026 - Eating for Hormone Health: A Chinese Medicine Approach With Amanda Ody

This week I’m joined by my lovely friend and acupuncturist Amanda Ody to explore how acupuncture and Chinese medicine can support us in midlife.

Amanda has been treating women for over 25 years and I’ve personally benefited from her wisdom and care for many years. In this episode she explains the principles of yin and yang in a really practical way and shows how they connect to the changes we go through in menopause - from hot flushes and dryness to fatigue, weight changes and anxiety.

We also talk about food, herbs and simple lifestyle choices that can bring your body back into balance, plus why acupuncture can be such a powerful support during this stage of life.

If you’ve ever wondered how Chinese medicine fits into modern midlife health, this conversation will give you fresh insight, practical tips and a new way of looking at your own wellbeing.

Get in touch with Amanda:

• Be Healthy with Amanda members podcast
• Subscribe here - £5.99 / month
• Email: hello@amandaryder.co.uk
• Buy Amanda's book - Feel Good for Menopause here
• Follow Amanda on Instagram @amandarydernutrition

Transcript

So I am sitting here today with Amanda Odie who is an acupuncturist and we are discussing how midlife women can really be helped by acupuncture and all the various things that you can do not just within a treatment session but also what you can do with foods. So welcome to the podcast Hi, so I'd like to talk a bit more about Chinese medicine because it's much wider than acupuncture so Chinese medicine has five arms, there's acupuncture, there's food, there's herbs, there's twina which is push-pull for massage and there's also qigong. That's so interesting because most of us think of acupuncture as just you go into you know you lay on a bed and you have needles you know put in you and yeah I mean I've been having acupuncture with Amanda for gosh how many years? A lot. 

Yeah a lot of years probably yeah I think probably since about 2010 or something so probably like 15 years right and I have it because I like the fact that you know you put the pins in and it kind of it does something to my energy I'm not really sure so that's why I'm so pleased to have you on the podcast so you can explain to us but it's basically you help my energy channels so that's how I understand acupuncture but then when I'm talking to you I know that you're you know have so much knowledge about food and you know how that can really impact us and how Chinese medicine can influence our health just by you know what we eat and what we put in our bodies. Can you speak to us a bit more about that as well? Sure so acupuncture and Chinese medicine is based on the principles of yin and yang. Yin is the is the character for yin is represented by the the shady side of a mountain and yang is represented by the the sunny side of a mountain and so if you if you want to liken the these characters to characteristics in people the yang is is your heating element your your fire the yin is your cooling element your water so as we approach middle age your yin typically declines and so does your yang but but women typically have more yin and it is said by the time that someone a woman gets to 40 they've lost half of their yin so if you imagine if yin is your like water and coolant if you've lost that then oftentimes as we as we know when you get to menopause you get too dry or you get other things like you're too hot you experience hot flushes and lots of dryness but there are other patterns as well so you can actually get too too much yang which would be the the classic people have just become quite maybe big around their waist they put on that that sort of weight and they become more waterlogged so that would be a yang pattern and so there's lots that Chinese medicine has to say about the food that you can help so that can help can I just stop you there Amanda can I just ask so can you describe to us if if if we're more yin what symptoms would be would we be right so if you're more yin deficient you'll have it more experience more dry problems so you might have dry skin dry hair vaginal dryness you might have more hot flushes that kind of stuff so that's quite a common pattern isn't it absolutely like women yeah absolutely yeah typically people are yin deficient but also yang deficient and then there's another factor called qi which is your energy generally and that can get stuck as well so then people can have yin deficiency and yang deficiency and qi stuckness which we call qi stagnation okay gosh so if I'm yin deficient I'm kind of dry I've got dry hair dry skin you know all the dries I'm experiencing them and if I'm yang deficient what what symptoms might I have so you might be prone to weight gain you might be having much more tiredness fatigue that kind of stuff and you might actually feel quite cold yeah so some women in menopause actually also get quite cold too I mean generally we know in scientific terms that our thermoregulation is impaired yes yeah so you can go one way hot or yeah but yeah yeah but some people will feel colder although that's