Better than perfect!

How could these babies turn out so beautifully without care?

What do I regret about my life?

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At this middle age I recall the part of life I have lived, I would say that I regret nothing but exercise!

I had a typical Chinese mindset that tends to separate physical part from mental part of our life. Many Chinese people seem to believe that a strong physical bodybuild represents lower intelligence (of course this is not stately recognized notion but I believe it was implied in many aspects of Chinese culture). Not that Chinese people don't want to be physically healthy, but lots of them just don't care much about exercises and sports. I believe I unconsciously hold this idea through my early years of life. That's why I was never into exercise, even though I desperately needed it since I was a teenager (my health was already bad during my early teen).

Now, under chronic condition, I realized that my physical being played a dominate role in my everyday life - it affects my life plans, short term goals, my relationships, my mood, and eventually my intelligence.

Had I known the importance of physical health, I would've exercised everyday! But good thing is that I am still in my middle age, my life still have many years to come. So I made my mind: when my condition gets normal, I will exercise literally -

EVERYDAY!

Cold feet is to blame for my sinus problem- hot foot bath stopped my sneezing

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For long time I had sinus problem. Allergy medicine did not do good on this. It killed sneezing but it also weakened my heart function. I just can tell because whenever I took medicine like "claritin" I would get palpitation easily and also breath hard.

This summer the weather is unbelievably hot and the AC made my feet frozen (my legs and feet are especially weak of dealing with coldness). This somehow slowed blood circulation and weakened my immune system so I sneezed very easily even it is no longer the season. One day I was sneezing like crazy all day long and at night I suddenly remember years ago hot foot bath stopped my sneezing (I thought it was a coincident at the time), so I did it again. Magically my noses felt smooth almost immediately, and in another few minutes sneeze was gone!

After I finished foot bath my feet and legs felt warm and my mind was clear again. However after a while when my feet got cold again and I started sneeze again. Then I went bed, put a small electric pad underneath my feet and had a good sleep. The second day, sneeze was gone totally.

This incident convince me that, sometime we have problems on one part of our body, the cause is really from somewhere else.

*This hot foot bath I believe can only work for sneezing caused by the slow blood circulation. Other allergy problems caused by different reasons would not be relieved by this method.

Ginger warmed my stomach!

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I had a "hunger" problem once a while: if I didn't eat enough, or sometime even I ate enough, I felt so hungry that I had to keep eating. Someone would suggest it was caused by depression. I simply don't buy that.

By Chinese medicine, "coldness" is a real killer of your health. We need to keep certain temperature inside our body. My problem was "diagnosed" (I quote some Chinese doctors from online so it is not as professional so I put quotation mark:-)) as "Stomach Coldness", which sounds a little crazy, I know. However I was not sure about that until recently, one night my hunger symptoms occurred again. I frantically sought something to eat, and accidentally put some ginger to my oatmeal. I felt suddenly so good when I ate it, and immediately realized that my body liked ginger at the moment. So I ate some more and my hunger feeling just finally disappeared.

After this incident, I purposely ate more gingers especially when I felt my stomach felt uncomfortable (after I ate regularly) , it seemed that my problem has been taken cared of (and I could finally stop gaining weight! God!).

I realized that because of the "coldness" inside me, inside my stomach, my body was keeping in need of something to get heat, so I kept feeling hungry. And because ginger is something can generate heat inside our body, it finally warmed up my stomach, and stopped my hunger.

Now I accepted this theory about "stomach coldness". It makes total sense to me.

A perfect cucumber from backyard!

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Juices are always good for health

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I stole this from mylot.com:

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Carrot + Ginger + Apple - This Boost and cleanse our system.
Apple + Cucumber + Celery - This prevent cancer, reduce cholesterol, and eliminate stomach upset and headache.
Tomato + Carrot + Apple - This Improve skin complexion and eliminate bad breath.
Bitter gourd + Apple + Milk - This avoid bad breath and reduce internal body heat.
Orange + Ginger + Cucumber – This Improve Skin texture and moisture and reduce body heat.
Pineapple + Apple + Watermelon - This dispels excess salts, nourishes the bladder and kidney.
Apple + Cucumber + Kiwi – This improves skin complexion.
Pear & Banana - This regulates sugar content.
Carrot + Apple + Pear + Mango – This clears body heat, counteracts toxicity, decreased blood pressure and fight oxidization.
Honeydew + Grape + Watermelon + Milk – This is very rich in vitamin C + Vitamin B2; that increase cell activity and strengthen body immunity.
Papaya + Pineapple + Milk –This is rich in vitamin C, E, Iron. Improve skin complexion and metabolism.
Banana + Pineapple + Milk – This is rich in vitamin with nutritious and prevent constipation.

