Welcome to the last post of Resolutions Week.  You made it!  Hopefully your first week with your new goals in 2011 went well!  If it was a rough one, keep going, it WILL get easier as these new habits become old ones.

Today I'm going to talk about willpower and tips and tricks for keeping the motivation until your new-found habits become integrated in your daily life.

First off, what is willpower? Dictionary.com defines it as: 

the ability to control oneself and determine one's actions

As I was looking through the definitions to find the one I wanted to use in this article, I found that they have a section of quotes that contain the word you've just looked up.  Pretty cool!  And funny enough, there's a quote that I think will fit well in this situation:

Writing a book is like rearing children—willpower has very little to do with it. If you have a little baby crying in the middle of the night, and if you depend only on willpower to get you out of bed to feed the baby, the baby will starve. You do it out of love. Willpower is a weak idea; love is strong. You don't have to scourge yourself with a cat-o'-nine tails to go to the baby. You go to the baby out of love for that particular baby. That's the same way you go to your desk. - Annie Dillard

Let's just substitute the parts about writing a book with the idea of living healthfully and loving your body.  Nice, huh?

So let's talk about willpower from a Chinese medical perspective.  

Our willpower is associated with our Kidneys.  When the Kidneys are weak, not only can we experience a decrease in willpower, but fatigue, early aging, pain or weakness in our low back or knees and much more.  

Kidney deficiency is really common in college students, parents of young children, and anyone else burning the candle at both ends.  Have you noticed that the more tired or stressed out you are, the harder it is to follow through with things that aren't vital?

So what can we do to strengthen our Kidneys so we'll be more likely to follow through long-term with our goals?

• Get plenty of rest - I know this can seem like a tough one, especially for those who are super busy.  But rest is going to be a key ingredient in letting your Kidney Qi regenerate.
• Eat a healthy diet - We get our Qi from our food and drinks.  High quality foods give us more Qi.  
• Keep stress levels low - We all know how stress plays in with fatigue.  Exercise can help keep stress from building up.
• Acupuncture and Chinese herbs help increase our quality of sleep, decrease stress levels and improve our digestion so that we're getting the best out of our food all so that our Kidneys can recharge.

So, as Annie Dillard said, it starts with love.  Love for yourself and your well-being.  When you take basic care of your body (and yes, the items bulleted above should be BASIC things we do for ourselves - not special treats every once in a while), you won't need willpower.  You'll love yourself too much to NOT do them, and you'll have enough energy and drive to follow through with them (as well as bigger and better goals!).

Resolutions Week - Intro
Resolutions Week - Part I - Exercise
Resolutions Week - Part II - Healthy Eating
Resolutions Week - Part III - Quitting Smoking

Welcome back to Resolutions Week!  If you're just now finding this series, you'll find links to the other posts at the end.

Today we're going to talk about smoking and how it affects our bodies from a Chinese medical standpoint.

In Chinese medicine, any time we're exposed to smoke it has a drying effect.  This could be cigarette smoke, marijuana smoke, or even smoke from the wood-burning stove you use to heat your house during the winter.  As with many things, a few exposures here and there aren't going to drastically change your health.  It's the chronic, long-term exposures that will have an impact.

What does it mean for something to be drying?

Just like a campfire can dry your shoes after you played in the river earlier in the day, smoking will dry up your body fluids.  Some people will notice this drying effect as:

• Dry mouth or throat
• Cough
• Thirst
• Red, dry eyes
• Dry skin, hair or nails
• Constipation

Again, in small doses, the drying won't have a lasting effect.  We'll drink more water because we're thirsty, which will replenish our body fluids.  Long term, however, while we could theoretically drink enough water to compensate for the loss of body fluids, our body's mechanisms for moving that fluid to different our different parts are damaged.  We can drink a ton of water, but we're still going to have the dry skin, hair and nails (and other symptoms) because our body isn't taking in and utilizing fluids properly anymore.

In Chinese medical terms, smoking damages our Yin.  When we don't have enough Yin energy to cool, moisten and calm, we end up with uncomfortable symptoms such as those mentioned above.

To reverse this drying effect, acupuncture and herbs can be prescribed, but of course, the best course of action is to limit your exposure.  

Tomorrow will be our last piece of this series on Resolutions.  We'll be talking about will-power and tips and tricks to keep going with those healthful resolutions!

