Raw Energy For Health

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THE following exercise will help you build up qi energy and physical fitness. Following that you will learn about the healing power of raw foods.

You can start your  day by doing this simple exercise that combines aerobics, muscle-building and qigong.

Start by standing in the basic qigong stance (stand with arms akimbo and knees slightly bent), then bring up both arms forward (hands in front, at shoulder level) and straighten your knees.

Now swing both arms downwards and backwards as far as you can, bending your knees and breathing in at the same time.  Next swing your arms forward to the original position as you straighten your knees and breathe out. This completes one cycle. You can repeat as many times as you like.

Doing it slowly is qigong. Doing it faster adds aerobic exercise. By bending the knees more, you strengthen the leg (thigh) muscles. You can try going down gradually to a low as a squatting position.

This is excellent exercise to energise yourself upon waking up, or as a warm-up exercise before starting a proper qigong or other exercise routine.

Healing with raw foods

Qigong and other healing arts are effective in maintaining health and reversing many disease by supplying the healing energy (qi, or its many other names) that the cells need for their reparative mechanisms to work. This energy is different from the caloric energy (that comes in cakes, candy, meat and fatty meal) that we are all familiar with.

The food that we eat is meant to provide us with energy and nutrients. Apart from providing caloric energy, food is also an important source of qi. But qi can only come from raw foods.

The different nutritional values of food are affected differently after the food item is separated from the living source, and further handled or treated in various ways. The food is denatured in some way or other by heat. Thus, enzymes and some the vitamins, antioxidants and phytochemicals are destroyed by heating and cooking, The best way to retain the nutritional value of food is to eat it fresh and raw. Food, taken as a whole, contains many nutrients (many as yet unidentified), and no supplements can hope to reproduce this.

Realising this, many health enthusiasts have promoted raw-food diets. The traditional Japanese diet is, in fact, rich in raw foods, and must be one of the reason why the Japanese live the longest. The Japanese also popularised the macrobiotic diet, which emphasise eating raw grains, greens, grasses, beans, roots, shoots, and so on. There have been many testimonies of people benefiting from this diet, including many cancer survivors.

While those who are dedicated followers of macrobiotic and organic diets diligently plant their own macrobiotic and organic foods, these are easily available, even in supermarkets. However, for many of us, our modern lifestyles exclude the routine preparation and cooking of such healthy meals on a regular basis. So, apart from frequenting restaurants serving organic or macrobiotic food, it is difficult to have sufficient intake of a wide range or raw food nutrients.

The only raw foods most of us get are fruits, and only some vegetables, since most of our vegetables are also cooked, and therefore, lose much of their nutritious value.

A German-trained Korean cancer specialist, Dr James Hwang, observed that his cancer patients tolerated the severe side-effects of chemotherapy and radiotherapy better if they were given raw foods. They also recovered better. Seeing this, he started including raw foods as part of his treatment for their cancers, and not just to treat the side-effects they suffered as a result of their medical treatments. The results he achieved so amazed him that he resigned from his post in the hospital so that he could concentrate more on this raw food-based therapy. He extended the use of raw food to treat other degenerative diseases as well.

To include the wide range of nutrients necessary for recovery from these diseases, he used many different foods, including cereals, grains, herbs,beans, legumes, mushrooms, probiotics (foods that contain friendly bacteria, for example, yoghurt), green algae, ginseng and even royal jelly. To make it convenient for his patients to consume enough regularly these foods are prepared in powdered form for them to drink, mixed with water, milk or fruit juice.   

The benefits of raw foods can be formidable if combined with the healing power of qigong. Cancer patients, especially, stand to benefit a lot from this synergy. For the healthy, you well be reminded that our lifetime risk of getting cancer is one in four. The benefits of raw foods also extend to preventing most degenerative and diet-related diseases.

Getting fat with food

Excess intake of caloric energy is one of the main health problems of modern society. All forms of food (carbohydrates, proteins or fats ) can be broken down to their building blocks by the body, and be utilised for energy. As energy sources, fats are the richest since they provide twice the calories of carbohydrates or proteins.

In a normal situation, the body uses glucose as its energy source. This can be regarded as the body’s “current account”, available for immediate spending. Indeed the brain uses only glucose.

Excess glucose is converted to glycogen, most of which is stored in the liver and muscles. This is the body’s “cash reserves”, energy which  can be withdrawn once the glucose supply is depleted. But the body is mindful that this standby energy should always be adequate and ready for use in emergencies. Therefore, the response to glucose depletion is hunger so that more energy is brought in through eating food, and the reserves are not touched.

However, for most of us, the excess energy input is more than sufficient to fill up our glycogen stores to the maximum, so that we start building up our “fixed deposit,” that is, our fat stores. Although fat is important and plays a major role in all cells and certain organs, especially the brain, what is bad is excess unhealthy fats.

Like fixed deposit in a bank, fat stores are difficult to lose because you have chronically deplete your  glucose and glycogen stores before the body starts burning the fats for energy.  That is why the fat person is as hungry as the thin person, even though the former may have fat stores equivalent to 50 meals, in calories. He finds it very difficult to skip meals as he gets hungry despite his huge reserves.

When the excess fat accumulates in the organs (visceral fat), the risk of heart attacks is higher. Since there is a correlation with external abdominal fat (central obesity), measuring the waist-hip ratio is an important risk indicator. There are now gadgets that can measure the total body fat percentage, as well as visceral fat distribution.

Persistently high carbohydrate (especially simple carbohydrates which rapidly increase glucose levels ) and fat intakes will cause the insulin level in the blood to increase to cope with the load. After some time, the cells become less responsive to insulin, which then loses its ability to efficiently regulate glucose and fats. This condition of insulin-resistance is now recognised as the underlying factor for a group of health problems – hypertension, dyslipidemia (high levels of bad cholesterol and triglycerides), and low levels of good cholesterol, hyperglycaemia (high glucose) and obesity (especially central obesity).   

This “Metabolic Syndrome X” in turn leads to heart disease, stroke, diabetes, cancers, many other degenerative diseases, as well as premature ageing. An excessive carbohydrate and fat intake is probably the mother of all diseases.

My prescription is to take plenty of fresh raw fruits and vegetables (preferably organic, and limit starchy vegetables, like potatoes) so that there is not much room left for the excess carbohydrates and fats to creep in. So you have to eat your fruits and veggies first!

However, our real problem is not that we overeat, but that we under-exercise, As a result, the calories that come with the nutrients we really need get stored as excess fat. So get moving!

(Written By Dr Amir Farid Isahak)