Everything in Moderation

A client of mine asked an interesting question one day. She had been feeling ill and dealing with the question of what was wrong. She was given different answers by different people which made her confused.

One healer had told her that she had slipped up during the Easter weekend by eating sugar and that it was causing her symptoms. Her question to me was: what was the point of trying to eat healthy food, exercising regularly and generally living a good life if she would get ill anyway? How was that one episode of eating sugar the cause of this apparent illness? 

My answer to her is two fold. One says that when you are committed to healing on a certain level, life will use everything to get you to stay on your path. If sugar shuts down your immune system and you are trying to heal it, you will react to the sugar. The second says that there are no guarantees in life, we can’t always know how our bodies will react. We can live as well as we can at any given moment and still get cancer or some other dread illness. I have known people who appeared to be the picture of healthy lifestyle and still died of cancer. My mother-in-law has a relative who is 90 years old, smokes, drinks, never exercises and eats fatty pork as often as she can. She can still bend over and touch her toes, walk easily and has no apparent health problems.

There is no real way to know who will get ill and who won’t, and as much as we are told that certain things are guaranteed to cause us illness or good health, there are always exceptions. I have clients in their 80s who are still heavy smokers and yet they haven’t gotten lung problems or cancer from it. They are obviously an exception to the rule that smokers get lung disease.

The entire system of Chinese medicine is based on the idea that most things are OK in moderation and that good health is achieved through finding balance. Balance involves a fine dance of dealing with the emotions in a sane way, finding a spiritual center and physical good health. Good health is different for each person and is determined by that individual. Ideally, one uses the information available to find the things that work to help bring about optimal health. The key is to learn to listen to your body. Find out what feels good for you

Few people really need to be fanatical about diet. There are certain health conditions that require strict dietary regulations, but for many others, if you pay attention to basic nutritional concepts you can be healthy and balanced and still allow for some foods that would be considered treats.