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Weight Loss

Weight loss treatment services available at Silicon Valley Acupuncture & Massage

Call to schedule an appointment and find out if TCM treatments for weight loss are right for you.

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As part of a complete program for weight loss I have studied many different diets. Part of my Qi Gong Energy  Meditation and Healing studies was a very old diet method that the Qi Gong Masters practiced to improve their health and advance their level of practice.

I have worked with my teachers and patients to bring this diet into a form that they can follow in our modern culture. What follows are some excerpts from chapters in my Clear Energy Diet handbook for my weight loss Acupuncture patients.

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Clear Energy Diet

Energy Facilitated Meat and Grain Free Diet

Before you start

Practicing the Clear Energy Diet requires a commitment. It's not an easy fix to magically loose ten pounds of fat without changing your eating habits or exercises. There is no magic pill that blocks fat or boosts your metabolism. You have to make changes based on your individual goals and health concerns. When you decide to make these changes they not only affect you but those in your immediate family too. If you change your diet it has an influence on those around you. Now you need to ask yourself some questions about how these changes will fit into your lifestyle.

Questions

1. If you change your diet will you receive support from your immediate family?
2. Are you starting your diet just before a social occasion(s) that involve food such as weddings, birthdays, or holidays?
3. Do you have a job or a hobby that requires heavy physical labor?
4. Do you cook your own meals?

Medical Concerns

You should not make any changes to your diet or exercise routine that conflicts in any way with the advice of your healthcare providers.
This point cannot be stressed enough.

There are many people under the care of a healthcare professional who are taking medications for the control and prevention of diseases. These medications and the diseases they are controlling may require dietary and activity restrictions. You cannot just decide to change or disregard these restrictions. To do so can cause very serious side effects and may bring about the very conditions that the healthcare provider is attempting to prevent.

An example would be someone who has diabetes. The basis of the diagnosis is the inability of their body to control the blood sugar levels naturally. Insulin dependent diabetics must control their blood sugar themselves through injections of insulin or the consumption of sugars. They do this by testing their blood sugar levels and taking insulin or glucose as indicated by the results of their tests. If they were to stop eating food for any period of time they could cause a disastrous drop in their blood sugar levels, which is one of the life threatening conditions they are trying to avoid.

For these people and anyone else under a healthcare providers care, they should discuss any changes that they want to make in their diet with their healthcare provider first. If you can explain your goals and the methods you intend to use you may be surprised by how much encouragement and support they will give you. They can also monitor your condition and make any modifications to your dietary changes that are necessary at the time to insure your health.

Principles of the Clear Energy diet

Cooking

If you cannot or will not cook for yourself then there is virtually no possibility that you can succeed at the Clear Energy or any other diet. Restaurant cooking is what I call "stunt cooking". There is too much fat, sugar, salt, monosodium glutamate (MSG), and other artificial ingredients added to the food. These additives are needed to increase the flavor for our over-exposed palates and to give the food needed properties for mechanical preparation. Extra salt, sugar, and fat are also used as preservatives, along with a host of chemicals in convenience foods.

You must cook all your own food on the Clear Energy diet

Shopping

You have to select all the foods that you will eat on the Clear Energy diet.

Clear Energy diet maintenance phase

Now that you have stopped the Clear Energy diet you may return to your "normal" diet. However, what your normal diet is will have gone through some changes. You should look at the maintenance phase as an extension of the Clear Energy diet where you add in more foods.

By now your tastes and cravings in foods have dramatically changed. If you really listen to your body you will find that those excessively sweet and rich foods that you could mindlessly eat before are very intense in flavor and have an impact on your body. Candies, chocolates, pastries, and snack foods will be off-the-scale sweet or salty and you will be able to feel their effects in your body after you eat them. If you listen to your body you no longer crave them or only want them on occasion in very limited amounts.

After all the work you have done to understand and follow the different steps of the Clear Energy diet, you should think of the maintenance phase is an extension of that diet re-education. All the foods that you prepared and ate on the diet are still on your menu. You can drink water at any time to keep hydrated. You can have fresh or dried fruits and nuts at any time as a quick snack. Fresh fruit and vegetable juices can be part of a small meal when you are busy or snacking. You can make a wide assortment of vegetable dishes and tofu as main courses or side dishes on your menu.

The normal diet for some will be Vegan or Vegetarian, for the rest it is an Omnivore diet. Follow a diet that your body needs to maintain its health. That diet will be different for each individual. Some people can maintain health on vegetables, grains, and a little extra protein, others need more nutritional support and must consume meats and diary too. All of these diets are perfectly fine as long as you follow them for your health and maintain balanced nutrition.

