Episode Transcript
[00:00:11] Speaker A: What's worthwhile considering what we consume, believe, say and do towards peace of mind, vitality of body and joy of spirit? I'm Ramsey Zimmerman. Here's some more healthy living motivation and discussion.
[00:00:31] Speaker B: In Chinese medicine, our toolkit is much, much, much bigger. The foundation is nutrition.
So I actually only did herbal medicine initially. I did not do any acupuncture. It took me three years, but I actually reversed my disease states. And it wasn't just the herbs.
They were very impactful, of course, but it was also me learning, like with being sick all the time. What is the very first symptom?
What can I adapt and change at the very first symptom? Because most of us just ignore our symptomology and then we have a full blown cold or a full blown flu.
[00:01:15] Speaker A: Hey there.
[00:01:16] Speaker C: It's Ramsay here.
[00:01:18] Speaker A: That was Mary Lee Cow mees.
Mary Lee is a practitioner of traditional Chinese medicine. Herbalist. An educator with over 30 years of experience guiding people toward whole person wellness.
She weaves ancient wisdom with modern insight to help others reconnect with the natural rhythms that support deep healing.
Mary Lee focuses a lot of her advice around the seasons and how we should adjust eating habits and patterns to match what is happening in nature and within our bodies based on the seasons in order to heal from illness and maintain our vitality. I learned a lot about Chinese medicine from Mary Lee and found her to be calming, compassionate, and down to earth. See what you think. Let's get started.
[00:02:06] Speaker C: Hey, Mary Lee, how are you doing today?
[00:02:09] Speaker B: Great.
We have a beautiful, sunny 100 degree day here today with a heat index of 110. This is the third day in a row.
[00:02:20] Speaker C: Oh my God.
[00:02:21] Speaker B: That's.
[00:02:21] Speaker C: That's pretty hot. Where. Whereabouts are you today?
[00:02:24] Speaker B: Uh, I'm in Kerrville, Texas, in Central Texas.
[00:02:28] Speaker C: Central Texas? Yeah. I'm in Olympia, Washington. We did actually have a 100 degree day yesterday, which is pretty unusual for us. We only get maybe like, I don't know, three or four of those a year and we don't have air conditioning, so those hit us pretty hard.
[00:02:48] Speaker B: Do you have a basement?
[00:02:50] Speaker C: No.
[00:02:51] Speaker B: Oh.
[00:02:52] Speaker C: What I do have is a couple of box fans.
[00:02:55] Speaker B: Yes.
With trays of ice cubes in front of them.
[00:02:59] Speaker C: Yes. That's exactly what I had. That's exactly what I had a tray of.
[00:03:05] Speaker A: I kept.
[00:03:06] Speaker C: I actually ran out of like ice packs because I have a variety of like different kinds of ice packs in my freezer. And I'm pretty sure yesterday I melted literally all of them.
[00:03:16] Speaker B: All of them?
[00:03:18] Speaker C: Yep. Yep. But that's the season Right. That's the season that we're in. It's summer.
[00:03:22] Speaker B: We are in the heart of summer.
[00:03:24] Speaker C: Yeah. And I'm intrigued by a bunch of things that I've learned about you recently. One of them is how, you know, to be healthy in the different seasons. And I definitely want to get there. But first I should give you a proper introduction. You are a practitioner and an educator of traditional Chinese medicine, and you also have experience and connections with Western allopathic medicine as well.
So I'm pretty interested to hear about all of that. And let's start with
[00:04:02] Speaker A: what was your
[00:04:03] Speaker C: health like early in life? And, you know, what struggles did you have and how did you ultimately find healing for those?
[00:04:14] Speaker B: Well, I was actually very chronically ill in my early 30s. That's what brought me to Chinese medicine. I had developed asthma.
I would be sick. I was living in Seattle at the time. So I'd be sick from September 15th, when it started raining, until July 4th when it quit.
Just one constant flu and cold after another.
I had bloodshot eyes. They couldn't figure out what the allergen was. So I actually wore glasses with clear glass in them. They were thinking if they could prevent some of the air from hitting my eyes, that might help. I think back on it and think, well, yeah, not really, but okay.