is that less common do you see that I'd say less commonly but I think classically lots of women tend to put on weight yes yeah yeah and I would describe that you know through my nutrition sort of brain and and understanding you know oestrogen and progesterone as they drop off these symptoms you know you get hotter and but I wouldn't split them into I would say you know if somebody comes in and they've got you know hot flushes dry skin you know dry eyes dry hair all the symptoms and then weight gain I would be describing as like a blood sugar imbalance you know we're not so sensitive to insulin we're losing our oestrogen progesterone but in Chinese medicine you can use Chinese medicine as a framework to understand okay the hormone differences as well so for instance you could look at for instance a yin deficiency could be much more to do with oestrogen so oestrogen is is is if you think about what oestrogen does it provides so if you want to look at yin could pertain more to oestrogen and yang can pertain more to progesterone and testosterone and if you think about what progesterone does as we know medically it will it's thermogenic so it will raise your temperature so you can kind of start to see that there's hot and cold within somebody and and if you look before somebody hits menopause you've got a biphasic pattern in their their cycle so they're when their oestrogen is is high in the first part of the cycle in the follicular phase you've got a roughly a temperature of 32 point sorry 36.2 and then it will be elevated in the phase to about 36.7 so you have a less 0.4 0.5 degrees elevation and when you start losing the oestrogen well progesterone first actually you start seeing some some quite often you can have coldness but you can also have a lot of of heat as well so it just depends what that person is is like to start with so if somebody is is is already too hot I mean Chinese medicine we talk a lot about the old old books talk about whether someone's too hot too cold too dry or too wet so out of these principles somebody might have been running too hot all of their life so if they've been tracking their their basal body temperatures they might have been elevated so they instead of at 36 point uh 37.2 they 36.2 they might they might have been averaging about 36.5 those women can often hit menopause and be quite hot whereas the the women um who were who were colder then will hit menopause and be colder so they're more yin the the former would be more yin deficient and the latter would be more yang deficient but presumably that's quite hard to know whether you're in you know I mean it's hard to know if you're one or the other because they're quite small differences aren't they yeah obviously you can tell but if I was someone listening and I'm thinking oh am I yin deficient what can I do or am I yang deficient how can we how would we be able to differentiate as to which one right so we are very symptom led okay if for instance um somebody is running too hot then then the old um Chinese um books would say where there's too much heat make it cold so there's very um simple ways you can do that with your food so for can I just interrupt one second darling just to say and I'm calling Amanda darling because I know her so well she's a dear friend as well but I've been seeing you and just to make this real for listeners what am I am I am I too dry too hot what can you remember what I am so yin deficient yang deficient so I'd say because women are by the time they get to 40 they've lost half of their yin so we're pretty much everybody everybody's gonna be indifficient yeah and but they're also yang deficient as well it's what is the nature of what happens as we age yeah it's just some people will hit menopause with more yin deficiency than others and some people will hit menopause with more yang deficiency than others and then some people might be more stuck than others so it's just everybody's individual and they're individual at a particular time of their life so you treat the symptoms rather than the general um so if somebody's running too hot um there's there's a bunch of things I actually work at a cancer charity as well and um so I help um treat women just with acupuncture but for hot flushes due to cancer treatment and um I always say to them if they want to make their hot flushes worse which of course they don't um but if they wanted to they would have a lamb curry with some red wine and some um really sugary pudding and then with a with a coffee because all of those uh ingredients actually elevate your heat um and so um conversely if they wanted to cool their flushes down they would avoid all caffeine which I'm sure is what you would say as well but caffeine is very heating the only really uh useful uh caffeinated drink that's cooling in Chinese medicine is green tea so you can get away with drinking caffeine but you have to drink it as green tea but things like mint tea which traditionally you know throughout I don't know lots of parts of the of the world they drink in very hot places actually cools you down so that's very useful so if we want to want to be cooler green tea