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Sleep Helps Weight Loss

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Night time is the time of day when our bodies regenerate. For millenia the Chinese have known the importance of quality sleep in the regeneration of the “yin”, or most substantive aspects of the body. Western medical research is starting to discover what Chinese Medicine has been telling us about the importance of sleep all along.

A recent study of 472 obese adults shows that well rested people loose more weight. This finding is completely unsurprising through the lens of Classical Chinese medical theory.

When the yin aspect of the body is not nourished with sleep the body naturally desires to balance the internal aspects of yin and yang. Sleep deprived people often turn to food as a source of yin in lieu of the yin regenerated through sleep. As you can imagine:

  1. food is a terribly poor substitute for sleep
  2. more food (particularly the high-carb, high-fat foods people crave) leads to more fat and weight gain

If you have not yet read my “tips for falling asleep” article, I encourage you to do so. Without proper sleep you are likely to find meeting your body weight goals to be more of a challenge. Acupuncture and effective sleep habits can make achieving quality sleep possible. Reaching your target weight is hard enough; why make it harder?

To see if acupuncture might be right for you, give us a call at our Durham location or you may call us at 919-228-8448. If you find it easier to make an appointment online, you can simply click here to use our online schedule to set up a free face-to-face consultation.

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Artificial Sweeteners Are Not For Fat Loss

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The sweet flavor from a dessert adds insulin to the blood, making weight loss difficultArtificial sweeteners are not for fat loss.

There is a concept in Chinese Medicine that refers to the energetic impact that the flavor of food imparts. The ancient doctors called this the impact of the Five Sapors (Wu Wei), or flavors. This idea has been essentially ignored in “the west” until recently. If you are trying to lose weight (fat) or are diabetic you will want to take note. You will see why diet drinks and artificially flavored foods are not your friends!

The ancient Chinese identified five flavors and associated these with the energetic system that they most affect:

  • Sour – Wood
  • Bitter – Fire
  • Sweet – Earth
  • Pungent – Metal
  • Salty – Water

For example, this means that if I eat a sour food that it will increase the Wood energetics in my body. They went further than this to say that the taste of the food, without even swallowing it, would immediately start to impact the body.

Flash forward a few thousand years to 2008 where a study was conducted on “Cephalic phase insulin response after taste stimulation“. In the study human volunteers tasted various solutions which contained either sugar, artificial sweetener, plain water, starch, etc. The subjects then spit out the solution.

Chinese Medicine would predict that the sweet solutions, the sugar and artificial sweetener, would impact the Earth energetics resulting in increased insulin release and other earth-related effects. So what did they find?

A significant increase of plasma insulin concentration was apparent after stimulation with sucrose and saccharin. In conclusion, the current data suggest that the sweeteners sucrose and saccharin activate a CPIR even when applied to the oral cavity only.

Surprise, surprise. As soon as the tongue sensed the sweet flavor, even if it was from an artificial sweetener, the pancreas started dumping insulin into the blood. This is one of the reasons artificially sweetened foods aren’t especially helpful for people looking to reduce fat on their bodies and loose weight. Your body doesn’t much care if it is getting real sugar or fake sugar. Extra insulin will be released and that’s going to make you hungry. Your body will require that you eat those missing calories one way or another. Sweet is not your friend if you are looking to loose fat.

To see if acupuncture might be right for you, give us a call at our Durham location or you may call us at 919-228-8448. If you find it easier to make an appointment online, you can simply click here to use our online schedule to set up a free face-to-face consultation.

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