I had seen a lot of Western doctors, a lot of specialists. I had been in a car accident, and so I had chronic headaches.
Really, I was just a wreck.
And I was very fortunate to meet Master Niwa Ching, who is a 74th generation Taoist master.
And the Daoist masters helped develop Chinese medicine. Chinese medicine is 4 to 6,000 years old, depending upon which records you're looking at. We have written records that are 3 to 4,000 years old.
So his history going back that far is amazing. And then he and his sons, the last 38 generations of his family, have all been traditional Chinese medical doctors.
[00:05:48] Speaker C: Wow.
[00:05:49] Speaker B: So it's that heritage that I was incredibly blessed to have fallen into, so to speak.
[00:05:57] Speaker C: Talk about a family business.
[00:05:59] Speaker B: Pardon?
[00:06:00] Speaker C: Talk about a family business. That's impressive.
[00:06:04] Speaker B: And it's still carrying on. I'm so excited because Master Knee had two sons. Dao Xing is his oldest son and Mao Xing is the second son.
They have both have children. And Dr. Do's son is a very well known cardiologist in California who specializes in integrative cardiology. So with all of his herbal background, he has incorporated that.
And then Dr. Mao has two daughters and a son. But both daughters have followed in the footsteps and one has graduated and is practicing and one is currently in school. So I'm just so thrilled that that lineage is going to be carried on, because the wisdom that these people carry, not only their knowledge, but in their heart and their souls, is just amazing.
I've always said that, you know, five to 15 minutes with Dr. Mao is worth a year of medical school, because their depth of understanding is just incredible.
[00:07:15] Speaker C: So what kind of things did you learn from them that related to what was going on with your own body, with your own health, that you were definitely not learning from, you know, the traditional Western doctors that you were visiting?
[00:07:32] Speaker B: Yeah, the Western doctors were. You're just going to have to live with this. We don't know what's wrong with you. Good luck.
And so many of my patients over the years have come in with that same story.
But I started working with Dr. Mao Chingney and he was in LA and I was in Seattle. So I actually only did herbal medicine initially. I did not do any acupuncture. It took me three years, but I actually reversed my disease states.
And the first assignment I was given.
So traditional herbal medicine, it looks like a baggie full of stuff that came out the forest floor, literally.
And my assignment was to brew that up. It stinks. Stinks to high heaven.
You gotta gag it down, at least initially. Some formulas are worse than others. And so my assignment was, I had a three year old at the time. I was supposed to sit down twice a day for 20 minutes and look at a magazine and drink a cup of tea.
Well, after about 10 days, I thought, I can't, I can't do this. I have a lifestyle problem. I can't do this. And I called Dr. Mao up and I said, you know, I think I have a lifestyle problem. I can't do this.
And he literally laughed at me and said, well, when you master it, call me back.
So that's the Taoist way.
So I brewed tea for three years.
And it wasn't just the herbs.
They were very impactful, of course, but it was also me learning, like with being sick all the time, what is the very first symptom?
What can I adapt and change at the very first symptom? Because most of us just ignore our symptomology and then we have a full blown cold or a full blown flu because we don't adapt quickly enough.
I'll use you a story of a woman I've been working with. She's in her 80s and she, for the last 20 years, every year, has had chronic sinusitis which is a sinus infection, followed by pneumonia and hospitalization.
Well, in one season, three months, I helped her figure out what is your very first trigger?
It was migraine headaches.
I taught her how to avoid the migraine headache. She did not have any sinus infections this last winter or spring, and no hospitalizations, no antibiotics.
She was amazed. It never occurred to her that she could change that pattern. She just thought it was part of who she was and what she had to go through every year.
And it's not.
So that's what I learned is slowly over.
You know, it's not something that you learn on a dime, because first you have to become aware of your body, and then you have to figure out, what do I need to shift?
So, you know, in her case, it was a simple shift, and. And it worked.
So that's how I got involved in Chinese medicine, was through my own health, through reversing my own disease states, which by Western medical standards weren't possible. You don't reverse asthma.