and mint tea yes yeah as drinks yeah um rather than than than coffee and and coffee even if you had it cold iced coffee it's still very heating because so there's an idea in Chinese that that medicine that if you there's an energy within the food inherent within the food and it doesn't matter whether you cook it or not so even if you try to flame grill a cucumber it's still cooling whereas steak is always heating so if you've got somebody too hot you would try to avoid lots of the red meats and lamb is particularly heating so would you say so I'm presumably yin deficient yeah so for me and women that listening like me that are you know I've lost half their yin as we kind of do and even if you take hormones you're on HRT you're still yin deficient or how does that mitigate some of the okay and then that's why women take HRT because it it stops hot flushes and it and it increases um you know sometimes if you're doing it vaginally it'll increase lubrication so it it stops dryness yeah basically yeah yeah okay there is a crossover there for sure so if I'm listening and I'm thinking oh you know yeah I want to do I'm having I feel you know yeah like I could you know I've got drier skin drier hair you know maybe you've got vaginal issues whatever what can I do um to you know replace some of that yin or to help with the yin through my diet right or lifestyle I think so so so well definitely with the diet so you want to avoid um things like red meat um especially lamb and and beef but actually the the you can you can eat duck that's very cooling that's really interesting yeah so why um you think about sort of um you know having duck in the Chinese restaurant don't you but if you ever buy a duck and you cook it it's very fatty yes okay and the fat is the is the is the grease is the yin yeah so you said earlier very unctuous yes yeah so that's that's that's and that cools you yes but it also lubricates you okay yeah it's not necessarily that it's so cooling but it's very lubricating okay and if you compare duck with chicken you don't get anywhere near as much fat from cooking a chicken as you would a duck yeah so it's that is that that's the difference and likewise with pork that's quite cooling too and then cooking with the bones of these things is very very helpful too for our bones too it is yeah can you elaborate so in Chinese medicine um there there is um a concept of marrow which we have in in western medicine but it's it's it's talking about the essence of of the animal and and if you cook it for a long time as you would probably tell your clients that it releases collagen okay so i think Chinese medicine would say that collagen is yin okay so you know if you increased your collagen you're going to increase your yin so you probably tell people to take collagen powders and boil bones yes for the reasons that i would do the same yeah yeah oh that's really interesting so there's lots of crossovers yeah it's really fascinating yeah so sort of pork and duck and and and oysters but oysters yeah okay they've got lots of zinc but not obviously you know you can't eat 15 oysters a day but actually that would be really good for your yin if you could if you could yeah okay yeah any other kind of any other foods i think we were talking earlier you mentioned goji berries so so oh so goji berries are an interesting thing because they are um herbal but they they're in this category where they're herbal and culinary so there are lots of herbs in Chinese medicine that are just medicinal but goji berries and dates would be in the culinary category so you can cook with them but they also are very medicinal okay okay but you have to be careful with goji berries because they're very sticky and so they can they in Chinese medicine we call them cloying so if you were to eat a handful of those just by themselves um they they absorb a lot of water don't they but they can they're very sticky they're very sugary so if you've got a sensitive digestion your stomach chi isn't very strong then you can cause a lot of bloating if you start eating handfuls of them every day yeah and a lot of us do get the message that maybe goji berries are good for us so a little bit of goji berry is good so therefore a lot must be good and it's not necessary it's not true and actually if you're gonna i've done that many times if you're gonna have goji berries you really best to to have them in in boiling water and and soak them yeah and then drink them as a tea oh really yeah i make this lovely i put it on my instagram it's this lovely asian mix where you put in i think it's two tablespoons of pistachios two tablespoons of flax seed two tablespoon of pumpkin seeds uh and then some black sesame seeds and and i think the same of goji berries and you mix them all up and it it's got a sweetness but it's got an earthiness to it and i use that like on toppings for yoghurt so you put all those ingredients in a pan you gently heat them and then you grind them in a you know in a blender or whatever um but they god it's quite addictive but it tastes so lovely and it's a mix that they use in asia for all sorts of like for hair for skin well so