Chinese restaurant, that would seem a little odd. The organs are a little bit complicated. In Chinese medicine, yes, we have yin organs and yang organs. And the way it's explained is that the yin organs are said to be solid. So if you think of the liver or the spleen, if you sliced it open with a knife, it would be solid inside. And the yang organs, the yang organs are said to be hollow. So if you think of the stomach or the intestines, those are hollow. Since yang moves outward, then you've got the yang organ on the outside, you know, the outside of the intestines, but they're hollow inside. Whereas yin contracts and moves inward, so the yin organs are more solid. So that's part of what it is. The yang organs, though, also have to do with food and drink and digestion and waste, whereas the yin organs deal with deeper physiology, using the nutrients that come from food, but not touching the food or waste directly.