The first tomato from backyard!

It was delicious!

Is human a machine? --- some thoughts about modern medicine

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I am currently reading the book "The history of knowledge" by Charles Van Doren (even though I have not read many history books I still cannot help to say it's one of greatest history books I personally have ever read! Brilliant!). In chapter 8 "the Invention of scientific method" the author talked about how those geniuses' discoveries and ideas contributed to the later revolutions in Europe. One of the biggest idea changes at the time was the fact that people realized that our mind could truly understand the nature - the nature that works as a machine. Of course this idea was not new but at the time it was encouraged tremendously by Newton's mechanics. And one of scientific fields that was encouraged the most was modern medicine.

This part of reading inevitably induced my further thinking of modern medicine. Now, looking back, was it if not a mistake but a short-sighted perspective to consider human as a machine? My answer is "yes". Not only my personal experience but millions of other unknown diseases sufferers' situations already proved that this immensely complicated modern medicine system has been not enough to take care of us as it claims. It is getting very clear that even though each parts of our bodies can work perfectly fine but as a whole they just don't work as they are supposed to. So it is reasonable to say that by focusing on studying parts of our bodies like parts of a machines simply is not enough to deal with something as complicated as human.

Again I am not crazy about Chinese medicine but, there is one thing I believe very valuable about it - Chinese medicine consider our body as a holistic being. It was this view led Chinese medicine into a "superstitious" way because it believed that there was some "magic" power inside this complicated system - our bodies knew better how to cope with diseases than our minds did. There is a popular saying within Chinese medicine practitioners: Chinese medicine doesn't cure disease, it just helps our bodies recovering to a decent condition so they can cure disease by themselves.

As I have not really taken much advantage of Chinese medicine, I really don't have much proof myself to say how effective Chinese medicine is, but I do believe there is some truth inside of it, as thousands years of experience/practice is not something we could just ignore by claiming it as superstition just because we don't understand it.

Also, I do not mean to underestimate the achievement of modern medicine. I truly respect science and I believe the discovery of human body's mechanical functions was truly amazing at the time. However, I believe this achievement is only the first step of medicine. Now, medicine faces new challenges. As more and more unknown diseases comes out, medicine institutions will be demanded to rethink their starting point - the mechanical view on human, which by my belief is the true reason why modern medince is so clueless when deal with some new dieseases - and widen their perspective, develop some new methods and solution for diseases.

The first blooming!

I sowed the seeds over a month ago finally see a flower blooming!

CFS - the biggest challenge in my life

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My biggest challenge in my life is my many years of chronic fatigue syndrome - it challenged me on almost every aspect of life: relationship, financial situation, and the most crucial one - my self confidence.

The real challenge for most CFS sufferers, I believe is NOT the seriousness of this disease (even though it is far more serious than people have imagined), but the TIME – the long term's "disable" condition.

We all in our life would have serious diseases once or even many times, but we all can more or less keep our hope as long as we know we would get well again, sooner or later. But keeping being ill for years (some of them basically have to live with it), it takes totally different mentality to keep the grips on hope.

Second to the time issue, another challenge CFS patients face is the mental loneliness. Partially misled by medical professionals, almost inevitably most people would take CFS sufferers as mentally depressing people, because not only CFS doesn't sound like a real name for disease, not only CFS sufferers don't look like ill people, but also CFS never has been considered as any actual physical diseases by medical institutions. So CFS patients eventually have to give up on people’s understanding - which they well deserve to have - and choose to live alone, because even the loneliness is better to deal with than being treated without respect.

These 2 reasons made me personally believe that the challenges that CFS patients face are greater than the challenges that many other people with more "serious" illnesses face, as long as their illnesses have "formal" names.

Under such challenge, I had big time doubt on myself because I used to be one of the most capable persons in dealing with challenges, but, for all these years I was inadequate for some very simple daily tasks. The consequence was I found people's attitude changed - I was taken as a "negative" person by many friends, even loved ones, thus I had almost no any support.

Now, not physically completely recovered, I am in much better shape. Once I thought all these years was a big waste of life, but now I take it differently. I have learned something I might not learn had I not have such experience - I have changed the attitude toward myself. If the reason that I loved myself during early years of my life was (only) because I was considered bright and loved by OTHERS, the love I have to myself now is unconditional - I love myself however I am.

Yes, self-esteem is unconditional. Someone might understand this easily but it took me huge chunk of my life to get it. Well, it is still worth it.