Quotes by Raymond Francis M.Sc

From Never be sick again:
Modern medicine, pumped up with huge amounts of talent and money, is a strange dichotomy - technologically advanced and cutting-edge, yet obsolete and ineffective. Medicine does a superb job managing medical emergencies and disease symptoms, but is woefully incapable of curing disease or promoting a lifetime of wellness. In medical schools, physicians study one organ or system at a time and then specialize, without developing an understanding of health or the body as a whole. A lack of holistic understanding and appreciation transfers to medicine's focus on disease rather than health.

White rice and wheaten food

For years I have learned that how these two type of foods were unhealthy and I purposely avoided or reduced intake of them. However, after latest serious relapse I have realized my messed digest system demand those foods. As I increased amount of these two type of foods, my stomach feels better and better, and each day I feel more energetic.

White rice and wheat(or flour) products are two staple foods (main course?) in Chinese diet structure. And I grew up with such foods. I believe my digest system had been used to them so my purposely avoidance of them did more harm than good. And that might be the primary cause that my body could not get nutrition from what I ate daily thus caused my big energy trouble.

Based on over 2 months diet adjusting and result I am positive that this is the main cause of my recently years' health trouble. Even though I realized the importance of diet years ago, I was in a wrong track, and virtually made my diet structure worse. Now, by turning my diet back to what I used to when I grew up, I hope I could finally be on the road to a normal health.

Again, I should not be presumptuous. I should be aware of other possible consequences. Also, as soon as my stomach back to normal, I should not stick only on white rice and white flour. I will update my progress in very near future.

"Right" or " wrong" nutrition - who decides?

Image via Wikipedia

I have been feeling better little by little each day for couple of weeks, by feeding myself with "right" foods that my stomach demanded. Actually all these "right foods" such as "white rice", "white wheat", milk and red meat, were all "wrong foods" by my understanding during all these recent several years.

For long time, I purposely cut off white flour and white rice in order to control my weight. Not only that, by candida diet theory sugar and white flour are both "the best friends" of yeast candida so they need to be eliminated completely from daily menu. However, after suffering my recent relapse, my stomach demanded me to eat white flour and white rice, otherwise I would get into serious trouble. And as matter of fact, I have been feeling better and better by listening to my stomach.

There are so many nutrition recommendations out there. So many researches by experts tell people what to eat and what not to. While I understand that many of these tips or theories were "scientifically" studied, I am still not completely convinced their efficiency, rather, I am quite convinced that "right" nutrition is really a "depend on each individual" business - especially for unknown chronic illness patients. In many cases, I think patients would feel better if they chose to listen to their own body instead of doctors.

I have never done any food allergy test, nor I understand what exactly the symptoms of food allergy are. Of course, just because I never had such experience doesn't mean other people don't have it. However, I have read a book written by some chronic patient telling story about his food allergy test: it ended like basically he was allergy to most types of food!

I thought I had "put my health on my own hands" since long time ago. I trusted doctors before, but they have convinced me that they had no clues about me at all. So I learned to take care of myself by reading informations online, from books or sharing others' experience. I have been also keeping an open mind in experimenting many different treatments/regimens by myself. Now, looking back, I "seem" to be able to get an idea of what's really going on with me: I have not really "put my health on my own hands". If my previous years of chronic problems were caused by my years of bad life style, my recent couple of years' problems mostly were caused by my "ruthless" "anti - Chinese traditional" experiment on diet. Basically, I ignored what my stomach wanted, forced my body to listen to my mind. Now, my body is launching her finally retaliation - forced me to eat what she needs!

More and more, I believe that the complexity of human body is beyond Newton's mechanics, and dealing with such a complexity with limited semeiological treatments, or, "scientifically" designing a few of certain "healthy" diet structures for all people is not only NOT ENOUGH but NOT RIGHT, and even DANGEROUS. I also start to believe that recovering from chronic illness is actually a personal business - each person has her/his own causes and treatments. Of course, knowledge from experts can help us understand our body function in general, but, if we admit that our body is more complicated than what our mind has already understood, we do need to respect it by yielding our mind to our body.

So again, "listen to our body". We, ourselves are the only one who have direct contact with our own body, and our body never stops giving us clues to save ourselves, if we could only listen to it!

Wanton from scratch!

Growing up from south of China, where people eat mostly white rice, I never ever made wanton in my life. Today I tried myself with whole wheat and beef.

Below are the pictures of process in order (total about one hour job):

And I don't know how it tastes yet. Will know tomorrow morning!

The second day morning:

I tried it this morning: it didn't taste good! I guess I will use regular wanton wrap (white wheat) next time!