you know so yes so goji berries are very famous in asia for tonifying the blood so we didn't even talk about that but that's another aspect of of menopause we can get back to that okay and and linseeds are very famous in chinese medicine they're actually in the material so linseeds and flaxseeds are the same thing yeah that's right um and and they are very famous for being a yin tonic and so when you look um scientifically at what linseeds contain they contain a lot of phytoestrogens so it's kind of there are always these bridges that you can build between what the science says and what chinese medicine says in the old books but you know it's oestrogen yeah actually phytoestrogen so it's very famous for if you ever have got ground linseeds and you soak them they'd swell up yes yeah and that's kind of that's what i'm talking about when i talk about yin it's lubricating it's watery it's slippery yeah and that's what women lose yeah yeah that's what you're trying to put back in with your food i mean yeah sure you can take supplements and and but it's it's like we have to all eat every day so you might as well try and get as much slippery stuff yeah back in your diet and and and fatty stuff that is also somewhat cooling yeah so what other like we're thinking of vegetables or what what vegetables will give us more yin pretty much all of the vegetables are are kind of cooling um so and they're watery usually as well so that's you know they're not um necessarily a yin tonic but but um they're they you know you just should or you should always include them um there are some particular so in chinese medicine there's also uh this idea of organs as indeed there is in western medicine so but particular things go to particular organs so for instance if you've got a um say if you had covid and you had a really bad chest infection and then you had a really dry cough afterwards what you want to do for dry you want to make it wet so you want to put moisture back in your in your lungs and a thing that's really good for that is pears oh pears yum they're very watery yes yeah yeah so they're they're very helpful for your lung energy but we're not talking about lungs we're not but all these foods are good to eat on a on a weekly basis for most women that are listening to this because yeah majority of us are yin deficient yeah i mean and if you're yang deficient and you're too watery then you want to be putting in some warmer stuff so you may be wanting to do that put in some more red meat or you're wanting to put in some spicy foods yeah well you know it's okay then to drink a bit of alcohol for those people who are a bit cold but a tiny bit a medicinal bit yeah you know chinese medicine has a lot to say about alcohol yes that's interesting what does it have to say about alcohol so if you're talking on a scale the the beer and cider are the least heating and then white wine is the next one red wine is more heating and then chinese medicine actually spirits are called fire water so if you really when you say spirits you mean like vodka and gin and yeah yeah so if you really want to get hot then you drink yeah yeah and and actually we all know that if we have a spirit we just feel quite i mean i know since i've been in midlife um sorry to bore all the poor listeners because they've heard this a million times before but you know just this heat when you drink it says it never used to be there but you know you just get hotter because you're drinking alcohol yeah yeah it makes sense yeah so you talked a lot about like you know fatty meats like duck and pork and also red meats if you're a bit yang deficient you're too watery and i'm thinking oh cholesterol you know midlife women have got to be a bit careful with cholesterol what's your opinion on that um well i think everything in balance and that's probably what you would say i mean don't eat do too much of anything i mean and and you know eat a rainbow and yeah lots and lots of diversity yeah i mean that's what you guys say yeah absolutely yeah and what about fish where does fish so so some fish i mean um prawns are very heating actually so i mean it's kind of interesting because in western medicine we know that prawns can cause a lot of allergies yeah i mean you know some people won't eat prawns they'll say oh they're bottom feeders and you know i didn't eat all the crap and therefore you know what's what's your opinion on prawns well i mean everywhere's polluted now right yeah i think you know in the olden days it wasn't yeah yeah you've got to be careful probably i mean it's like tuna you know but but that's kind of yeah yeah it's all right once a week when you're talking about the mercury levels you know if you have tuna more than once or twice a week you know you might be getting more mercury because tuna are such big fish yeah and they buy you accumulate mercury because they eat all the little fish they've got a little bit of mercury in them and then they're suddenly you know they've got yeah a bigger fish so therefore they've all the little fish and then their flesh you get high levels of mercury yeah and different if they're bigger fish they live