I have no asthma. I haven't had asthma in decades because I shifted the pattern in my body.
[00:11:03] Speaker C: So I'm only a little bit familiar with traditional Chinese medicine, or tcm, as it's often called, and I imagine a lot of listeners are kind of in that same place. Can you lay out for us kind of what you think of as a working definition or description of sort of the basic elements or tenets of tcm? And what can you give us a quick primer, like, what is it that we need to know and what is it that we need to be thinking about in terms of having this conversation?
[00:11:40] Speaker B: Well, Chinese medicine is based on nature, so the first thing you have to adapt to is the language, because we talk about polar opposites. So the first thing that you learn is this concept of chi, which is your life force, what animates you. And you can see this in nature. You can see two rose bushes side by side, side, and one is just vibrant and growing really well, and the next one kind of looks weak, and it's just not quite making.
Could be the soil. It could be the depression where one gets more water. There could be a lot of factors to it, but you can see it in nature. One is much more energetic, much more vibrant. It's qi, or its energetic manifestation is better than the one next to it.
[00:12:33] Speaker A: We all feel it, the pressure to
[00:12:35] Speaker C: perform, keep up, move faster, all while
[00:12:38] Speaker A: staying present and connecting with our loved ones. It's a lot. I know. So join me live weekly on Zoom, Tuesdays at noon, Pacific Time for sessions of better before burnout. Waking, eating, moving and sleeping to beat stress and bring vitality. These sessions are interactive and customized. Each time, I go through the foundations of establishing vitality that carry you through your days and calm your sleep through your nights. I also focus in on particular practical strategies. Learn more and register online by visiting whatsworthwhile.net better don't forget to use coupon code blastoff for one free session.
[00:13:25] Speaker B: So the first thing is this concept of Qi. Then we have polar opposites.
So many people will hear of yin and yang, and that's the polar opposite of male and female. So yin is female, it's quieter, it's more introverted.
Yang is masculine, it's the sun, it's more outgoing, it's more extroverted.
Yin is the moon, by the way.
So at simplest level, what you're always doing in Chinese medicine is balancing yin and Yang. If someone is ill, the yin and Yang is out of balance.
So that sounds simple, right?
And it can be simple. It also can also be very complicated. And what I mean by that is you move from these polar opposites. So yin and yang, hot and cold, dry and damp, just to give you a few.
The next thing we talk about are what we call the five elements.
So there are five seasons in Chinese medicine.
We in the west recognize four, but they recognize five.
And each season has an element that goes with it. So right now we're in the height of summer. That is the fire element.
And you can see that with your hundred degree day yesterday.
And if you think about fire, it can either burn really, really smoothly and steadily if you manage it well, or it can flare and burn really bright and fizzle out when we think about the body that way.
So the fire element is associated with the heart and the small intestine. So back to those polar opposites. The organs are paired.
So in five element theory, I'm going to take you through the cycle of nature to help you see this.
You start with the fire element, which is the heart and the small intestine that ashes that are left from a fire become the earth, and the earth is the spleen and stomach.
Probably 125 years ago, it was mistranslated. It should have been translated as your pancreas, but basically it's your digestive functioning. So your spleen and stomach, your digestion.
If we take earth and compress it, we get metals, and that would be the next element, metal.
Metal represents your lungs and your large intestine.
So if you leave metal out overnight, water will Condense on it, which takes you to the next element of water, and that's your urinary bladder and kidneys, your kidney functioning, basically.
And then that water is the nourishment for wood, which is your liver and gallbladder.
And then wood is the fuel for the fire.
And that's called the co promotion cycle. It's spelled ko.
And that is the way the body is supposed to work. The energies in your body is fire is supposed to support earth, earth is supposed to support metal, metal is supposed to support water, wood and wood fire.
When we're working with the body in Chinese medicine, we're looking at the energy.
I can use those words, your heart, and people will say, oh, my gosh, do I have heart disease?
No, your heart has a specific energetic function. I'm talking about the energetic function that these organs are supposed to do in your body.
And that's how.
That's one of the ways that we figure out the diagnostics in Chinese medicine of what needs to be done, what needs to be shifted.
