Why are so many people struggling with the numbers on their bathroom scale?  There are so many answers—we live in a land of abundance, we eat the wrong foods, we eat too much food, we exercise too little, and the way our food is produced is a nightmare.

So how then, can you successfully jettison that excess weight and keep it off?  Many health experts would have you believe that just eating less and exercising more will do the trick.  Unfortunately, weight loss is not that simple.  What and how you eat is a combination of physical, emotional, and spiritual issues, and each person is unique in the factors they bring to the table. (No pun intended).

I have learned not only from studying and practicing Traditional Chinese Medicine, but also from observing and working with my patients, that many people do lose weight and are able to keep it off.  The key to their success goes far beyond less food and more activity.  The following is a list of things that I have found to be true regarding successful weight loss:

1. Weight loss takes commitment.  This is a baby steps kind of thing.  Even though you may want to be twenty pounds lighter today, it’s not going to happen…today.  But it can happen over the course of a few months.  Losing weight means signing on for the long term and taking one day, one meal, one snack at a time.
2. Weight loss takes planning.  You know that you need to eat lunch each day.  You have a choice—you can head out to Big Butt Burger Shack with your co-workers or you can eat the healthy lunch you packed for yourself.   You know that you’re going to come home tired at the end of the day and not want to cook.  What will you do?  Call for the All Cheese All the Time Pizza Special, or take your pre-prepared entrée out of the freezer?  You get the picture—you know you’ve got to eat and you know yourself; so plan ahead.
3. Control over what goes into your meals is crucial.  When you eat out, you have no control of how much butter or oil went into that pasta dish you just ordered.  The bleu cheese dressing at the salad bar is too thick to pour for a reason—it’s loaded with stuff that is not your friend. Fattening stuff tastes really good, and restaurants use lots of fattening stuff that they would never tell you about.
4. Exercise helps you lose weight and keep it off.  Actually, in Chinese medicine, we’d call it movement.  All that excess weight you’re carrying around is considered an accumulation of damp tissue.  Movement is crucial to resolving the accumulation—it’s kind of like self-medicating in that movement restores the flow in your body.  It also speeds up your metabolism and improves your digestion. You don’t have to take up an Olympic sport.  Just go take a walk, ride your bike, or play outside.
5. The people around you can make or break your resolve.  If you are going to lose weight, you need to be surrounded by supportive people, not someone who is trying to tempt you with chocolate and cheesecake.  If your family isn’t on board with how you eat, find a friend or co-worker who can act as your support team.
6. You need a plan.  It can be as simple as deciding not to have seconds or counting calories or it can be as complete as Weight Watchers.  I have seen patients lose weight and keep it off using all kinds of methods.  The thing they had in common was that they had a plan.
7. You can eat the foods you like and still lose weight.  You just need to eat less of them and less frequently.  You will not lose weight eating all brownies all the time—but a brownie once in a while will help you not feel deprived.
8. Your digestion is a huge player in the weight loss game.  In Chinese medicine, if your digestion is poor, you are more likely to convert your food into damp tissue that accumulates on your belly and thighs.  How do you know if your digestion is funky?  Heartburn, stomachaches, lots of gas and rumbling, feeling tired after a meal, food cravings, loose stools or constipation, nausea and no appetite are all signs that your digestion could use some help.  Acupuncture, Chinese food therapy, and even an herbal formula are good options to set it right.
9. Some foods can be over nutritious.  Say what?  It’s true; foods that are very rich or highly concentrated can be too hard to digest.  Some obvious offenders include meals in a can, diet shakes, concentrated juices, and even some rich meats and sauces.
10. Extreme diets don’t work—at least not in the long term.  Here’s why:  You go on a diet, say the Just Eat Cabbage Diet.  You lose a bunch of weight over the course of say, two weeks.  Great!  But what happens when you go of the diet?  Oops!  Right back to the way you were eating, but now your metabolism has gotten a little slower, because you were eating only cabbage.  So now just eating the way you were before the diet causes you to regain more weight.  Bummer!  The net result of your diet—weight gain. 
11. One slip doesn’t spell catastrophe.  Keep your head in the game. This means not only staying committed, but realizing that your can slip up and still lose weight.  Many people beat themselves up for failing to keep to their plan, and just quit altogether.  The successful ones fall off the wagon, but get right back on, and keep losing weight.
12. You need to eat good food.  This means lots of vegetables, whole grains and a little protein at each meal.  Forget about the over processed, chemical laden, genetically modified, sugar-loaded, hormone treated stuff you find at eye level in the average grocery store.  Look for food that has been grown or meat that has been raised without the help of pesticides, chemicals, antibiotics, hormones, and all manner of stuff on the label that you can’t pronounce.  You really are what you eat.
13. Long-term changes are the key to success.  Losing and maintaining your weight is not a project you undertake just to get ready for swimsuit season or an upcoming class reunion.  It’s a way of eating and moving your body that is health promoting, done in moderation, and sustainable for the rest of your life.