deeper down yeah they get more because it's heavy metals you know so um anyway that's that's not really chinese medicine i mean in the olden days you know fish prawns are definitely heating so best avoid those if you're indeficient but then you've got the white fishes and then they're they're pretty neutral but something like salmon is actually quite greasy yes and i think that's what the nutritionists would say it's actually rich in omega-3s yes and so that stuff is slippery and lubricating yes again yeah so that's that's how you can kind of keep eating the oily fish guys which we love yes salmon and mackerel and sardines herring yeah trout yeah yeah all of that yeah yeah anything else that you'd have to die i mean i know your diet amanda is very natural but you like a roast don't you on a sunday you always do your chicken or something roasted um amanda grows all her grow used to grow she's in the middle of moving at the moment but you used to grow all your own vegetables a lot of them well a lot of them yeah and yeah so you're i mean i would say your diet is quite balanced but you do you do kind of prioritise food that yeah you know the origin i think i think there's always um room for improvement for all of us right but i think it's it's best to try to eat food that's grown locally and seasonally um and i think that's what chinese medicine is very good at saying you you kind of eat stuff in season so i mean there's obviously times of the year where you cannot get so much food but it's probably not best i mean we all love bananas we all love oranges but it's you know this this stuff is for instance bananas are very dampening so if somebody's quite um sluggish and have got slow um uh digestion and they're also maybe quite you know like watery um sludgy uh bananas aren't that great so you've just got to be careful with what you've got what your particular presentation is and then match the food according to that having said that one banana day is probably going to be fine but you know they come from a hot place and actually they're quite cooling and quite um well as you would say very sweet so you don't want to eat a load of them no yeah but berries like you know berries good so berries are usually very good and i think you guys would say they don't you know like if you're talking about glycaemic index is low yeah um but but you know berries are um you know as we know in in western medicine rich in you know all sorts of antioxidants and that sort of stuff but in chinese medicine they're they're they're very helpful for yin yeah for sure yeah and and going back to the goji berries do you think it's a good idea for most of us to have some goji berries in our diet then well so in china um they would typically drink goji berries with um in in hot water yeah you can eat eat it when it's swollen um but you wouldn't eat loads of them and and classically um they have it with um chrysanthemum flowers and it's very good for you nourishing your what we call liver blood so it which is actually very good for your eyes so if you have dry eyes which a lot of women do uh in menopause and postmenopausally uh it's actually very lubricating they're quite slippery goji berries yes yeah yeah so it's that kind of thing that you're trying to tend to yes to to increase the the um the wetness and the slipperiness yeah yeah interesting so interesting so any any other any other headlines when it comes to food that we haven't included before we move on from that topic well so i think um you know quite often uh something like a bone vinegar is very very helpful so um you can um or a vinegar that you use um i classically give people about five six chinese herbs to soak um in apple cider vinegar and and then put loads of vegetables in say like kale or parsley nettles if they're doing it in springtime and a tablespoon of that in a bit of water every day is is really helpful for a um probably about 500 milligrammes of calcium yeah so so thinking about bone health basically yeah yeah because we do lose bone most of us lose bone as we get older and we have to work quite hard to keep it maintain it yeah so just stop it going down too quickly basically because it does yeah it we do lose it unfortunately absolutely and so there's a there's a lot of uh chinese herbs which are not medicinal which are actually uh so we're sorry not culinary yeah which are just medicinal i mean you wouldn't really want to drink them uh like for for culinary purposes because they taste quite strong but they are actually very useful at strengthening your bones yeah so so do you believe that we can maintain our bone mass if we're quite sort of proactive well as you you and i know it's much more than just your diet you need to do a lot of exercise yeah um you know stress the bones and and and also not have so much stress in your life because that cortisol will will you know do you know yeah from a western perspective that that antagonises insulin all sorts of stuff but like causes havoc with your bones yes yeah and alcohol as well too much alcohol is is also yeah so this bone um what would you call this bone uh bone vinegar bone vinegar