Helping Ourselves: Guide to Traditional Chinese Food Energetics -eBook

HelOurGuiTra

By Daverick Leggett
Digital Goods, eBook
ISBN 9780952464006

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Helping Ourselves is a concise guide to traditional Chinese food energetics, as useful for the layperson as it is for the practitioner. The book contains charts detailing the energetic properties of over 300 common foods, and succinct explanations of the principles of Chinese medicine in an easy-to-read format.

This invaluable reference manual forms part of a trilogy with the Energetics of Food wallchart and Recipes for Self-Healing by the same author, both available from Redwing.

Written for practitioners, students, and clients of Oriental medicine, this text provides an easy to use, concise, and accessible reference for information on yin-yang and five phase food energetics. The revised and expanded second edition is 30% larger than the first and, as well as updated information on all foods, it includes a significantly expanded list of foods, a totally new section on the properties of over 150 western medicinal herbs , a guide to the properties of commonly used essential oils, and a new section on diagnosis. Other notable works from the same author which dovetail nicely with this text are Recipes for Self Healing, Guide to the Energetics of Herbs Chart, and Guide to the Energetics of Food Chart.


Praise for Helping Ourselves

“There are other guides to Chinese dietary therapy on the market, but none that I have seen makes the subject so readily accessible.”

-Simon Fielding, European Journal of Oriental Medicine


“The thing I most like about the presentation of this book is its simplicity. In the introduction the author says that the book is intended both as a learning resource for students and clients of traditional Chinese medicine and as a reference manual for practitioners. In my opinion it succeeds brilliantly in both instances: it explains Chinese energy concepts… in terms that most lay people would understand.”

-Altair de Almeida, Traditional Acupuncture Society News


“Helping Ourselves takes two important steps towards making Chinese food energetics accessible. Firstly, it is extremely easy to read and explains Chinese energy concepts such as the Spleen, Yin, Yang, Cold, Hot and Damp in terms most lay people would understand. Secondly, it classifies the foods into what they do energetically so you can easily look up which foods help to resolve Dampness and which foods are cooling. To my knowledge this has not been done in English before.”

-Bill Palmer, Shiatsu Society News


“I particularly like that by using this book we can advise patients to take positive action and enhance their treatment by adding certain foods to their diet, as well as excluding others. It is a useful book to have in practice and I use it regularly.”

-Sally Blades, acupuncturist


“Helping Ourselves is a relatively short introduction to the basic principles of Chinese dietary therapy… the foods discussed are easily available and the writing intelligent, clear and concise.”

-Peter Deadman, Journal of Traditional Chinese Medicine

Qi Nutrition: An Introduction to the Essential Principles and Practice of Qi Nutrition

QiNutIntEss

By Daverick Leggett
Digital Video Data
ISBN 9780952464068

This 115 minute DVD looks at nutrition through the lens of traditional Chinese medicine. Taught by an expert in the field, it is simple accessible introduction to the subject full of helpful insights and practical ideas. You will find yourself looking at food with new eyes and hungry for further study.

Disc One (55 minutes) outlines the essential principles of Qi Nutrition focusing on how to nourish and protect the digestive system.

Disc two (60 minutes) introduces the fundamental concepts and language of food energetics and then takes us into the kitchen where Daverick cooks three unusual and delicious soups illustrating the principles outlined in Disc One.

This DVD is supported by the book Helping Ourselves and is followed by a practitioner training DVD series. Please note this is in PAL format, so this will play on a computer but not a US region DVD player.

About the Author:

Daverick Leggett teaches nutrition internationally and is the author of two bestselling books on nutrition: Helping Ourselves and Recipes for Self Healing.

Helping Ourselves: Guide to Traditional Chinese Food Energetics

HelOurGuiTra

By Daverick Leggett
Trade paperback book
ISBN 9780952464006
58 pages

Helping Ourselves is a concise guide to traditional Chinese food energetics, as useful for the layperson as it is for the practitioner. The book contains charts detailing the energetic properties of over 300 common foods, and succinct explanations of the principles of Chinese medicine in an easy-to-read format.

This invaluable reference manual forms part of a trilogy with the Energetics of Food wallchart and Recipes for Self-Healing by the same author, both available from Redwing.

Written for practitioners, students, and clients of Oriental medicine, this text provides an easy to use, concise, and accessible reference for information on yin-yang and five phase food energetics. The revised and expanded second edition is 30% larger than the first and, as well as updated information on all foods, it includes a significantly expanded list of foods, a totally new section on the properties of over 150 western medicinal herbs , a guide to the properties of commonly used essential oils, and a new section on diagnosis. Other notable works from the same author which dovetail nicely with this text are Recipes for Self Healing, Guide to the Energetics of Herbs Chart, and Guide to the Energetics of Food Chart.


Praise for Helping Ourselves

“There are other guides to Chinese dietary therapy on the market, but none that I have seen makes the subject so readily accessible.”