[00:17:38] Speaker C: That is a tremendous model.
The elements, do they map up to seasons, and as the seasons flow one into the other. Can you go through that really quick?
[00:17:51] Speaker B: Absolutely. So right now we're in the heart element, which is summer. Then we go to earth, which is late summer. We don't have late summer in the west, but in Chinese medicine we have late summer. And then from late summer, you're going to go into fall, from fall, you're going to go into winter.
Which would be the water element, then the liver element or the earth? No, I said earth. I'm. I'm at wood. Sorry. The wood element is going to be spring, and then the heart element is going to bring you back to summer.
So what's significant about that is your body is changing every season, your body changes and your body is changing based on what is happening in the earth.
And so we look at the body that way, we look at nutrition that way. What do you need now in summer?
We had a conversation a couple of days ago and I told you if it was going to be a hundred in Seattle to go buy watermelon in cucumbers, Peppermint chrysanthemum tea.
I love to make a watermelon feta mint salad. So you get the cooling effects of the watermelon. That's coupled with the mint, just very, very cooling.
And that is counteracting the external heat.
So what happens is we think, oh, it's just hot outside.
Well, actually, heat really depletes your qi and your blood so your life force and your blood, and I mean blood like the red stuff in your veins over days and days and days like we have here in Central Texas, is very, very taxing on the body.
So you use nutrition to counteract that external heat.
And then some people, depending upon their disease state, will have what we call internal heat. So in that case, I've got to correct not only the external heat, but the intern internal heat that they may be experiencing. Somebody else might have internal cold.
So again, back to those polar opposites I have to look at and sort out. Is it a heat condition? Is it a cold condition, Is it a blood condition, Is it a chi condition? What organ system is involved? And then what shifts can they make to correct their own health?
[00:20:27] Speaker C: You know, that's fascinating to me. I've heard many times the idea of sort of eat seasonally, and it's usually based on things like availability or, you know, fresh produce or, you know, things like that. But what I'm hearing you saying is eating seasonally for a different reason, which is what our body needs at different times of the year. So do those things line up, like is in terms of the types of foods that are typically available at different times of year, do those happen to line up with the things that you need at different times a year?
[00:21:07] Speaker B: Sometimes they do. So, for example, living in Texas, we have access to watermelon year round and especially in the summer months, whereas you being up in the Northwest, you're probably not gonna. People aren't going to grow their own watermelon, whereas down here, everybody grows a watermelon. So that is an example of where nature has already provided exactly what you need.
[00:21:33] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:21:34] Speaker B: The problem that you get into with that the hardest things to change is actually your diet and your nutrition, because that was set up from infancy.
So people don't realize when they're trying to undo it or make it change that they're trying to undo. 30, 40, 50, 60 years of maybe misinformation and it. And it changes. I mean, what, what you might be able to tolerate at 20, you might not be able to tolerate at 40 or 60 because your body has changed, your energetics has changed. But basically, yes, nature has provided what we need at each season. So if you think about winter, in winter, I'm telling people to eat root soups and stews, so turnips, parsnips, carrots, maybe potatoes, if they can tolerate them, because that's the food that is better for your body in that season.
I mentioned that the energetics of the earth Think about the season in spring.
The energy is coming up from the roots of the plant and it's starting to bud and create leaves and grow outward.
[00:22:57] Speaker C: Yes.
[00:22:58] Speaker B: So those are the foods that you want. You want foods that are going to support the energy moving up through your body and moving out.
Then when we get at the height of summer where you have this fire, it's about containing the fire and what I try to get people, you all know, I'm going to describe the fire person to you.
They're normally really loud.
They're very red in the face.
They maybe don't know how to be quiet because they have that energy that's moving them and moving upward.
So that's why they'll be red in the face. They'll be louder than normal.
So that's an example.
And I'll give you somebody from the, from the winter, maybe a yin person.
So back to this yin and yang. The fire person has too much fire, too much yang. It's not being contained by the yin.
The yin person is going to be very quiet. They might be really folded in on themselves because they don't have enough yang.