As an illustration of these diets are some new food guide pyramids that show how whole food selections should be made over a particular timeframe. For example, the Mediterranean diet has red meat consumed on a monthly basis, which is fairly infrequent. Fruits, vegetables, and olive oil are consumed very frequently, on a daily basis as shown. They also show water and alcohol consumption, and are built on a base of daily physical activity. You may not see it that way but physical activity is a part of your diet because it influences the number of calories you need to consume.

Maintenance phase foods

The maintenance phase of the diet allows for the consumption of all foods, including the addition of grains, beans, meat, and diary. You want to include whole foods and not refined or processed versions into your diet. You have to keep reading the food labels in the store to find all the hidden refined white flour, sugar, high fructose corn syrup, MSG, and other artificial additives in many of the prepared food products.

Beans

Canned beans are a very good product as long as they are not in a sugar based sauce. They make an excellent addition to salads and make good side dishes themselves.

Grains

Whole grains like brown rice are preferred selections on your menu. Brown rice is a bit difficult to prepare properly. You may have to practice to get it right. Inexpensive rice cookers are available that turn out perfect rice or even a rice pilaf.

Polenta is made of ground corn and is a good alternative to white breads and rice as a grain. You might be able to find whole grain polenta and that would be even better.

Breads

Finding 100% whole wheat bread is surprisingly difficult. Whole wheat bread is available as an artisan hand made bread, but even some of those have white flour mixed in. You will probably have to buy an inexpensive bread machine or learn to make bread if you want100% whole wheat bread. That is just about the only way you can get it. Home made cornbread without white flour is another whole grain alternative bread. Corn and whole wheat tortillas are readily available in stores and are good for the bread component of your diet.

Pasta

Pasta is available as a whole-wheat product. It may be on the shelf of a megamart, or more likely in health food stores. Servings of pasta are very small compared to the full plate portions served in restaurants. About one cup of cooked pasta is a single serving.

Starchy root vegetables

Starchy root vegetables are good if they are eaten as whole vegetables and not deep fried in oil or mashed with a lot of fat and diary products added to them. Whole baked potato or roasted squash or sweet potatoes are good sources of fiber and nutrition along with carbohydrates.

Meats, dairy, and eggs

Meats, dairy products like milk and cheese, and eggs, should be consumed in limited quantities. The body needs only small amounts of animal protein to balance nutrition. Small quantities of high quality meats are better than large servings, although, it's hard to resist a perfectly cooked steak!

Cheese is not a food group! It should be used sparingly as a condiment. Full flavored and hard cheeses have more flavor and smaller amounts are satisfying. Grating a little Parmesan or Romano cheese on your whole-wheat pasta brings out flavor and is more satisfying that a pound of tasteless skim milk Mozzarella on a pizza.
Eggs are a very good source of balanced protein and are very versatile in preparing other dishes.

Dining out

There will be foods that are not part of your regular maintenance diet. Parties, dining out, cravings, will all occur and you will have to make choices. Do not feel bad or guilty over the choices you make. Now you understand what you are eating and why you are eating those foods at that time. That is a very different state of awareness compared to mindlessly eating all of whatever prepared confection passes in front of you.

If you are hungry, eat something. Don't deny yourself just because you have some strict idea of what you should be eating. Of the foods that are available you can make choices of which ones and how much of each you have. You will be surprised how close you can come to eating foods that are on your maintenance phase menu without stressing out yourself or others around you.

Portion control

Portion control is out of control. The serving size per person is so large in most restaurants that it is enough food for two meals. After the Clear Energy diet your body is more efficient at absorbing nutrients and works better with whole foods.

You will automatically want to stop eating half way through your meal, not because the food is bad, but because you are already full. You need to have the idea that since you are paying for the food you can do as you wish with it, including not eating the rest of it. You may take the leftover portion home for you to eat on another day.

Sometimes you may even find yourself eating at different restaurants because you can get smaller portions or make a meal out of small side dishes. You are still following the maintenance phase of your diet when you are conscious of your food consumption and actively make choices.

Maintenance diet pyramid examples

Click on any image to take you to the source with more descriptions of the food groups in each pyramid.

Figure 2: Vegetarian diet pyramid

Figure 3: Mediterranean diet pyramid

(Peer-reviewed Journals, Health Associations, Government Expert Panels)

"The traditional Mediterranean diet as outlined in this article is an ideal eating pattern for prevention of cardiovascular disease. We believe that current understanding and scientific evidence are adequate to recommend this diet widely as a practical, effective, and enjoyable strategy – the new "gold standard" – in heart disease prevention."

Understanding the Mediterranean Diet: Could This Be the New "Gold Standard" for Heart Disease Prevention?

Curtis B, O'Keefe J, Postgraduate

Medicine, 112(2):35-8, 41-5 (2002)

[Link to the complete Oldways Preservation Trust article.]

Figure 4: Latin American diet pyramid

Figure 5: Asian diet pyramid

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All information herein provided is for educational use only and not meant to substitute
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Last Modified: September 02, 2007