Healthy recipes to remove dampness and detoxify, bid farewell to body heaviness

If you want to eliminate dampness and detoxify by eating, say goodbye to the swollen face when you wake up, heavy walking, sticky stools and sticky stools that are not clean after flushing three times, the core is never to drink red bean and barley water for a month, but to first identify whether you have a "cold-dampness" or "damp-heat" constitution and then adjust the ingredients of the three meals accordingly. At the same time, avoid milk tea, ice drinks, and refined sugar, the three most easily ignored "humidity-causing majors". People with a good metabolic foundation can feel that the body's heaviness is significantly relieved in as little as one week.

Last month, my best friend worked overtime for three consecutive months, taking turns to drink iced American style + full-sugar milk tea every day. When she woke up in the morning, her eyes were swollen like walnuts that had just been cried. She could make deep marks on her ankles when wearing socks. It was not pleasant to squat on the toilet for ten minutes. She went to see a Chinese medicine doctor for a pulse and told her that the moisture was heavy. She went home and cooked red bean and barley water for half a month. The more she drank, the more she became afraid of the cold. My aunt was so painful that she broke into a cold sweat and asked to take leave at home. Later, I helped her adjust the recipe, and within a week she sent me a message, saying that now she didn’t have to take breaths when climbing to the fourth floor, and it was much easier to go to the bathroom.

In fact, regarding the term "wet", the cognitive differences in different fields are quite large. In traditional Chinese medicine, dampness is divided into cold and heat. Those who are usually afraid of heat, have bad breath, have repeated redness, swelling and acne on the face, and have sticky and strong-smelling stools are mostly caused by damp-heat. However, those who usually have cold hands and feet, thick white tongue coating, diarrhea after eating something cold, and persistent unformed stools are basically cold-damp. ； There is actually no clear concept of "moisture" in modern nutrition. Most of it corresponds to intestinal flora disorder, accumulation of metabolic waste, and tissue edema caused by insufficient protein intake caused by long-term high-sugar and high-oil diet. The logic of the two sides is different, but the adjustment direction actually has many things in common.

If you have a damp-heat constitution, drinking red bean and barley water is indeed useful, but you must pay attention to two details: the barley must be fried in advance over low heat until it is slightly yellow to dispel the cold. The red beans must be slender red beans, not round ordinary red beans. The latter is mainly for replenishing qi and blood, and has a much weaker effect of removing dampness. When I was very hot and humid last summer, I cooked winter melon and pork ribs soup twice a week. I added 3 grams of Poria cocos into it. It didn’t require too much seasoning, and it had a light and fresh aroma. I drank a bowl at noon and ran to the toilet twice in the afternoon. The swelling on my face disappeared very quickly, and the usual sleepiness in the afternoon was much lighter. I occasionally cooked cold purslane as a side dish.

If you have a cold-damp constitution, be sure not to drink cold things like raw barley or iced drinks. The more you drink, the more wet you will be. My mother is a typical cold-damp person. Two years ago, her face was so swollen when she woke up that she couldn't even recognize it. Now she steams half a stick of yam every morning with a small bowl of stir-fried pumpkin and millet porridge. After less than a month of drinking it, she said that her old shoes no longer squeeze her feet. You can also make some ginger and red date tea to drink, but remember to drink it in the morning. Drinking it in the afternoon will easily cause you to get angry. If you are too lazy to cook, steaming some pumpkin and frying some white lentils will also work.

Oh, by the way, don’t listen to others who say that you need to be vegetarian to get rid of dampness. It’s totally unnecessary. Both traditional Chinese medicine and modern nutrition recognize the role of eating high-quality protein appropriately. To put it bluntly, if you eat enough protein such as lean meat, fish, shrimp, and eggs, the water in your body will not run into the skin and swell, and naturally you will not feel heavy all over. When I was adjusting the diet for my best friend, I specifically asked her to eat a fistful of shrimps or lean beef for lunch every day. She was originally worried about gaining weight after eating too much, but in the end she lost two pounds in a week, which was all due to the edema that had gone away.

Nowadays, many nutrition bloggers say that "removing dampness is an IQ tax." In fact, this is not wrong. If you stay up until two or three o'clock every day and eat ice milk tea and barbecue, it will be useless no matter how much ingredients you eat to remove dampness. Whether you believe in the physical conditioning of traditional Chinese medicine or the metabolic adjustment of modern nutrition, the core is to avoid high-sugar and high-fat ice drinks and to have a regular work and rest schedule. This is a general principle recognized by both parties.

My biggest feeling after practicing the method in the past two years is that removing dampness is really not a complicated matter. You don’t need to buy a bunch of dampness-removing tea pills that cost hundreds of dollars. You just need to pay more attention when eating, drink two less cups of iced milk tea, steam half more yams when steaming, and don’t peel the winter melon too cleanly. The cost is less than a few yuan, and you can feel the changes after two weeks of persistence. After all, the refreshing feeling of walking lightly and not having to secretly brush the toilet three times every time after squatting down is something you will never forget once you try it once.