As mentioned above, here are links to the rest of the articles from Resolutions Week

Resolutions Week - Intro
Resolutions Week - Part I - Exercise
Resolutions Week - Part II - Healthy Eating
Resolutions Week - Part IV - Willpower

Welcome to Resolutions Week! Yesterday we talked about how Chinese medicine looks at exercise.  Today we're going to take a look at how Chinese medicine views healthy eating - another common New Year's Resolution.

In Chinese medical theory, your Stomach is viewed as an oven, in which the foods you eat are cooked using the energy of the Spleen.  This isn't too far off from what we know biologically happens.  Biologically speaking, our foods are chemically "cooked" using acids and enzymes rather than heat cooked, but those ancient Chinese had a great analogy going, so let's stick with it!

So you put food into your Stomach and then your Spleen turns the oven on to digest that food.  There are a couple of ways that we can make our oven inefficient at cooking our foods.  Let's take a look at them:

• Ice water - Drinking ice cold water cools off our digestive oven, making it have to work that much harder in order to turn food into energy we can use.  If you tend to be on the colder side and you drink ice water, you may notice undigested food in your stools!  That's evidence that your oven isn't getting hot enough!
• Raw Foods - Eating lots of raw foods can also make our Spleen have to work harder to digest our foods.
• Too many sweets - too many sweet foods gum up the works of the Spleen, making it difficult to digest foods properly.  

The above things that we can do to make our oven inefficient are often used in "dieting" to burn more calories (except for the part about eating too many sweets, of course).  For someone who is extremely robust and in tip-top shape, doing those things won't likely make a large impact on their digestion.  Their oven is already super efficient and not bogged-down!  But in someone who has weaker digestion, who is cold all the time or has fatigue, doing these things can mean you're spending too much energy on digesting the food without gaining enough from it.


So here's what I recommend most people do to eat healthier:

• Skip the ice in your water.  Cool from the tap is fine.  Room-temperature or warmer is better!
• Eat fully cooked foods - Cooking is merely another way of pre-digesting the food.  Don't make your Spleen work so hard and you'll feel much more energetic!  A side salad is alright, but avoid those entree salads, especially during the winter when it's so cold outside.
• Avoid sweets - Too many sweets weaken the Spleen.  An occasional treat is fine, but let's not over do it.

Come back tomorrow for a look at Quitting Smoking as a New Year's Resolution!

In case you missed the rest of this series:
Resolutions Week - Intro
Resolutions Week - Part I - Exercise
Resolutions Week - Part III - Quitting Smoking
Resolutions Week - Part IV - Willpower

Welcome to Resolutions Week! Today we'll be discussing exercise and its importance as viewed from the Chinese medical perspective.

Many many MANY people make exercise a part of their New Year's Resolutions.  (It's definitely made my list!)  We all know that to be truly healthy, exercise is an important building block.  So why do so many of us struggle with the motivation to get up and move our bodies regularly?

We are a society of stress.  Our jobs are stressful.  Our families are stressful.  Traffic is stressful.  We're expected to do so much in so few hours!  In Chinese medical theory, stress is associated with the Liver and the Wood element.  Stress prevents the Liver from doing its job of keeping our Qi moving in a smooth fashion.  If our Qi isn't moving properly, we start to get symptoms of unhealth.

When we exercise regularly, we are mechanically making our Qi flow.  Think of all those muscles moving.  That blood pumping.  The sweat pouring.  Your Qi follows each of them.  So even though the stress may be making it difficult for your Qi to move smoothly, when you exercise, it is being forced to do so, which will help ease your levels of stress.  See how that works?  It's a great feedback loop!

One of the reasons we may find it difficult to get motivated to get moving is because of our Qi not moving properly.  Think of it like a car with a dead battery.  If the battery isn't sending power to the engine to start it, you're going to have to push-start it.  It's hard to be motivated to push that car, especially if it means having to get up earlier in the morning!  However, if you know that if you push that car and get the battery fixed so it'll start easily when you tell it to, it's much easier to get out there and start pushing!

So get out there and fulfill your New Year's Resolutions, and know that you're doing your body good to get that Qi moving!  Remember, it'll get easier to continue with your new habit once all those little bits of Qi get unstuck!

Resolutions Week - Intro
Resolutions Week - Part II - Healthy Eating
Resolutions Week - Part III - Quitting Smoking
Resolutions Week - Part IV - Willpower