Here’s a list of some reasons you may be gaining weight; some may surprise you:

1. Stress.  In Chinese medicine, weight gain due to stress is considered a Liver and Spleen disharmony.  In its simplest form, it’s the result of strong emotions (stress, anger, sadness) messing up your digestion and causing that spare tire around your waist. This is one of the most common patterns I see in the clinic, especially in women.  The symptoms tend to appear as a threesome of depression or stress, out of control cravings for sugar, and weight gain in the form of belly fat.
2. Lack of sleep.  Not getting enough hours of shut-eye disrupts many of your body’s hormones, including cortisol, insulin, and adrenalin.  When these hormones get out of whack, your metabolism also takes a hit, causing unwanted weight gain, especially around your middle.
3. Digestion.  The concept of digestion in Chinese medicine is about the transformation of food into nutrients and energy.  If you’re not effectively converting your food into nutrients and energy, your body likes to turn it into fat.  Symptoms of poor digestion include gas, bloating, loose stools or constipation, heart burn, stomach aches, lack of appetite, and the feeling that your food is just “sitting”.
4. Eating the wrong food.  Okay, this isn’t an aha moment for anyone.  You know lots of sugary treats and greasy foods are going to pack on the pounds.  However, many people don’t stop and think about the nourishment value of the food they’re eating.  Overly processed foods; chemical sweeteners; preservatives; dyes; ingredients you can’t pronounce; and foods that are unrecognizable as anything that ever came out of the ground, ocean, or off the farm are all the wrong foods.  These foods aren’t nourishing, your body doesn’t know what to do with them, and they’re just adding useless calories to your diet.
5. Boredom. Yup, some people eat because they don’t have anything better to do.
6. Depleted Yang. In Chinese medicine, this is like your body having a low pilot light, which can slow your metabolism, including your digestion.  Yang is warming and transforming, and some general symptoms of deficient Yang include feeling cold much of the time, sluggish thyroid function, retaining water, getting up several times a night to…uh, pee, and fatigue.  (For more info and foods to balance Yin and Yang, go here.)
7. Dampness.  The best way to understand the concept of dampness is to think of a farmer’s field after it rains.  In a healthy field, the water will drain into the ground and nourish the crops.  However, in a damp field, the sits around and accumulates in soggy puddles.  In your body, dampness feels heavy and can produce symptoms such as loose stools, edema, yeast or bladder infections and weepy or wet looking skin rashes.  Dampness is on this list because fat tissue is considered excess dampness on your body.  The most common cause of dampness is poor digestion, but it can also be caused by living in a damp climate or working/living in a cold, damp building.
8. Lack of movement.  You knew the exercise talk was coming, but getting enough exercise isn’t just about burning calories.  Movement creates heat (remember Yang from above?), gets your digestion going, and creates flow in your body in general.  Flow is good.
9. Aging.  You can’t do much about aging. It’s a part of life, and the reality is that as you get older your metabolism slows down.  This is a bad thing and a good thing.  It’s bad because you’re trying to keep the weight off.  However, it’s good because that excess weight is also stored energy which may keep you from becoming frail as you get into your seventies and beyond. As you get older, it’s important to maintain a healthy weight without getting obese or too thin.  Most people who maintain their weight as they age tend to eat a little less and move a little more.
10. What you drink.  With the exception of water and tea, most of what you’re drinking has calories, is frequently full of sugar (alcohol is a big offender here), and if you’re slugging down a creamy Latté, is loaded with fat, too.  For some reason, many people think that if it comes in liquid form that all the fattening properties are negated.  I wish!

