Traditional Chinese Medicine: Emotions & Digestion

Video Transcript

"In this segment, we're going to talk about how our emotions affect our diet and our health. And so all though this is a huge category, I want to talk about how it affects the things that we eat. So in Chinese medicine, we look at the five elements or the five main organs. The heart, the spleen, the lung, the kidney and the liver. Then each one of those organs we actually relate an emotion with. So with the spleen, which we now is all about our digestion. We associate worry. With the liver, one of the organs that really has a huge effect on our emotions, the big stuff we look at is stress. In mixed with that, we see depression, irritability, anger and so forth. So what I tell people when you're dieting so often, we worry about the foods that we eat that we had a small square of chocolate and all the sudden we have all this guilt and we worry about how its going to affect us. That emotion of worry will affect the way our spleen functions. We say it knots our stomach up so that the digestion can't afford to extract that energy, that chi from it. In the say way that if we stress and we have stress at work, stress in our life, that we'll find that there's an interaction between both the liver and the spleen that will cause our digestion again not to be good. And so we know that we can be so stressed that we actually get nauseous sometimes. We feel our stomach knotting up. So it?s important that when we eat, we enjoy the food, we try to create a restful environment and that we don't have guilt over the few guilty pleasures that we have like a small piece of chocolate or a cookie. We just can't do it constantly and its all about portion side. So a small piece of chocolate, not the whole chocolate bar. So remember, enjoy your food, eat from the plethora of colors that are out there and protect your spleen and nourish your bowl of soup."