yeah i've made this before um and maybe i could put the recipe in the show notes but basically can you describe that once more so you get apple cider vinegar so yeah and i i use typically give uh my clients about five different chinese herbs and then you put those in the bottom of a of a you know kilner jar and then you fill um put greens in so if it's in springtime fresh nettle tops because they're rich in um calcium no iron iron and vinegar is very useful at extracting minerals so that's that's the the the the means by which you're increasing your calcium so there's lots of vegetables and also my herbs that that have they're quite rich in calcium but there's also other uh minerals that are really useful for bone builders like silicon um silica which is in um a horsetail for instance yeah and i remember that book manda gave me a book about what it's called now but years ago we had that book and it was you recommended it was for bone health and it's got this recipe in there don't remember it just being chinese herbs was there something else in there because if somebody's listening and they're thinking oh i want to make that uh it didn't have your chinese herbs and it had something else in it because it was just a recipe oh so anyone could get but um well i think most of them were chinese herbs but you can get them yeah i mean they're they're available probably from somewhere like um baldwins online so this yeah so basically if people are interested and they want to make this i will put the recipe in the show notes and it's basically a drink that you have did you say a couple of tablespoons a day just a tablespoon mixed in water mixed in water and that's going to give you about half the amount or you know or one third of the amount of calcium you need on a daily basis absolutely yeah because it is quite hard to get we need about 12 1300 milligrammes of calcium a day uh postmenopausal and you know or premenopausal whatever i mean yeah it's hard you know i look at people's diaries and you're not getting it and a lot of people aren't doing dairy these days i mean what's your what's your opinion on on dairy so in chinese medicine dairy is very dampening um so actually if somebody's classically very dry dairy is pretty useful because it's slippery yeah yeah you know if you think of yoghurt it's slippery and it's wet um and so it's that's and it's and there's a heaviness to cheese as well so if somebody's quite um uh dry then it's it's you know it's greasy um so that's quite useful for some people but maybe not for the people that have put on lots of weight because they're also yang deficient as well so they have a mixed pattern of yin deficiency and yang deficiency okay yeah can you tell so well before i get into that let's just go back to the dairy a second so again you know we think cheese high in saturated fat um you know greek yoghurt seems to be having a moment of you know at the moment because everyone's talking about you know it's got you know good levels of protein in it but do you think you know that that eating lots of cheese and eating lots of greek yoghurt is is perfectly all right and butter and what's your opinion on butter i think so um they have they're probably in the neutral zone when it comes to whether they are hot or cold so it's not too bad to eat them if you're too hot um they're not super cooling but but they're neutral so i think you know if somebody's very dry they're very helpful yeah yeah and it just i think dairy kind of went out of fashion and a lot of people were doing dairy free and now i think with things like kefir and yoghurt getting talked about quite a lot i'm finding people are quite enjoying going back to dairy um i do see some people that just do not get on with it they do struggle i'm sure you must see people so some people just absolutely yeah just don't get with dairy but if you don't have a problem with it it's quite useful it's quite it's quite useful and i think that the dairies i mean especially um cheese is is i mean they're all of the dairy though is is quite heavy and so if if some women are very anxious it's actually a heavy food and it's really helpful for that anxiety is it that's really interesting yeah in our old you know kind of ideas we just say you know have a cup of warm milk for bed to calm you down yeah it's to do with that yeah you know who eats uh um you know what's milk for for babies yeah it's it's nourishing yes yeah um i think having said that you know it's always about balance and in china you know there's not a load of dairy so you know people would probably eat um you know instead of having an ice cream i mean i don't recommend ice cream at all because that's frozen i mean maybe if it's 40 degrees but but that's it's very very cooling so um typically in in china there's not a big um this idea of everything's like ice in drinks for instance it's it just kills your digestion um and it's that's interesting ice kills your digestion because you want the heat and the you need you need the pot yeah to cook stuff yes yeah i mean sometimes that pot's too hot and you you have all sorts of gastro problems like gastritis or you