It's January - Christmas has been and gone and many are recovering from that uniquely December spirit of excess: office parties, celebratory drinks, late nights, lots of food, too many boxes of chocolates, limited edition, coffee shop Christmas lattes, not to mention the heating being cranked up indoors!
Yes, it's January, the first month of a new year and in spite of its newness, how many folk are already a bit worn out? And what can we do to get over the Christmas Excess hangover?
Hydration...
It's a cornerstone of health in Chinese medicine. When we're not properly hydrated, our bodies can't do what needs to be done to sidestep things like winter lurgies, because when we're not sufficiently hydrated our defences are not working optimally. Coughing, sneezing, pooing, weeing, sweating, vomiting...these are all ways that our bodies eject invading pathogens, but even these 'ejectors' rely on the body being sufficiently hydrated to eject effectively!
While plain, room temperature water is a good source of hydration, an even better source is to feed the body with foods that have been steeped and cooked in a watery base: think soups, stews, broths and porridges. As the first major point of call for digestion, the stomach is like a cauldron that breaks down food through a heating and liquifying process. In the instance of soups and stews, the Stomach's job is made extremely easy, whereas in the case of a pack of Pringles, it requires alot of extra liquid and hard work to digest...which brings me onto the subject of foods that dehydrate the body....
The best example of a dehydrator, and a growing, popular obsession here in UK, is coffee. Classical Chinese Medicine teacher and practitioner, Ann-Cecil Sterman, explains the effects of coffee on the body (from a Chinese Medicine perspective) so effectively, that I shall leave it for her to expound:
"Coffee is a concentrated, bitter fruit and when you put that data through the lens of this medicine, you find that it is a triple dehydrator! It’s a concentrate; you need a lot of those beans to make a cup! But the body is not geared to digest concentrates! It reads them as toxins, since nearly all toxins in nature are highly concentrated, and it knows it must respond by purging! Second, it’s very bitter! Nearly all toxins are very bitter and so again, a purge is stimulated! Third, it’s a fruit! Fruits...clear accumulations from the body! When you put these three factors—concentrated, bitter, fruit—on your tongue at the same time, the brain receives a focussed message to purge and to do it fast! It goes to work, first at the liver whose job it is to process toxins or store them if it can’t keep up with them! The liver releases some of its toxic load to the kidneys to make room for the incoming threat! The kidneys read that event as an emergency and engage the adrenals to speed up the process! This is the super famous coffee high! And what follows is the purge itself—urination and defecation! The purge comes at a price because the body uses its fluids to create the purge and so the net effect of coffee is dehydration! Meanwhile, the body is so exhausted from having the adrenal glands artificially stimulated that it chooses to stop releasing the daily magical puff of adrenal that it is supposed to release upon waking, which is nature’s way of making us excited about life, and so we get depressed and drink more coffee!"
Coffee, like choccies, crisps, cakes and all the other cheeky treates that the body so often craves for an immediate hit of energy, creates heat as a by-product of its digestive process. And heat, of course, has a drying effect, so drinkers get caught in a double (if not quadruple) whammy of dehydration!!
If you are resolved to make changes in the new year, you can do your body and energy levels no greater favours than keeping it properly hydrated and being aware of the things that rob it of this hydration.