So what can Chinese medicine offer in the battle against weight gain?  Well, we practitioners can offer up acupuncture to calm stress and anxiety, help you sleep better, and improve your digestion.  We also have a pharmacopoeia of herbal formulas to help with digestion, dampness and Yang depletion.  We can help you choose foods that best suit your unique body constitution.  And we can help you balance all of the lifestyle factors that have the potential to make you Fat.

This woman also reminds me of many of my patients seek out acupuncture because their lives are stressful and overwhelming. Most understand that their stressful lifestyle is at the heart of their physical symptoms, but many are either unwilling or unable to make the necessary changes to alleviate their stress. They want me to treat their symptoms, but continue their insane lifestyle.

People, here’s an ”a ha” moment. If your habits or your lifestyle is making you sick, you need to make some changes. If you don’t, the source of your symptoms remains in place and will continue to make you sick. Simple.

That said, I’m the first person to acknowledge that making a change is not easy. In fact, it’s anything but easy. But it can be done. If you are one of those people who needs to change, here are a few tips to smooth the way:

1. Do your homework first. Research the change you’re about to make. If it’s a healthier diet, an exercise plan, or quitting smoking, find out what you need to know before C-Day, the day you begin your change. In addition, it really helps to motivate you if you get a little information on the consequences of not making your change.
2. Plan ahead. Make a plan for specifically how you’ll change it up. For example, if you’ve decided to eat healthier and cut out the Burger Doodle for lunch, decide what you’ll eat instead, and go to the grocery store. Chances are if it’s noon and you don’t have a plan, you’ll end up at the Doodle again.
3. Get a little help from your friends. Find a pal who wants to exercise, too. Or a family member who’ll tell you which foods count as vegetables. It’s a little easier to change when you have someone on your team.
4. Take baby steps. The deck is stacked against you if you decide to quit smoking, lose weight, start exercising, floss every day, and swear off ice cream all at once. Make only one change at a time, and only make changes that you feel you can stick with forever.
5. Cut yourself some slack. Realize that making a change is hard. Be gentle with yourself if you lapse. Also, rewards are a good way to celebrate your successes.
6. Give it time. It takes three to six months for a change to morph into a habit. Hang in there for at least that long.
7. Commit to being consistent. Doing a new activity only some of the time will just become less and less frequent, and will ultimately just go away. Agree to a consistent schedule. The same goes for quitting something like smoking, only in reverse. If you allow yourself a cigarette or two, you’ll ultimately just end up smoking more and more.
8. Fill the hole. If you’re quitting smoking, adult beverages, coffee, or whatever, make sure you fill the void of losing that pleasurable habit. For example, if you’re trying to become an ex coffee drinker, go shopping for some flavorable herbal teas to drink instead.
9. Remove the temptations. If you’re trying to lose weight, know that the cheesecake in your refrigerator is not your friend.
10. Do it for yourself. Only make the changes that you truly want to make. If you try to make changes based on others’ expectations or to please someone else, it will be hard to stay motivated to the end. You can do this, but it has to be because you want it.

This trio of symptoms—emotional upset, sugar cravings, and belly fat—is a pattern that I see in many of my patients. They come to me because they want to feel better emotionally, but also don’t like the fact that they’re gaining all this weight, especially around the middle.  In addition, when they try to control their eating, all they can do is reach for a Kripsy Kreme.

Gaining weight around your waist increases your risk for heart disease and high blood pressure.  We’ve all heard about the risks of having an apple shaped figure versus a healthier pear shape.  Also, people who are under a great deal of stress or emotional turmoil secrete higher levels of stress hormones that can cause weight to accumulate around the middle.

But what’s going on from the standpoint of Chinese medicine?  I’ve talked about the disharmony between your Chinese Liver and Spleen in previous posts.  This is a common pattern in which strong negative emotions impact your digestion, causing a whole host of hellish symptoms from nausea or a lack of appetite to an uncomfortable lump in your throat, and can even wreak havoc with your bowels.

This upset digestive theory explains a lot, but it doesn’t necessarily account for the fat tire around the middle that I see in so many of my patients.  To understand what’s going on, I’d like to talk a little about an infrequently mentioned organ, called the Triple Burner.  That’s right, there’s an organ in Chinese medicine called the Triple Burner, and the best way to explain how it works is to think about a rice steamer. 