-Simon Fielding, European Journal of Oriental Medicine


“The thing I most like about the presentation of this book is its simplicity. In the introduction the author says that the book is intended both as a learning resource for students and clients of traditional Chinese medicine and as a reference manual for practitioners. In my opinion it succeeds brilliantly in both instances: it explains Chinese energy concepts… in terms that most lay people would understand.”

-Altair de Almeida, Traditional Acupuncture Society News


“Helping Ourselves takes two important steps towards making Chinese food energetics accessible. Firstly, it is extremely easy to read and explains Chinese energy concepts such as the Spleen, Yin, Yang, Cold, Hot and Damp in terms most lay people would understand. Secondly, it classifies the foods into what they do energetically so you can easily look up which foods help to resolve Dampness and which foods are cooling. To my knowledge this has not been done in English before.”

-Bill Palmer, Shiatsu Society News


“I particularly like that by using this book we can advise patients to take positive action and enhance their treatment by adding certain foods to their diet, as well as excluding others. It is a useful book to have in practice and I use it regularly.”

-Sally Blades, acupuncturist


“Helping Ourselves is a relatively short introduction to the basic principles of Chinese dietary therapy… the foods discussed are easily available and the writing intelligent, clear and concise.”

-Peter Deadman, Journal of Traditional Chinese Medicine

Recipes for Self-Healing

RecSel

By Daverick Leggett
Trade paperback book
ISBN 9780952464020
339 pages

Daverick Leggett is the author of Helping Ourselves A Guide to Traditional Chinese Food Energetics, one of the only books on the traditional Chinese approach to diet rooted firmly in the dietary habits and readily available ingredients of Western countries. Recipes for Self-Healing develops from that earlier work and presents a wide range of recipes, again using indigenous foods rather than the often strange and unavailable components of similar Chinese books. The recipe section is divided into Soups, Salads, Grains, Vegetables and Beans, Meat and Fish, Sauces, Dips and Relishes, Condiments, Bakery, Desserts and Drinks. For each recipe, as well as the standard preparation and cooking instructions, there is a full discussion of the energetics and a simple table showing its effect on qi, blood, yin or yang, pathogenic factors and zangfu, as well as its temperature and contraindications. Thus for example ‘Cabbage in Chestnut Walnut Sauce’: “Chestnuts and walnuts both support the Yang and help counteract Dampness. They are supported in this by the garlic whilst the lemon acts on the Liver and makes the dish more digestible. The cabbage helps strengthen the Blood and is especially beneficial for the Stomach and Intestines”. The overall effect of this dish is to warm the body, clear dampness, support the Kidney Yang and nourish the Intestines”.

There is much more to this book however than just the recipes, however wonderful. Introductory chapters discuss such subjects as sources of nourishment (air, water, trees and plants, cosmic energy, sensual nourishment, relationships and food) which reveal the author’s grounding in qigong and spiritual practice, and his always rounded, sensible and comprehensive approach to the potentially narrow issue of dietary regulation. Since this book is aimed both at the practitioner and the layperson, there is a comprehensive introduction to the relevant Chinese medicine theory (channels, zangfu, substances, yin and yang, climatic factors etc.). A valuable final section, suitably entitled ‘Leftovers’ considers subjects such as coffee and tea, alcohol, sugar, dairy foods, vegetarianism, raw food diets, pregnancy, babies and children, slimming and obesity, fasting, microwave cooking, genetic engineering, vitamins and common medical drugs.

“The true spirit of traditional Chinese medicine is a living one and it is in this spirit that this book is written. As a westerner I have been drawn to an oriental philosophy and healing system because it offers something I have not found in my own back yard: a coherent, living vision of the world as energy, and a poetic and metaphorical language to express this perception. It suits me, because to perceive the world as energy is natural to me and has been so since childhood; and, besides, I am more inclined towards poetry than science. I am, however, not Chinese and have no ambition to live anywhere other than the beautiful and sacred landscape of Devon, England. Nor am I interested in living or eating like a Chinese person. So in bringing the profound insights and wisdom of traditional Chinese medicine into my own culture my interest has been to understand how this extraordinary understanding can take root here and become native, how it can enrich rather than supplant my own culture and traditions. For this reason, the suggestions in this book for healing ourselves and eating our way to health are based on primarily western foods and lifestyle practices.

In this book you will find the ideas of eastern medicine explained and interpreted in a western light. I hope that I have sufficiently managed to liberate the ideas of traditional Chinese medicine from their cultural context to make them useful and directly relevant to the western world. I also hope that I have managed to do this without dishonouring their tradition or misrepresenting the ideas through the limitations of my own culture-bound vision.

