• Spring　Go to bed late, rise early, and take a long walk in the courtyard — do not stay shut indoors; go outside
• Summer　Go to bed late, rise early, and do not tire of the sun — do not live in air conditioning, do not hold sweat back
• Autumn　Go to bed early, rise early, keeping the hours of the chickens — gather the spirit, avoid over-excitement
• Winter　Go to bed early, rise late, and wait for the sunlight — keep warm, sweat little

Modern life does the opposite: late nights in winter, cold drinks in summer, days and nights turned around — this is not busyness; it is going against heaven.

A simple standard:

• You wake at daylight, without wrestling the alarm
• You settle when it gets dark, without a screen keeping you going
• You wake loose and easy, without headache or backache

Those sixteen characters stand in a strict order (五谷为养，五畜为助，五果为益，五菜为充). This is not a casual arrangement: they run from the base of a pyramid to its apex — the positions cannot be swapped, the order of principal and supporting cannot be reversed.

1. Why the staple must be grain

Grains enter the spleen and stomach channels and are the easiest thing to turn into qi and blood. After thousands of years of rice, millet, broomcorn millet, wheat, and beans, the spleen and stomach digest them without effort: they are the fuel that costs the least fire.

Meat is different. It belongs among the “assistants” and costs extra spleen fire to ripen and transform. A bowl of rice is dealt with easily; a plate of steak means two or three hours of overtime. Now and then it is a good supplement — but as the star of every meal, the plant will eventually collapse.

2. The five fruits: a little benefits, too much burdens

Fruit is not forbidden; the crucial word is “a little”. Eaten well, it generates fluids and moistens dryness, and has a tonifying effect. Eaten to excess — and most fruit is cold or cool in nature — it leaves those with insufficient spleen yang full of dampness: a thick tongue coating, sticky stools, a bloated belly.

Eat with the season, a little of what is in season. Out-of-season fruit, iced fruit, fruit eaten as a meal — all of it adds dampness.

3. The five vegetables fill out: both support and clearance

The word chong (充, to fill out) carries two meanings, and both are needed.

The first is support — vegetables assist the grains, supplying what grain lacks, so that a meal is not merely filling but complete.

The second is clearance — grains, meat, and fruit all move inward, and gathering in the middle burner they tend to congest. Vegetables take the road of free movement and drainage: they sweep the stomach and intestines clean, so that what comes in can also go out. Go without vegetables and you get bloating, bad breath, and stools that are sticky and never quite complete.

So vegetables walk beside the staple: the staple gives strength, the vegetables give passage. As for ginger, scallion, vinegar, and salt — a little of each guides the medicine and aids transformation; they are supporting players among supporting players.

4. How modern eating turned this upside down

• No breakfast, or a high-protein shake in its place
• A lunchtime salad with chicken breast, carbohydrates cut to almost nothing
• Barbecue or hotpot for dinner, with the staple skipped “for fear of getting fat”
• Snacks that are all protein bars and zero-sugar drinks

The result is a spleen and stomach kept permanently out of work: too little raw material, the plant shuts down, and qi and blood have no source. You may look lean and well-defined, but the foundation is empty: cold hands and feet, loose stools, dwindling periods, hair falling out, exhaustion at the least exertion.

This is a plant with no raw material and a warehouse slowly emptying.

Four principles for eating:

1. Start every meal with the staple — a bowl of rice, a steamed bun; eat it first, then the vegetables and the meat
2. Keep the grains mixed — rotate rice, millet, broomcorn millet, wheat, and beans; add brown rice, foxtail millet, oats, adzuki beans, black beans
3. Meat is the supporting player — no more than a quarter of the plate, with the staple taking half
4. Stop at seven-tenths full, and eat dinner early — leave a third of the stomach empty and the spleen can turn

Every food and every herb carries its own nature — cold, hot, warm, cool, or neutral — along with one of the five flavours (五味) and a texture that may moisten, dry, stick, or slide. This is the qi it drew while growing between heaven and earth, and it does not turn over because you heat it in a pot.

1. Heating is not the same as changing nature

Mung bean is cold: as soup it is still cold. Watermelon is cold: warmed in the microwave it is still cold. Crab is markedly cold: steamed and served hot it is still markedly cold. Heating does one thing only — it makes food easier to digest. It does not change its nature.

It is like a piece of ice held until it melts: warm going down, but once it dissolves it is still cold water in the stomach.

2. What actually does change it

Why is frying different? Because frying is refining by fire. Fire belongs to yang; to refine something in fire is to add a layer of fire qi to it, pressing down its original cold. So fried mung bean clears heat less strongly, but a person with a weak spleen no longer runs to the toilet after drinking it.

3. The usual traps

• “If it is heated it is not cold” — so in summer you drink hot mung bean soup instead of iced, and with a weak spleen you still end up in the bathroom
• Hotpot with watermelon, on the reasoning that “room temperature is fine” — it arrives unchilled, but in the belly it does the same cooling work
• Milk is cold; warmed, it is given to the elderly and children as a warming tonic — but a person of cold constitution still needs a slice of ginger or a little cinnamon to hold it down

The principle by which Chinese medicine heals comes down to four characters: correcting bias with bias (以偏纠偏).

1. Why people fall ill: because they have tipped

• Too cold → aversion to cold, clear nasal discharge, a white coating, cold hands and feet
• Too hot → fever, sore throat, yellow phlegm, a yellow coating
• Too damp → heaviness and fatigue, a greasy coating, sticky stools
• Too dry → dry mouth, dry skin, bound stools

What is health? It is the centre (中) — neither to one side nor the other, cold and heat matched, ascent and descent in order. Illness is that centre having shifted.

2. Why medicine heals: because it carries a bias of its own

Fresh ginger is warm, so it drives out cold; gypsum is cold, so it clears heat; ephedra disperses, so it induces sweat; rhubarb moves downward and drains, so it opens the bowels; ginseng is sweet and warm, so it boosts qi.

A medicine is not something that “kills the enemy”; it is a force with a direction. When the body tips cold, warm medicine pushes the cold aside; when it tips hot, cold medicine presses the heat down; when it is blocked, dispersing medicine opens the way.

3. Which is why medicine is not taken at random

Medicine has bias in itself. Used rightly it corrects a bias; used wrongly it creates a new one: cold-natured remedies for a cold pattern add cold to cold; warming remedies for a heat pattern pour oil on the fire; ginseng slices held in the mouth daily by someone who is not deficient congest the qi until it forces its way out — nosebleeds, mouth ulcers, irritability.

Hence the old rule: stop when the disease is hit (中病即止) — once seven or eight parts of the illness are gone, put the medicine down. A medicine is a wrench for bending things straight, not a daily supplement to hold in the mouth.

4. Food is medicine too, with a smaller bias

This is what “medicine and food share one origin” (药食同源) really means: food and medicine do not differ in kind, only in the size of their bias.

Rice and noodles are almost without bias, so daily eating does no harm. Mung bean is cold: a bowl now and then to clear heat is fine, but daily drinking the spleen cannot bear. Aconite is hot and toxic: used rightly it saves a life, used wrongly it takes one.

5. Writing a prescription is solving a balance problem

One warm herb is balanced by a cool one to hold it; one that rises is anchored by one that descends; one that moves to the exterior is supported by one that moves inward. A dozen herbs make a formula — not a heap of materials but a company in which each assists and checks the others, together pushing the body back toward the centre.