So that's why it's always about each. Chinese medicine is totally individualized medicine.
Because you can give me 10 asthma patients, they're all going to be treated the same way.
You could give me 10 diverticulitis patients, they're all going to be treated differently.
Now, diverticulitis is a condition that we call damp heat.
So they're all probably going to have some aspect of damp heat.
However, when you look at their overall makeup, they have to be treated individually.
And that's very different from Western medicine.
[00:24:48] Speaker C: Yeah, for sure.
My perception of Western medicine is that it's often focused on finding ways to be efficient and to have high throughput and to do things quickly and to do things in a regimented fashion.
But what you're, what you're describing sounds to me very much like the opposite.
I'm curious how, when you are meeting and getting to know a potential client, like what forms of diagnostics are you kind of going through in order to begin to learn what you need to learn about people?
[00:25:30] Speaker B: Well, there are many aspects to diagnosis.
So traditionally we're looking at your tongue and there's a representation for every organ on your body on your tongue.
So I can tell when you stick your tongue out what organs are out of balance.
Then we take your pulse and it's not, oh, you have one.
There are three positions in each wrist, so we're checking each wrist and those three positions correlate to different organs.
So I'm going number one, can I find a pulse? Are they so depleted and so weak that they have no pulse in that energetic system? Or back to that fire person? Is their pulse really, really tight and wiry like a guitar string?
That's the person that's really wound up. And you've got to calm their liver down and calm down their central nervous system.
So those are the two foundational ways. But then you also learn or I studied physiognomy, which is how to read your face.
I can tell oftentimes immediately because I know how to read what's going on in their face.
And then I listen to how they speak.
So I'll give you an example.
Some people will come in and they'll be talking about fear.
I'm fearful of the rain. I'm fearful of what's happening in the country. I'm fearful about my children. I'm fearful. Everything they say is fear based.
They are totally kidney deficient because each of these seasons and elements has an emotion attached to it and a color attached to it. So I can tell based on their clothing, if they wear the same type of clothing like you have on that beautiful yellow shirt that is an earth color. So if you're always wearing yellow, I know that you are in some way trying to support your earth element.
So there are many ways to look at diagnostics, really. And I look at all of those things. I don't just rely on the tongue or the pulse. I look at everything.
[00:27:48] Speaker C: Huh.
Tell us a bit about how you work with clients from a practical sense, like what types of services do you provide? What kind of things do you address? What kind of things do you do?
[00:28:03] Speaker B: Well, currently I have an online membership called Living in the Season.
And through that membership, people can either participate quarterly. It's a quarterly membership. And they will be given a set of curriculum, if you will. They're going to get a core content about that season.
I'm writing Fall as we speak.
They'll get recipes, they'll get practices, they'll get meditations, they'll get affirmations. And every single thing in this curriculum is designed to help them see where they are energetically and what they need to shift to improve their health.
And through that membership, people, there is an option for people to work with me individually.
So they can either do it as a member and get their content, or they can. And they can pay quarterly. They can pay by the year and get a discount, or they can do private consultation.
So that's how I work with people at this time. I also write on substack, I'm doing podcast, because to me, I truly Ramsey would not be alive if it were not for Chinese medicine. That's how grateful I am for what I have learned. Does it mean my health is perfect? No, it does not. I would like to tell you that it is, but it's not, because we're always changing all the time, and so I have to adapt to that, but that's how I work with people now.
[00:29:41] Speaker A: Great.
[00:29:44] Speaker C: And it sounds like the advice that you provide will sort of overlay with, you know, lifestyles that people have. I wonder, I guess I'm getting at, you know, how sort of radically different do people need to live in order to benefit from these, you know, traditions? And, you know, because it's part of a larger question of can you. Do you need. If you're going to do TCM and you're going to benefit from that, is that, like, completely pulling away from Western allopathic medicine, or is there sort of a nice, happy place where you can sort of live in the middle and benefit from potentially the best aspects of both?
[00:30:36] Speaker B: I think you can live in the middle. I don't think it has to be a dramatic change, because what I am teaching and what really improves your health are small, incremental changes over time.