In your standard rice steamer, you put some water in the bottom, a little rice in a pan above the water, and turn it on.  The cooker heats up the water, which usually steams the rice to perfection.  In your body, the digestive process works the same way.  Your internal pilot light (Yang) heats up the food you eat, and turns it into nutrients and energy in what’s called your Middle Burner.  The steam that rises from the rice, or your Upper Burner, is similar to the respiration that comes from your breath, and the water in the bottom, or your Lower Burner, is a bit like the waste that’s excreted after your food is digested. 

In an ideal world, or a healthy body, this whole rice cooker/Triple Burner, digestive process works really well.  However, as I mentioned above, the process can easily be upset by strong emotions.  When that happens, your rice cooker goes on the fritz, and you get gummy rice, clogging up your Middle Burner.  After weeks, and even years of upset digestion, that gummy rice has nowhere to go, except to settle around your middle, and is called…um, Belly Fat.  If that’s not enough, a clogged up Triple Burner can cause lung problems in the form of phlegm, asthma, or bronchitis in your Upper Burner, and bowel, bladder, or yeast problems in your Lower Burner.

In addition, there is a flavor associated with each organ in Chinese medicine, in which a little bit of the flavor is beneficial, but too much is damaging.  The flavor associated with digestion is sweet.  That’s why you frequently want something a little sweet after you eat a meal—to aid your digestion.  However, like Claire, people who have very poor digestion (broken rice cooker) will often have out of control cravings for sugar, indicating that their digestion is off.  Unfortunately, eating more sugar just increases the damage.  For people like Claire who have sugar cravings, the only solution is to cut out all sugar, and as their digestion improves, the cravings will subside.  Acupuncture, Chinese herbs, and food therapy can help here.

It used to be that you were being blown off when a doctor told you that your symptoms were all in your head.  However, the Chinese have a saying that “The emotions are the cause of one hundred diseases”.  My point is that in most cases the road to better physical health is by settling the emotions.

I spent a great deal of time talking with Emily about weight loss from the perspective of Chinese medicine.  I described what would be involved for her success, including the role of digestion, stress management, adequate sleep, and physical activity—beyond just dieting. 

I treated Emily at her first appointment with acupuncture and gave her some simple dietary guidelines according to Chinese food therapy.  I set up an appointment for her to come back a week later.  The following week, Emily came into my office and told me that she didn’t think the acupuncture was working, as she hadn’t lost any weight.  It was at that point that I realized that Emily was only interested in me performing acupuncture, while her fat melted away.  Wow!

Needless to say, Emily did not come back, and I chalk this one up as most frustrating for a couple of reasons.  First, Emily wasn’t committed to doing anything other than showing up for her appointments and watching her weight drop.  Secondly, she expected it to happen after only one treatment!

That’s where Dr. Oz comes in.  For anyone living on another planet, Dr. Mehmet Oz is a cardiologist and wellness guru that first appeared on Oprah several years ago.  He has since written a number of books, including   YOU: The Owner’s Manual: An Insider’s Guide to the Body that Will Make You Healthier and Younger.   I’ve read a bunch of them—they are fabulous, funny, and get to the point of what you need to know to be a healthy, beautiful person who knows how to age well.

Dr. Oz has his own TV show now, and earlier this week, he did a segment on acupuncture for weight loss—and he got it right.  Acupuncture is a great choice to help you lose weight because it can help curb your appetite, decrease your cravings (especially for sugar), speed up your metabolism, and decrease stress—a common saboteur in your effort to lose weight.   Dr. Oz also emphasizes the importance of good digestion, which is considered crucial to good health in Chinese medicine.  According to the Chinese, you can eat the healthiest food in the world, but if you don’t digest it well, you might as well be hitting the drive-up window at McDonald’s every day.

 According to Dr. Oz, there are a number of hormones that impact how you gain or lose weight.   In You: On A Diet: The Owner’s Manual for Waist Management, he describes the role of ghrelin, which is a hormone that impacts hunger as well as the secretion of leptin, which regulates your metabolism and how you store fat. Dr. Oz describes how acupuncture can influence and regulate these obesity hormones to support weight loss.

Finally, in his guidelines, Dr. Oz directs viewers to “complete a full course of treatment”, which for weight loss is usually ten treatments over the course of several weeks.  Acupuncture is a therapy, not a magic bullet. Hear that, Emily?

For the full segment, go here.