know reflux and stuff but you know maybe those people want to cool stuff down and and and and um you know that's why we put in kind of milk and it calms you know the tummy down but um you've got to be you've got to be um if you're putting too much ice into somebody then you're really gonna interfere with their digestive enzymes and just their just thermally it's it's we need to be a certain temperature to actually cook our food yeah yeah no absolutely i know you said to me that uh well i can run a bit cold my temperature can be can be quite cool and um yeah and i often feel cold and you said to me you know i need more like warming spices and and hot food shouldn't eat cold food and i find that's really helpful like if i have breakfast and it's got you know a bit of heat in it whether that comes from ginger or or some chilli on an egg or something like that i've been making this i've been making this uh lovely breakfast where you have like a fat bread and then i add some hummus a layer of hummus to that and then i add some harissa paste lovely yeah and then i might add you know some greens like a handful of rocket maybe some cherry tomatoes and then i put an egg on the top or two eggs it's so yummy and it's kind of like it's got that heat and it's got you know protein from the eggs and from the hummus and i feel like that keeps me going for like hours and i just feel a bit warmer on that whereas sometimes i'll have a smoothie and i try and get my fruit in the smoothie that hasn't been frozen because it's really brilliant in the having like cold berries in your freezer and then you know i make my smoothie and i might throw a handful of berries in and even on a hot day i think oh i'm feeling a bit chilly so really i've really sensed that it really cools me down so it depends on the nature of the person so if somebody's running too hot generally they can probably get away with drinking uh something you know frozen berries in just about but um in chinese medicine you know your height of your digestive fire is between 7 and 11 in the morning so if you're putting cold stuff on the fire you know like any fire if you put cold on cold water on a fire you're going to put the fire out you need a certain amount of fire to cook your food so i wouldn't recommend that people drink anything really if they if they especially if they run cold i'd say really avoid anything from the fridge straight from the fridge and and and avoid any definitely never have anything frozen especially ice yeah gosh that's interesting i've never seen you have an icy drink now come to think of it no you're not an ice cream person either are you i run a bit cold and and if i were somewhere i don't know in 40 degrees then i might be tempted to an ice cream but it would have to be really hot yeah um another thing in chinese medicine is that people tend to eat you know really advocate eating seasonally um in terms of um temperature so you know if it's if it's really if it's the depths of winter you eat soup you eat like the proper hot food um and and so you know sometimes i have clients come to me and they're saying they want to lose weight um and it turns out they're eating salads in the middle of winter and so in chinese medicine i would really say avoid eating raw food you need to eat cooked food especially for the people that are running cold if people are running really hot then maybe they can get away with a bit of salad but in the winter but generally i'd say don't eat too much raw food in the winter yeah that makes sense i mean i've had people as well that have sort of done the metabolic balance with me and they get a list of vegetables that they can have and they've embraced it brilliantly and they followed the plan and they come and they go i've had quite a lot of stomach aches and i'm like what have you been eating and they've been eating like a lot of raw carrot or you know raw you know i don't know not raw broccoli or you know things like that but just quite hard to digest and they're cold and they're uncooked and it's just too overwhelming so there's not a surprise in a lot of asian um you know cuisines you would put something like ginger in to to mitigate some of that coldness so for instance when you have sushi which is cold you would put horseradish with it and ginger pickled ginger because it offsets that cold fascinating and so you see this time and time again that things are paired to offset or mitigate that that hot and cold stuff so yeah i always say to my you know clients if there's too much heat make it cold if there's too much cold make it hot if it's too wet try and make it drier and if it's too dry try and make it wetter yeah yeah that makes sense and you've touched a little bit on anxiety what would you you know if someone comes in and they're feeling and you know i i've suffered with it myself but you know if you are feeling a bit anxious and that it can be quite a common symptom can't it in midlife you know as oestrogen goes down and you just don't quite feel as chill as maybe you once did and you get that overwhelm how would you approach that so if you can imagine you know one of those kettles