Two women visited the clinic with hormone balance issues. One is in the menopausal stage, the other of child bearing age. Both of these women struggled with anxiety, sleeplessness, and hot flashes. After some acupuncture treatments, both women’s hot flashes subsided and insomnia improved. However, they were noticing that the hot flashes and insomnia would come especially at night after eating food that didn’t suit them.
Most recently I asked both patients to focus on eating a larger breakfast that included grain. I suggested they take a more pristine dinner or use a fasting protocol for their dinner meal. Both women took the recommendations and noticed that their hot flashes subsided markedly, their anxiety significantly reduced, and their insomnia resolved. What is the Chinese medicine explanation for this? Let’s dive into the mechanism behind a fasting protocol combined with Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) timed eating.
According to TCM, the stomach is doing its best work during the hours of 7-9am. The sweet flavor goes to the stomach to stimulate it. Sugary foods, including fruit, smoothies, and granola, are too sweet for breakfast. The muscles will be attacked if we consume overly sweet foods in the morning. Grain is sweet in nature, but not too sweet for the stomach and spleen during the morning meal. It is only during these morning hours that a person can consume the appropriate type of grain based on his or her body type.
I love the tenets of Mindy’ Pelz’s fasting protocol in Fast Like A Girl. She suggests eating for hormone balance, cellular repair and detoxification. However, one thing that the protocol does not address is the importance of eating breakfast. She focuses on a more heavy lunch and dinner meal. Western medical doctors are taught that everything that goes into the stomach must be cleared by the liver. This is true in Chinese medicine as well. This lends to the logic that as we eat a heavier meal in the evening time the liver may be working hard during the hours we should be resting or sleeping, as well as recognizing the stomach is at its very lowest energetic time. According to Giovanni Maciocia, author of The Foundations of Chinese Medicine, since the liver houses blood, if not supplied with appropriate blood (yin, food) then when “someone is asleep at night Blood naturally embraces the Mind and the Ethereal Soul [Liver], but if blood is deficient the Mind and Ethereal Soul [liver] ‘float’ and the person cannot sleep or dreams a lot (Third Edition – p63).” These two women at vastly different stages of life had the same tremendous health benefits of lessened anxiety, hot flashes, and insomnia due to eating a breakfast meal and fasting at dinnertime.
Dr. Renae Haldeman BS, OMD