Digestion
Good digestion turns food into good blood, strengthening every aspect of your body. Poor digestion creates weak blood. Since blood feeds your organs and your mind, poor digestion weakens your entire body and destabilizes your emotions. Matching your diet to your body type can help you improve the health of your digestive tract, overcome digestive problems, disorders and diseases, select the right digestive aids, and strengthen your digestive fire.
Introduction
Digestion is the foundation of health. While each system plays its own vital role, none can perform optimally if digestion is defective. The quality and strength of digestion influences the entire body via the blood. What you digest and absorb enters your bloodstream which then circulates to reach every other system, organ, tissue and cell. When digestion is strong and balanced, the food you take in is broken down, absorbed and assimilated efficiently, nourishing the whole body. You feel strong, alert, energetic and vibrant. If digestion is vitiated, even the most perfect diet cannot be processed properly and the body will lack vigor and vitality. Improperly digested food creates phlegm. Over time, phlegm accumulates and enters into the bloodstream, circulating throughout the body. Phlegm is a precursor for many future diseases, therefor prioritizing your time and attention on the maintenance of your digestive health is essential.
While the need to keep digestive strength balanced is necessary for all, there are many nuances and variability for each person’s digestive system. The assessment of digestive functionality takes an individualized approach. Each person’s unique digestive history and tendencies are taken into account by using traditional diagnostic tools such as questioning, analyzing the tongue, face, eyes, pulse, and stools.
What Causes a Digestive Imbalance?
As life itself, which is so powerful and yet so delicate, the same goes for digestion. This well-oiled machine, working in unison, will perform efficiently and gracefully if it is properly, and regularly, maintained. That said, it can be thrown out of balance easily. Inappropriate eating habits, such as overeating, eating when you are not hungry or bad food combinations, are major factors that can be quite harmful for your digestive system. When you overload your body with excess food, your digestive tract doesn’t have the time or energy to process everything that is going in, and ultimately it becomes weaker and weaker, leading to the accumulation of phlegm which further weakens digestion.
Lifestyle choices also play a part in digestive imbalances. Eating highly processed foods, irregular meal times, eating too close to bedtime, eating while stressed or fatigued, deprivation of sleeping hours, will compromise the strength of your digestion.