In presenting these ideas about food I have sought to apply the principles of food energetics to a western cuisine. Most of the ingredients will be familiar and homely and some will reflect the cosmopolitan nature of our eating. Every now and then I have suggested the use of a more unusual ingredient because of its special value. Nevertheless, you should be able to find in your local shops almost any of the ingredients in this book.

The key question in deciding what to eat is not ‘What is the best diet?’ but ‘What is the best diet for me?’ or, more precisely, ‘What are my constitutional patterns and what are the conditions prevailing in my life and my body today?’ What works for one person may not work for another. One man’s meat, as the saying goes, is another man’s poison. To get the most from this book you will need to understand your own energetic tendencies. Reading the book will take you part way there; but if you are not already familiar with traditional Chinese medicine as a practitioner, or as a student or recipient, it will probably help if you seek out the assistance of a qualified practitioner skilled in traditional diagnosis.

The recipes that form the second part of this book are designed to help you eat according to your own unique needs. If, for example, you are working with a pattern of ‘Spleen Qi Deficiency’ in your life, you will find several recipes that suit you perfectly. The measure of whether a recipe is right for you is that you can expect to feel good afterwards. Once you have found recipes that work for you, you can apply the principles to recipes of your own making. There is no limit to the number of new recipes you can create.

You can be further helped in this by getting hold of a copy of either the wallchart The Energetics of Food and/or the companion volume to this book Helping Ourselves. The chart and book list the properties of about three hundred common foods and will enable you to choose ingredients that are well-suited to your individual needs. Both are available from Meridian Press and Redwing Book Company.

Words committed to print tend to become somehow fixed as truth. The recipes in this book are not ‘cures’ but rather part of a style of eating that, in my judgment, is suited to certain kinds of people and conditions. This book is an adventure and an exploration of how the principles of traditional Chinese medicine and food energetics can be applied in our daily lives. I invite you to test its ideas against your own experience and find your own way of working with the information and principles offered here. I encourage you to be creative in the kitchen and use the recipes as starting points to spin off into your own creations. The principles of a tradition may not change over millennia but the tradition is kept alive only by constant reinterpretation in the light of experience. It is in the creative human spirit that a tradition lives on and its death begins the moment it is ‘fixed in stone’.

It must be said that the main ingredient of any recipe never finds its way into a recipe book. Cinema goers may have seen the film ‘Like Water for Chocolate’. In this sumptuous film the cook’s tears, laughter and desire are at different times infused into the meal, causing hilarious results at the dinner table. It is not mere fancy that the energy with which food is prepared is infused into the meal. From the viewpoint of energy medicine, the Qi of the cook is transmitted to the food and this, in turn, is received through eating.

Cooking is an alchemical process. To liberate the nourishment from food the Qi of the cook must impregnate the food, interacting with the flavours to generate a nourishing message. The energy that goes into creating the ingredients is important too: the grower and the retailer are part of the story. Organically grown food sold by people who know and care about their food carries that caring message to our kitchens. I encourage you to support organic growers and, if you have the opportunity, to grow some of your own food.

Lastly, in using these recipes, I encourage you to relax and have fun in the kitchen. This is your own secret ingredient that no one else can copy. Certainly no one can put it in a recipe book. Bon appetit”

-Daverick Leggett


Praise for Recipes for Self-Healing

“Whist Helping Ourselves was very obviously a self-published book, Recipes for Self-Healing is an altogether more professional publication, attractively designed and laid out, and with fine illustrations. It marks a major step in the development of Chinese dietary principles to Western diets and habits, and establishes Daverick Leggett as one of the leaders in this field.”

-Peter Deadman, Journal of Chinese Medicine

Guide Energetics of Herbs Chart

GuiEneHerCha

By Daverick Leggett
Chart, rolled
ISBN 9780952464037

Like its sister chart, the Guide to the Energetics of Food, this new full color chart is attractively designed and matt-laminated. It displays information on about 150 Western herbs, outlining their energetic properties in the language of Oriental medicine. It will be of use to all those with an interest in Western herbs, whether professionally or otherwise, and is another significant step in bringing the wisdom and understanding of Chinese medicine into the Western world.

Guide to the Energetics of Food Chart

GuiEneFooCha

By Daverick Leggett
ISBN 9780952464013
Chart, rolled

This full colour wallchart is the ideal companion to both Recipes for Self-Healing and Helping Ourselves. Attractively designed, fully laminated and easy to use, it enables you to find at a glance the energetic properties of about 300 common foods. For anyone wishing to apply the principles of food energetics in their own kitchen, The Energetics of Food wall chart is the perfect companion.

Foods are listed alphabetically in clear groupings such as Grains, Vegetables, Meat and Fish. Each food is described in terms of its flavour, temperature, route and action. This chart is designed for “western” cuisine: all foods are familiar and easy to find. All information is up to date and well researched making this an excellent resource for both practitioners and lay users.


Praise for A guide to the Energetics of Food

“A masterly condensation of information.”

-Shiatsu Society News