We all want the silver bullet. We all want the instant improvement.
Well, sometimes we get that, but mostly we have to make small, incremental changes.
In my personal case, I changed everything in my life because I wanted to live in alignment with what I was learning from Dr. Mao and Dr. Dow. And so as I learned more about Chinese medicine, as I started speaking publicly about Chinese medicine, because I really wanted. I'm like, oh, my God. Doctors need to know about this.
Well, in the late 80s and early 90s, they could care less.
So I discovered real quick, well, okay, that's not going to work.
I'm going to give you an example, though, from my practice. I ended up specializing in chronic degenerative diseases, and I treated a tremendous amount of carcinoma. Every type of cancer you can think of, I've treated.
So how do you use Chinese medicine? You use it to control the side effects of the chemotherapy. You use it to control the radiation burns. I would have breast cancer patients that had no radiation burns.
I had one of them that I knew, an oncology radiologist, and she was a patient of his. And she said, the nurse said, can I see your burns? And she goes, I don't have Any burns.
And there's just like, what are you talking about? Let me see. And she went out and got the doctor and said, you have got to see this. And then he calls me up and I'm like, it's not that hard. It's really not that hard. You just have to constantly be clearing the heat that the radiation is causing.
So that is an example where the two work together very, very well.
I told you. And I really believe this. If I'm hit by a Mack truck, take me to the er.
Yeah, I think emergency medicine is really, really, really good.
And I think when you have chronic diseases or chronic degenerative diseases, they didn't happen overnight. It's going to take a while to undo them and you really can. And I saw that over and over and over. I would give my patients a check off sheet. It's about five or six pages long. It takes about 20 minutes to fill out. And I said, every time you see this symptom, even if you've checked it off before, check it off again.
And then I take those symptomologies and I create that five element chart. Well, the people that had the most imbalances were actually the people that were the easiest to fix because no matter where you started, they started to improve.
[00:33:47] Speaker C: Yeah, that's powerful. And it's very sort of hopeful and encouraging too.
[00:33:53] Speaker B: You can't learn it overnight. I mean, that's the thing. That's why I developed a curriculum that's little tiny weekly shifts helping you become more and more aware.
Because I really believe it's about awareness and adaptability and what happens in our culture. Because we're so Western medicine based and we're so pill based.
And you think about this, if you go to a doctor, they only have three tools. They can drug it, they can radiate it, they can cut it out.
Those are the only tools they have.
So my patients would come back going, well, I saw the doctor and he just wants me to take this drug. And I'm like, well, what did you expect?
That's his toolkit.
So in Chinese medicine, our toolkit is much, much, much bigger. The foundation is nutrition.
And there's just so many little things that you can do. Just the smallest thing, like having watermelon when it's 110 outside, that helps your body. That's a very simple thing to do. That doesn't take a massive lifestyle change.
Now, I had one patient right out of medical school, she went in for a hysterectomy. She was in her 40s and they discovered she was just full of cancer.
They sewed her up in her home, and I actually saw her in her home.
I normally give patients three things to do.
If they master those three things, they get three more things, because it's about those small incremental steps.
Well, I wrote out two pages of stuff that this woman needed to do if she was going to live. But we're talking about somebody that's fourth stage diagnosed.
This woman would not eat a vegetable. She wanted to eat rice and pasta and potatoes. That was her diet.
So I actually found. And again, this was in the 90s.
I actually found an encapsulated vegetable at that point. There's a lot more of them now than there was then, so that I could try to get that aspect of nutrition into her diet because she wouldn't do it on her own.
Now, the thing that was amazing about her is she lived two full years and she had tumors in her liver. And usually tumors in your liver, you're looking at six months.
She reversed the tumors in her liver. She worked full time. She took no time off. She did do traditional chemotherapy.
And after about two years, she just said, I'm done. I just don't want to do this anymore. And so she did pass away, but to work full time.
So it's also about your quality of your life.
Yes, she had a terminal illness, and she had fantastic quality of life at the end of her life.
[00:37:01] Speaker C: Yeah.
That's beautiful.
So I do have a question.