that you can see through yeah um so if you if you um when you switch it on and you first put the water in it's still but when you switch on and you apply heat to it you're going to start seeing the the water being agitated and it starts bubbling and rising and eventually obviously that boils turns to steam and so the same with us uh anxiety is not cold it's warm and and the more anxious you are probably the more heat there is in the system so you want to have somebody try to cool that heat um and so that's not putting coffee in it's not putting loads of alcohol in it would be putting you know like i said earlier green tea in that will be and i think you guys would talk about l-theanine in that exactly yeah farming amino acid yeah so there's kind of lots of these crossovers once you look at the the um the old wisdom versus the new science yeah there is so much crossover and of course chinese medicine is like how old like four thousand years old well it has a recorded history of two thousand years two thousand i guess yeah but um yeah that's amazing and you know yeah i mean acupuncture is you know we haven't talked about we've talked a lot about foods but the actual you know act of giving acupuncture i mean you see a lot of women don't you yes and you know they come back month after month because you know they feel so much better from seeing you what you know can you can you can you explain why somebody might want to you know explore acupuncture as a way of helping them through the transition or even just you know keeping them healthy as they get older i mean you know you know me i come along sort of every four to five weeks and i see it as maintenance that i have my acupuncture with you i'm not really sure exactly what it does but i just um you know i totally trust in you and and i know you know i talked earlier about very sort of uneloquently about how you know it moves energies and it clears things in your body but that can can you explain to me what acupuncture actually does for people so eloquently than i can so there's this idea that there's energy that runs through people's bodies um but it's called chi in chinese medicine other cultures so in india it's known as prana but chinese medicine talks about it as chi and it flows in channels throughout the day in different channels and these channels can get blocked and by putting needles in particular places you can unblock the flow so there's there's a very famous old saying where there's no movement there's pain so you know classically people would would present to an acupuncturist for treatment for pain any sorts of pain so be that musculoskeletal be it period pain be it migraines that kind of thing and usually there's a stuckness associated with that so sticking a needle in will promote some sort of or elicit some sort of movement to reduce um the pain and and create flow um how that can work in terms of um helping with midlife stuff is that that you know a lot of times things get stuck but also you can balance people's um so to a certain degree you can balance people's yin and yang i mean i think that really um food and herbs is the way to to to strengthen somebody um but acupuncture is somewhat helpful with that yeah and there are there are quite a lot of papers aren't there to show how efficacious acupuncture is for hot flushes for example oh for sure i mean i work at a a a cancer charity that that treats where i treat is that addenbrookes yes cambridge yeah um where where um we treat um people with women with um hot flushes because of breast cancer treatments or men with hot flushes because of um anti-androgen therapy for prostate cancer so both of these groups are have their hormones interfered with um and and that's where you see extreme hot flushes yeah yeah really fascinating wow amanda well that's been you know a really fascinating conversation and i i i reckon i know more now about acupuncture because i normally come and have my treatment and let me tell you amanda sees about seven or eight people every day of the week and she's been doing that for i don't know how many years 25 years she's a very very busy acupuncturist and that's because she's so good at what she does but amanda just to finish up if somebody's listening and you you've given lots of information that we can start using in our everyday lives but what couple of you know standout um pieces of advice would you give someone in midlife who's listening might be struggling a bit um you know to help them through your sort of chinese medicine lens well i think actually it'd probably be the same as the advice you'd give you know balance um and try to eat as much a variety as you can and eat a rainbow um and you know if you're too hot then then look at the food you're eating and try to eliminate that um and if you're too cold um try and and and put warming stuff in if you're and if you want to know more about amanda or you'd like a session with amanda yourself if she could fit you in which i can't promise you because she's quite busy but i will leave amanda's details in the show notes so thanks for listening i hope you enjoyed this one thanks amanda pleasure