Whether you’re feeling under the weather or the grey days are making you gloomy, we have some tips to winter-proof your body, mellow your mood and soothe aches and sniffles.
Dry Skin
Moving from the freezing cold outside into overheated conditions inside can play havoc with your skin leaving it dry and flaky. Using a good quality moisturizer is important; however, it’s also important to moisturize from the inside out and for that, we suggest you pick foods rich in magnesium, essential fatty acids, vitamin C, and beta-carotene, which will make you less prone to dryness. Beans, broccoli, salmon, and other fatty fish, oranges, and carrots all contain ingredients that will help hydrate your skin.
Colds and Flu
I find Chinese medicine to be particularly good at preventing colds or speeding up the time it takes to recover from one. Last week I was due to record an interview, about acupuncture, with Katie Couric for ABC News, when I came down with a cold and a sinus infection. My face was swollen and puffy, my voice was hoarse and I felt achy and tired. This was not how I wanted to face the TV cameras, so I prescribed myself some herbs and the Yinova team gave me lots of acupuncture and I managed to shed my symptoms within 48 hours.
Joint Pain
Do you have weather-predicting joints? Lots of people, particularly those with arthritis, complain that their joint pain gets worse when it’s cold and damp. Modern research suggests that the reason for this is that the fluid around the joints gets thicker when it’s cold leading to stiffness and pain. Chinese medicine has recognized this for hundreds of years and there are great herbal formulas to treat the kind of joint pain that reacts badly to winter weather. Moxibustion combined with acupuncture is a great treatment for this. Here is a video of Yinova acupuncturist, Anne Brunn, demonstrating how moxibustion works.
