Please Do Not Diet Blindly
The love of beauty belongs to all; today there is a society-wide rage for weight loss, and young women especially take slenderness as more important than anything.
Some girls fast for a month to slim — bringing on anorexia and amenorrhea. Some take daily laxatives unafraid of diarrhea. Some women eat only vegetables — no grain, no meat — until the body weakens, ailing. We see such cases often at Pingxintang.
The chief bad fruit of blind dieting is injury to spleen-stomach. TCM holds the spleen-stomach is the post-Heaven root, the source of qi-and-blood — the prime mover of life. Spleen qi rises, stomach qi descends; with normal transport-and-transformation, qi-blood-yin-yang are in harmony. With disordered eating, transport-and-transformation goes wrong; a chain of disease follows.
With spleen-stomach disease, water-fluids cannot be distributed; damp lodges within — diarrhea, palpitation, scant urine, edema, distension. With disordered rise-and-fall, transport fails; damp gathers into phlegm; phlegm-turbid blocks — dizziness, cough, asthma, vomiting, abdominal fullness, and more.
TCM has many effective methods for body-shape, mostly working from regulating storehouse-bowel function. Spleen-deficient inner damp — excess water cannot be removed — is one cause of obesity; fortify spleen and dispel damp slims. Kidney-deficient obesity — supplementing kidney qi — also slims. But for one who already has a fine slender figure, a slight fullness is Eastern beauty. To slim to bone-thinness with sallow face and chronic illness — what beauty is that?