What is the difference between summer and late summer?
[00:37:13] Speaker B: Well, in late summer, late summer is the earth element. So it's your spleen and your stomach and your digestion.
And the way I handle that, because we're all geared to four seasons, is every season I spend a couple of weeks where I talk about the earth element.
But that's late summer. It's, you know, in Seattle, it's what you might call an Indian summer.
Here we are praying that it cools off.
But it's really. It's really so. Summer is heart, it's the fire.
Late summer is the earth.
It's the grounding that really, truly, the earth is the foundation of our lives. You want really good spleen and stomach qi. You want your digestion to be good, because that. So let me go back.
We have energy, or we get energy from three different ways. A genetic component from your parents, the food that you eat, and the air that you breathe. It's those three things combined that give you your overall energy.
And so that digestive process is really, really important for being able to extract the nutrition to increase your qi.
[00:38:39] Speaker C: So here we are. It's still summer.
We're headed into late summer at some point, presumably, in addition to the watermelon and cucumbers, what should we be up to now, and what's on the next horizon for us seasonally in terms of things that we should be doing and thinking about?
[00:39:02] Speaker B: Well, for now, and let me see if I can explain that in a way that will make sense.
So we Say fall starts September 21st in the Chinese calendar. It's actually six weeks before that.
So we're actually in late summer. Now.
There's this kind of odd time shift when you really start talking about the five elements.
But as we go into the earth element, you want to make sure that you're using cooked foods. This is a real misnomer. Everybody thinks, oh, I'm having a raw salad. I'm doing great. No, the spleen and your digestion really likes dry and warm.
So cooking your food even slightly does two things. It breaks the cell wall in the plant so that you can actually equip extract the nutrition in the cell.
Plants have very hard, structured cell walls. So just you chewing doesn't break it down necessarily enough to get the nutrition out. But if you lightly cook the food, then you have better digestion and a better ability to extract the nutrition out of your food.
So going into Earth and the late summer, you want cooked foods.
You're starting to have more, perhaps, of the root vegetables as we're moving into fall, because when you think about fall, your energy is starting to drop and go back into the core of your body, just like it does with the trees. So you want to support that process.
So that's some of the things I think. I think cooking your food is probably the most important, important for going into late summer.
[00:40:56] Speaker C: Okay, so sauteed vegetables, roasted vegetables, grilled, that sort of thing. Yeah.
[00:41:03] Speaker B: Baked apples instead of raw apples.
Even in oatmeal, you know, I've had oatmeal with oranges in it where I've actually cooked an orange lightly in the oatmeal.
And we don't think about that in our culture, we eat things raw.
And that is really hard on your digestion.
[00:41:22] Speaker C: Huh. Interesting.
Well, good.
So as people have more questions as they want to get in touch with you online, where do they find you? Where can folks get in touch with you?
[00:41:40] Speaker B: They can just go to livingintheseason.com easy to remember because we're talking about seasonal living. So livingintheseason.com they I have a free ebook there that they can access if they would like to. I have a lot of blog articles about different aspects of different seasons. There's a lot of really useful information at the website.
[00:42:05] Speaker C: Awesome.
Well, Mary Lee, I learned a lot.
I thank you so much for that.
Some good practical advice. I'm going to go cook some vegetables here for lunch and I just really appreciate you taking the time today. It was great to meet you. Great to talk to you.
[00:42:26] Speaker B: Well, thank you so much, Ramsey, for having me. I love to talk about Chinese medicine, in case you can't tell.
And it's always a pleasure to have an opportunity to educate people and share the knowledge that I have because people really can take control of their lives. They can quit outsourcing their health and there are very, very simple things that they can do that will have a tremendous impact on their health.
[00:42:54] Speaker C: Wonderful.
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[00:42:58] Speaker A: Visit whatsworthwhile.net to listen to podcast episodes. Master your response to stress by reading my book, Stress Response, available through Amazon, or to get better before burnout sets in by requesting the free guide. Regardless of where you are in your
[00:43:14] Speaker C: journey, I'd love to hear from you
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[00:43:34] Speaker B: Sam.
