Without Changing Lifestyle, Chronic Diseases Are Hard to Cure at the Root
On the day of the End of Heat (Chushu), I shouldered a hoe and went to my little vegetable plot to turn the soil. I dug about thirty square meters, worked up a heavy sweat, and rubbed the skin off my hands. After digging, I set out cabbage seedlings, planting nearly one hundred large Chinese cabbage starts—this is my family's winter storage cabbage. This is a very primitive way of farming, exhausting, but remarkably effective for weight loss. After growing vegetables for over a year, most of my surplus flesh has melted away; my weight has returned to the value it had in my twenties, back within the standard range.
There has been a lot of rain this year, and the mosquitoes and gnats in the vegetable plot are far more numerous than last year. Several times I went to the plot at night, and the insects, like countless bombers, bit me all over until I was covered in big welts. I even developed allergic reactions a few times, my skin itching and burning all night long, with large patches of redness and swelling. After one trial and another, I discovered that edible white vinegar is the nemesis of this kind of allergy. After dabbing the vinegar several times on the swollen, red areas, all the redness and swelling subsided.
This painful experience made me want to give up gardening several times; for two weeks I barely went to the plot. Once I stopped going, my enthusiasm for exercise also cooled, and my weight began to climb again during those two weeks. In the end I kept on gardening, only changing the time I went to the plot to the morning hours. Mosquitoes are civilized pests—they observe the martial virtues and do not bite during the day.
For years I have also been fighting a battle against my own fat; I am a veteran fat fighter. Earlier attempts at weight loss had not gone well, and during physical checkups my triglycerides and cholesterol had even climbed, and I developed mild fatty liver. But in this year and more of gardening, my triglycerides and cholesterol have dropped, and the fatty liver has resolved. My wife, who often runs to the vegetable plot with me, has also been cured of her fatty liver without treatment. So although I wanted to back down a few times, for the sake of these health benefits I have kept on gardening.
I once read a book called Atomic Habits. I have now forgotten most of its contents, but one sentence from it I have always remembered. The gist of it was that most weight-loss efforts end with the weight bouncing back to where it started; only when we decide to change our lifestyle and become a different person can our weight come down for good.
I have also held gym memberships. Quite apart from the fact that, affected by the pandemic, I no longer dare go to the gym, even before the pandemic going to the gym was not very effective, because it is so hard to keep it up. The beauty of gardening is that once you have planted, you have to keep going to water and harvest. If you stay away for many days, the garden runs wild.
Having left the countryside more than twenty years ago, I often miss rural life. After a year of gardening, the scorching heat and the insects have once again let me taste the hardships I endured in the countryside. When you are suffering, you understand that the real life of a farmer is not all pastoral poetry; it has many disappointments, otherwise so many people would not have wanted to escape farming. When I am exhausted, or covered in insect bites and allergies, I too want to quit. But as soon as I slip back into my old way of living, my weight rebounds without mercy.
A person must balance mental and physical labor; the body must be made to endure some toil to reach its healthiest state. Since the Industrial Revolution, the lifestyles of most people have changed dramatically. In the decades since the Reform and Opening-up, we Chinese have done less and less physical labor. This change has altered the Chinese physique; nowadays more and more Chinese are overweight and fewer are thin. Modern epidemics caused by obesity—diabetes, fatty liver, cancer—have become the mainstream diseases in our disease spectrum.
The reason these chronic diseases are so hard to treat is also that modern people's lifestyles are so hard to change fundamentally. One of my mesothelioma patients was from Weihai, Shandong. During his treatment I specifically urged him to exercise more, telling him to walk or run with a load every day. He took my advice and ran with a weighted pack along the seashore every day. During that period, although he used very little medication, his illness improved miraculously.
He also set a miracle for mesothelioma survival: after being diagnosed, he lived about eight years, far longer than his fellow patients. Once he told me that when he first fell ill he had joined a mesothelioma WeChat group; every group member he had known back then had died, and only he was still alive. Unfortunately, later on he felt he must be completely cured, relaxed his discipline, stopped exercising as diligently as before, and on his own initiative stopped his medication. Before long the disease recurred and metastasized.
The lifestyles of most chronic-disease patients are problematic; bad habits keep them in a long-term subhealth state. After falling ill, it is very hard for them to change themselves at the root, because those habits of daily life are so very hard to change. Building a new habit is not easy; the great majority of adults fail midway when trying to form new habits. I have always considered myself very strong-willed, able to persevere to the finish where many cannot. Yet even I, when trying to build a new habit, have wavered—in fact, farming is not even a new habit for me, since I grew up in the countryside; I merely interrupted my rural life for more than twenty years.
To mobilize the body's self-healing power in full, one must undergo a thoroughgoing transformation of lifestyle, and must persist to the end; giving up halfway wastes all the previous effort. I encourage patients to do all kinds of exercise—Guolin Qigong, gardening, running, swimming, Tai Chi—all of which benefit recovery. Relatively speaking, moderate-to-high intensity aerobic exercise shows the clearest benefits. If one can keep it up indefinitely, the results are even better.
Why are more and more people getting cancer now? There are three main reasons. First, average life expectancy keeps rising, and the longer one lives, the greater the risk of cancer. Second, human lifestyles have changed drastically: we have been liberated from heavy physical labor and eat far better than before, so diseases of affluence have increased; the more developed a country or region, the higher the prevalence of cancer and diabetes. Third, environmental factors have changed: air, water, and food are polluted, and carcinogens have multiplied.
If we want to improve our quality of life and avoid being tormented by cancer, we must make adjustments in lifestyle and diet. Cancer is a multifactorial disease; relying on medicine alone, without mobilizing one's own self-healing power, it is not easy to cure.
Society develops quickly, but the human body evolves slowly. After material conditions improved, many people take in far more calories each day than they burn. Unless we change this imbalance, we cannot have healthy bodies. Changing the imbalance means waging a stubborn struggle against our own inertia. Human nature is to prefer ease over toil; who does not wish for a comfortable, lazy life? But toil is our destiny. The more we eat and drink, the more toil we need. If we want to eat and drink well without any exertion, in the end we can only pay for it with our health.
I will keep urging myself to struggle against my love of ease, to change my old lifestyle, and to keep balancing mental and physical labor and physical toil and exercise. I have long felt that it is absurd for a medically trained person to be pot-bellied and riddled with chronic diseases and then go treat patients. That is because it means such a doctor has not achieved the unity of knowledge and action. If they cannot even put the health-preserving knowledge they learned into practice for themselves, how can they be expected to give patients correct guidance and example?
Let us together put changing our lifestyle into action, and not shrink back before difficulties!